In Elle, the Legally Blonde prequel, a teen magazine is tossed aside in the garden, its well-worn pages thumbed and flicked into crinkled obedience. An armful of brightly coloured shopping bags swings purposefully to the triumphant beat of a girl's first pair of kitten heels. A phone cord stretches and twists itself aimlessly around the same girl's finger as she gabs for hours on end.
By all accounts, these are the rather mundane images of teen life—albeit teen life of a not-so-distant, but most decidedly bygone era. And Elle captures this bygone era with meticulous precision. But its portrait of '90s teenhood isn't merely about slapping a bunch of trivial '90s-coded aesthetics on our screens. Instead, it's an achingly nostalgic reminder that the analogue adolescence really was something special—and its irreversible loss has stolen some joy from the teen experience for good.
