Adam Sandler’s new coming-of-age flick, You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzah—which began streaming on Netflix today—gets one thing absolutely correct: Preteen girls are gross little weirdos.
It is a generally accepted belief that 12-year-old boys are, well, disgusting. They fart and burp with abandon, laugh at childish jokes, never wear enough deodorant, and are just all together immature. But a truth acknowledged far less often is that 12-year-old girls are, in all honestly, equally disgusting. So when You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzah featured a montage of preteen girls snoring, farting, snotting, pimple popping, and yes, even queefing—I was absolutely thrilled. Finally, here is the representation grody little 12-year-old girls deserve!
Directed by Sammi Cohen, with a screenplay by Alison Peck, You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzah is based on the Fiona Rosenbloom novel of the same name. Sunny Sandler—the now-15-year-old daughter of Adam—stars as Stacy Friedman, a soon-to-be 13-year-old Jewish girl who is obsessing over her upcoming bat mitzvah. This is the party that will make or make her social status for the rest of her life, and everything needs to be perfect. Luckily, she and her bestie Lydia (played by Samantha Lorraine) have a plan. Lydia, the writer, will write the speeches, while Stacy, the video editor, will make the entrance videos.
Inevitably, the two BFFs have a fight. Stacy, fueled by rage, edits together an embarrassing video, using all the footage she’s collected of Lydia doing gross, immature things over the years. She has footage Lydia forcing Barbies to make out, footage of Lydia pretending she has huge boobs, footage of a snot-faced Lydia coming out of the pool, and, the H-bomb: footage of Lydia “farting from the front, like, from your vay-jay-jay.”
It’s all very sweet and innocent, of course. There’s nothing lecherous or sleazy about the footage—it’s just girls being their gross, dumb selves, and having a blast while doing it. And it’s instantly relatable to anyone who’s survived girlhood, despite what society may have led us to believe. “Girls are supposed to be polished,” director Sammi Cohen said in a recent interview with Decider. “Like, ‘Girls don’t fart. Girls don’t poop.’ But the Sandlers—they are free in a way that they embrace being human beings.”
Cohen, who uses they/them pronouns, said there was no hesitancy on their part to include the queefing, nor on the part of any of the Sandlers. (Indeed, all four Sandlers were involved in making the film: Adam starred in the film as his IRL daughter’s on-screen father and produced the movie via his Happy Madison Productions company; Sunny Sandler played the lead; 17-year-old Sadie Sandler played Sunny’s older sister; and Adam’s wife Jackie Sandler played Lydia’s wacky mother.)
“[The Sandlers] don’t shy away from the reality of like, we’re all humans,” Cohen said. “And I never shy away from it. In fact, I want to see more. I want to normalize that girls are just people, and they do all of these weird things.” Cohen concluded, “Whether you’re a little boy or little girl, you can be gross and you can be weird. You can be all of these things.”