When she hangs up the phone after hearing her lover say We’re coming right now, she knows in her heart of hearts what she hadn’t faced up to before: that this man she loves, this prince from nowhere, is a hoodlum. He has just robbed a bank and a man got killed. It’s the mid-1970s. She’s ninteen years old. Right now, as if in a waking dream, she falls headlong from the tight, narrow space of her father’s uptown apartment into a weaving world of escape – Spain, Morocco, Greece – and from being an almost well-behaved girl into the life she’s always wanted, for better or worse. The crazy, dizzyingly elliptical progression of the action perfectly embodies the emotional turmoil that Lili is keeping to herself – like most teenagers, she’s in far less control than she thinks she is.
