Itty Bitty Titty Committee   ★★★★★
Dir: Jamie Babbit
Cert: 15 • US: 85 min • TLA Releasing • DVD
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Jamie Babbit’s endearing tale of political and emotional awakening is not about its main character, Anna (Melonie Diaz), coming to terms with being a lesbian. It is about her coming to terms with her breasts and precisely what it means to be a woman.

The film opens with Anna set against her bustier older sister, who is preparing for her wedding.  At her work, a plastic surgery, she is set against her busty blonde co-worker, who encourages her to get a breast augmentation on the grounds that it is half-price, and thus “like Christmas, but for your boobs”. She is shaken out of this rut by the Sadie (Nicole Vicius), whom she witnesses spray-painting the surgery windows with the words ‘A woman is more than her parts.’

The sexy and punky Sadie inducts Anna into the world of her activist group C(i)A, Clits in Action, whose guerrilla actions are designed to inspire women to follow their lead and fight the system. The group is made up of three other young women and one trans man, but that does not mean the story is weighed down by abstract issues of sexuality and race. That the women are, for the most part, lesbian, and that the lead, Anna, is Latina, is not the subject. The subject is the one thing that unites them: the fact that they are women. This makes the film more personal, and the characters people it is possible to care about.

The result is as much about the personal as it is the political, and so that which unites them also tears them apart. Anna immediately falls for Sadie, who lives with her much older girlfriend Courtney. Through Courtney, who works for the non-profit organisation Women For Change, the film shows the contrast between the protest tactics of the group with the more sober approach of effecting change from within. It is innocence versus experience, a time of promise and a time of compromise, in which neither side is entirely right or wrong.

Itty Bitty Titty Committee is about not only the spirit of protest but also the importance of protest as part of a young woman’s emotional development. ‘Every generation needs a new resolution’, the film’s poster art proclaims. The punk music and the grainy black and white scenes give the life and the actions of the C(i)A an immediacy which show that this generation needs to find it own form of protest. It cannot simply inherit that of an older generation. The resolution of the plot is as much about what this means to the characters as it does to their cause. It is explosive, anarchic and romantic, and it makes you want to cheer.

That certain US retailers would not carry the DVD because of the word ‘titty’ brings the issues into perspective. The US distributer has three packages available: one with the full title, one with ‘Ti**y’, and one called Itty Bitty Committee. Then, they could hardly release it under the name Clits in Action if the word ‘titty’ caused such a hullabaloo.

“Why do all our important American symbols have to look like enormous erections. It’s like on vacation: come on, honey, get the kids, we’re off to worship the giant white cock!“