Do you remember that guy who in seventh grade you had the biggest crush on? He was older and way out your league. He was friends with your brother, so you’d seen him at your house a couple of times. Each time you were terrified that he might notice you and you would have to talk to him, yet, in those casual glances where his eyes accidentally met yours, the butterflies in your stomach made you feel things that you were ill equipped to understand or describe. Each fleeting glance you shared made you long to grow older and into a woman who could hold her own against such an unfathomable force. And you did. You caught his attention and for a brief moment you held it, but before it ever truly began it was over. The world seemed to play out in front of you in shades of gray, dull and dreary in comparison to the world of color that he alone could show you. You were devastated because for a moment, you had the man of your dreams, but were left with nothing.

For me, that man was André Previn.

At this point, I expect everyone that is reading this blog to be thoroughly confused. For those who know who André Previn is, you have correctly assumed that he was not friends with my brother, we did not go to middle school together and that I have never met him. For everyone else: André Previn is an eighty-six year old German-American composer that I quickly became enamored with four years ago during my freshman year of college. After hearing Ariel Halt win the Concerto Competition by singing Previn’s Honey and Rue, I was obsessed. I downloaded every CD of his music and sat for hours in the music library pouring over scores, feeling and loving the music he created because it touched me in a way that no other composer had. I flipped through the pages of the scores, never daring to check one out of the library, because I knew that I was not ready to sing his music – I was not a mature enough artist or technically skilled musician to turn the notes on the page into the music he desired – and so I waited.

Finally, I was ready. I learned every piece, except for one, that he wrote for soprano – knowing full well I would not have the opportunity to perform them. I reveled in the time I spent learning the strange intervals and negotiating the tuneful melodies barraged by an accompaniment determined to corrupt them. Yet I saved one, my favorite, for my final performance on the Hill Auditorium stage and my final shot at the Concerto Competition: The Magic Number.

Two months ago I dared to begin learning the notes which filled the twenty some pages of the piano-vocal score. I began to memorize, section by section, the 17 minute long piece. With no recording to prepare me for the sounds that the piano would make or how desperately it would try to pull me off pitch, I entered each coaching terrified and left with stars and circles covering my music but with a lightness and joy in my head and heart. For the first time in my life I had fallen in love with a piece of music.

Monday this world was shattered. I discovered that Previn had pulled all copies of the published orchestral score and so that performing The Magic Number with orchestra would be impossible. I was devastated. It was more than the stress of having to find, memorize and perfect another twenty minute piece with less than a month before the concerto competition, it was losing a piece of music that had become such a part of my life that I couldn’t imagine carrying on without it.

I am aware of how incredibly melodramatic I am being. Yet, there is a part of me that cannot help but long to hear the colors and textures of an orchestra playing The Magic Number, summoning up feelings that I do not know how to express other than by singing. But it’s over – the piece has been pulled from publishing and I have no choice but to move on. Previn broke up with me, so it’s time to start a new love affair.

There are too many interesting things about “Palo Alto” to write it off completely, but not enough coherence or real substance to ever really fall in love with it.

To start off, the performances are pretty great. I’m used to seeing Emma Roberts as the gloriously bitchy characters of Ryan Murphy’s shows (“American Horror Story” and “Scream Queens”), but it turns out Roberts is surprisingly good at playing the shy introvert. As her character, April, awkwardly says goodbye to her love interest Teddy (Jack Kilmer) and says she’ll call him, she follows up the promise with a funny expression of self-loathing and embarrassment that instantly makes her endearing. Nat Wolff, in the supporting role of Fred, is given way more emotions to play than his bland soft-spoken protagonist in “Paper Towns.” Both as a figure of hilariously obnoxious comic relief and as one of the film’s antagonists, Wolff is a standout.

Coppola has clearly inherited the directorial prowess of her famous filmmaking family; the whole movie is shot so well, especially with Autumn Durald’s cinematography. With the help of Devonté Hynes’s strong score, Coppola imbues every scene with feeling. The movie is great at crafting images and creating a feeling in the viewer. There are some scenes towards the end, especially an encounter between Fred and a drug dealer, that are surprisingly tense, and there are several sex scenes that are disturbing to watch. When April loses her virginity to Mr. B (James Franco), her soccer coach, the scene is shot evocatively, with surreal close-ups of April’s face repeatedly being swept over with black. It’s one of the most horrifying sex scenes I’ve seen in recent memory.

As great as Coppola is at conveying desperation, horror, and shame, I couldn’t help but get the suspicion that all this great camerawork was covering up a lack of substance. Now, I’m a believer that just because a feeling is achieved through aesthetics doesn’t mean it isn’t genuine—there are plenty of stories with average screenplays that enter the cinematic canon because of their directorial work—so the knowledge that the visual and auditory elements of the film were covering up some spotty writing didn’t make the emotional impact feel illusory to me. That said, it did make it easy for my mind to drift away from the narrative now and then.

The main reason for that, I think, is that there isn’t really a central narrative. The movie is ostensibly about the relationship between April and Mr. B, and there’s certainly a great movie buried somewhere in there about a deeply problematic teacher-student relationship. But surprisingly few scenes are devoted to this central plot because the movie makes the mistake of toggling constantly between April’s narrative, Teddy’s narrative, Fred’s, and supporting character Emily’s (Zoe Levin). Right when I became really wrapped up in the creepy April-Mr. B dynamic, the movie backed off April and returned to Teddy. Teddy’s story is the most unimaginative—he has to do community service after drunkenly getting into a car accident, but he mostly just sulks around, smokes weed, and navel-gazes—but I still got into his story after watching him for a few consecutive scenes…and then, right when I became interested, the movie skipped over to Fred and Emily. All of these stories have such strong potential, especially because Fred and Emily have a horrifying history; at some unspecified party, Fred undressed her and guided groups of guys into the room to, effectively, rape her. But skipping around meant I never had the chance to really focus on any story and become invested. And since each got equal screen time, they were all a bit shallower than they could’ve been. “Palo Alto” is adapted from James Franco’s book of short stories, so maybe this explains it—Coppola probably should’ve focused either on April or Emily exclusively as protagonists, but she tries to cram too much into one movie.

In fact, the movie has to keep creating party sequences to find excuses for all the main characters to be in the same place at the same time. Maybe this would’ve been more effective if Coppola had focused exclusively on one night, like “Dazed and Confused,” but instead it seems like each party scene is designed to finally bring the disparate narratives together. In those scenes, the movies floats the inevitable idea of a romantic relationship between April and Teddy; he’s clearly supposed to be the ‘right guy’ who she ends up with once she realizes how creepy Mr. B is. There’s something rote about the idea of a romance between them, though, so I’m glad that the movie ended by leaving it mildly ambiguous, at least. Also, I can’t complain too much about the party scenes, because they do a great job of putting you in the setting of a realistic high school party. I particularly like the shot of Teddy throwing up outside and Emily rubbing his back, asking him if he’s okay and only getting an embarrassed “shut up” in response. Same goes for the shot of Emily staring at herself in the mirror, post-blowjob, with the muffled sounds of the party in the background.

Gia Coppola clearly has a lot of talent, especially as a director. She has a keen understanding of how to elicit emotions through images and sounds, so it’d be wrong to dismiss the movie entirely because of some structural messiness. Still, there were too many moments throughout the movie when I wondered, Where is this all going? What’s the central story here? Last week’s “Funny Ha Ha” proved that I’m okay with plotlessness, but don’t tease me with four central narratives and only half-commit to each of them.