Paula (Lucia Castro) is a 14-year-old girl, struggling with adolescence in familiar ways. She tries to fit in with a clique of popular classmates. She struggles with her weight, leading her to try increasingly inadvisable attempts to become thinner. She has reached a stage in life where she is combative with her parents and growing jealous of her elder, skinnier sister Sofi (Virginia Schulthess).

There a lot of familiarity to Paula’s life, which is something of a double-edged sword for Florencia Wehbe’s teen drama of the same name. On the one hand it tackles issues of adolescence in a clear, elegant fashion. It is good for a popular audience of teenage girls to see their own experience reflected in their entertainment, and Paula is a worthy and responsible mirror. On the other hand, there is little – perhaps even nothing – that has not been played out over and over in film and television. It may be a neatly composed and modest teen drama, but its audience will likely have seen it all before, and done better.

Lucia Castro is one of the film’s strongest assets, bringing forth a portrayal of Paula that manages to straddle the line between good and bad behaviour. At the same time it is grounded in an empathetic fashion: even when engaged in her worst moments, Paula is believable and fallible. That fallibility is key to the film’s success. It refuses to tie things up neatly in the end, or to provide easy solutions to Paula’s problems.

There is an odd element to the film, in which Paula and her friends appear to regularly head out to nightclubs and drink alcohol. It is a frequent enough element that I felt compelled to double-check the legal drinking age in Argentina – from which the film originates. It is definitely 18, which begs the question of which kind of disreputable venue openly serves alcohol to teenagers without an identification check in sight. However they manage to score their drinks, it certainly doesn’t seem to have been a good idea. Like everything else in the film, we’ve seen the consequences of teenagers binge-drinking many times before.

Paula is well-made, but unimaginatively scripted. It is entertaining enough, but once it’s had its festival run it’s likely to be rapidly forgotten.

Paula is screening at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival. Click here for more information.