American Girls

Girls speak for themselves, uninterrupted by adult discourse, in Carol Cassidy's "American Girls" trilogy of 54-minute documentaries. Cassidy avoids the clichés of standard liberal TV, but her over-brisk surveys, in which scores of young women split the viewer's attention, find both too much and too little to put in their place.

The flurry of interviews with teenage mothers in Baby Love (August 21 at 10:30 a.m.) becomes a predictable exercise in cutting on zingy lines and postures of despair. I never got involved with these people, though some of them earned my respect, especially when they talked about their career hopes and their determination to be better mothers than the ones they had. Run like a Girl (August 7 at noon), which has a sports theme, is most successful when it sticks with a girl boosting her self-esteem through rugby; she's especially compelling as she prepares for a blind date. The most focused of the three films is Smile Pretty (August 14 at 11 a.m.), a study of teenage-beauty-pageant contestants. By not letting her own detachment harden into condescension, Cassidy undercuts your tendency to look at this aspect of American culture as if it were taking place under a rock.

Cassidy's low-budget slickness, with regular interludes of Super-8 footage scored with generic alterna-rock music, keeps her portraits fast and accessible but lessens their impact. Her material is fascinating, but the presentation doesn't cling. At the Museum of Fine Arts.

-- Chris Fujiwara