Just a girl: "Clueless" at 30

Clueless reaches 30, though this is plainly a film that will forever be 1995: so 1995 that one character is caught panicking at losing his Cranberries CD, so 1995 that its celebrity reference points are Cindy Crawford and Marky Mark, so 1995 that the girls go to the mall to catch "the new Christian Slater", so 1995 that it features that "Shake Some Action" song that might conceivably have also been on the soundtrack of Empire Records or Reality Bites. It's not that the studios have stopped chasing the teen dollar in the intervening decades, but American movies were once, much like the general population, optimistic about the future our kids were growing into; our movie executives, meanwhile, were once literate enough to see the pop-cultural value in staging a high-school variation on Jane Austen's Emma, or at least smart enough to get the jokes in Amy Heckerling's well-turned script. Without Heckerling updating the classical idiom to fin-de-siècle Beverly Hills, there would be no Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and everything that followed from that; Julia Stiles owes a substantial part of her early career (10 Things I Hate About You, Hamlet, O) to this one text. But let's not overlook what Heckerling the director did on these sets with this particular, unlikely combination of players, matched as perfectly one of Cher Horowitz's outfits.

Folks have been given pause to consider why Alicia Silverstone - as Cher - couldn't fully convert this breakthrough role into sustained stardom, but then this is the kind of role actors rarely get twice in a career: the faux-sophisticate who learns her most valuable lessons outside of class. (Silverstone's knowingly slangy narration is at odds with the vulnerability captured in close-ups, but she also knows where every single one of the laughs are.) More perplexing is why Heckerling couldn't - or wasn't allowed to - reach these heights again. (Especially with Fast Times at Ridgemont High already in her back pocket.) A few rough edges here suggest the presence of deleted scenes or alternate cuts: I still think the dastardly Elton (Jeremy Sisto) is introduced as Cher's boyfriend, which isn't the case. (One revelation on this rewatch: how many red flags the boys in this movie send up. Even Paul Rudd's notionally dreamy stepbrother Josh, who responds to Cher's sincere inquiry about how she can improve the world with a sneery "Sterilisation?") But they're surpassed by deft comic touches: Tai (Brittany Murphy) rouses from moshpit-derived unconsciousness only to boop her head on a low-hanging light. One issue was that the American teen movie was heading into choppier postmodern waters: Scream, Final Destination and Mean Girls, where the characters' flaws would be punished rather than forgiven. (Heckerling did, however, direct a run of glorious episodes for the generally wonderful, underrated Amazon series Red Oaks.) It's pure serendipity that Clueless returns to cinemas in the week of F1, with its own Nineties throwback vibes - but lest anyone need further reasons to revisit an earlier era's robust and nourishing pop culture: check the colossal proportions of the Snickers bar Heckerling's camera notes in passing on the two math teachers' table. Everything's funsized nowadays, which is barely any fun at all.

Clueless returns to cinemas nationwide from today.