In suburbia, a world of woes

IT’S STRANGE to hear Summer Bishil speak in a 13-year-old’s voice -- high-pitched, tentative, as if determined to render herself a cipher.

Bishil is actually 20, and was 18 when she starred as the lead Jasira in “Towelhead,” the provocative new film from “Six Feet Under” creator Alan Ball. But she used the eerily accurate adolescent voice for this tale of a 13-year-old Lebanese American girl’s coming of age in a Houston subdivision during the first Iraq war. “Towelhead,” which opens next week, explores Jasira’s burgeoning sexuality and the fear it instills in her Lebanese single father who wishes she’d remain 9, and the desire it stirs in Jasira’s next-door neighbor, a 35-year-old Army reservist played by Aaron Eckhart. To some, the film -- with its comic-horrific tone -- will be shocking, but to Bishil it was a relief to find a part that not only suited her ethnically but actually resonated with her.

“It was like, finally, I’m reading something that holds a lot of truth in it, and means something. I was so relieved,” she says, speaking in her regular voice, which is about an octave lower. “I was really attached to [Jasira]. It wasn’t so much that I had gone through what she had gone through because I never did, but I understand her quest for understanding of herself and the people around her. And not having full control over her life. Over her body. Over her decisions. And not knowing what it means to own them.”

In the film, Jasira is shy and mostly embarrassed about her body. She slouches and galumphs, with the awkwardness of an adolescent girl wearing sanitary pads. (That’s a plot point in the film, and as Bishil says, “I picked a wedgie in every take of that scene on the supermarket aisle.”)

Bishil, though, is a beautiful, uncommonly self-possessed young woman, who last week was meticulously eating her spaghetti ordered from the kid’s menu at the Four Seasons, dressed in a completely borrowed designer cocktail dress and borrowed Jimmy Choo shoes.

Bishil plays Jasira not as a budding Lolita, but as an inquisitive naif. “Just because she’s provocative doesn’t mean she’s not innocent,” Ball says. “Just because a child is sexually curious or is looking for pleasure or a sense of power in her existence doesn’t mean they’re not innocent. [Summer] really got that. I didn’t ever want [Jasira] to seem like she was being manipulative. It’s a much purer response. Summer is such a pure person, and I think it really translates to the camera.”

Clearly, the theme of adults being sexually attracted to adolescents is one that circled through Ball’s Oscar-winning screenplay “American Beauty.” Ball points out that “I had a thing happen to me as a child. It’s something that has resonance for me and it’s something that happens to a lot of people. The statistics are 1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men” experience this type of violation. For something to be that prevalent in society and for us to have such an aversion to looking at it and the reason why it happens. . . .”

Still, Ball had to raise money privately to make “Towelhead” because, despite his talent and pedigree, every studio passed. “The kind of response we heard is, ‘We love the script but we have no idea how to market this’ and ‘I can’t possibly make this movie. I have daughters,’ ” Ball says.

After the film’s completion, Warner Independent ultimately picked it up earlier this year when it was titled “Nothing Is Private.” Ball later went with “Towelhead,” the title of the Alicia Erian novel on which the film is based. The filmmakers screened the film for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in November, Ball says, and no one complained about its content, but more recently, the Greater Los Angeles office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations asked Warner Bros. to change the film’s title, which is considered a racial slur.

The studio has declined. “I understand that it’s a painful word to hear,” Ball says. “I understand it’s shocking to the senses. That’s the point. That’s why Alicia chose to call the book that.” It’s like when the gay movement reclaimed the word “queer” from its pejorative meaning, he says. “I do believe that you disempower those words by saying them out loud in a context in which you can look at them for what they are. It’s hate language. To say you can’t say this word ever makes it so powerful and helps maintain the illusion that we’ve moved beyond the racism such language represents. We all know that’s not true.”

Like her character, Bishil is a uniquely American cultural blend -- part Indian, part Hispanic, part Caucasian. As a child, she lived in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, but spoke only English. “I didn’t really know I was Indian until I was in my teen years. I thought I was Saudi Arabian. I thought I was Arab,” she says, noting that her father went off every day to work in traditional Arab garb. After Sept. 11, she and her brother and sister and her American mother moved to a Mormon community near San Diego and she attended a regular public high school for a week.

“I hated it,” Bishil says. “I was called a whore on the first day of school, and somebody said they thought my dad funded terrorism. I just knew that nobody was ever going to want to be my friend there. I had panic attacks the first year of my life here.”

Ultimately, the family moved to Arcadia. Her mom home-schooled Bishil, who says it was her passion for acting that ultimately helped her assimilate to America. “I always wanted to act. In Saudi Arabia, I would watch movies sometimes too adult for me like ‘Pretty Woman’ and ‘Edward Scissorhands.’ I watched movies all day. As soon as we came to L.A., I thought, ‘I’m here. I want to do it.’ It was something that helped me adjust. Without it, I don’t know where I would be.” Her mother drove her to auditions. She landed parts primarily in Disney Channel fare until Ball discovered her during an extensive casting search that reached from Detroit to London.

In “Towelhead,” Bishil must imply -- and occasionally perform -- a range of sexual activity on camera, though Ball wound up cutting most of the graphic sex out of the film. “Summer was a pro,” Ball says. “I think it was much harder on Aaron than for her.”

Still, Bishil found one particularly violent scene was upsetting. “I knew this stuff would have to happen eventually but I didn’t think about it,” Bishil says. Afterward, however, she remembers going back to her dressing room and “having a little emotional tantrum and crying. And being very sad. I was really tired too. I wasn’t sleeping a lot. I was working 16 hours a day and operating on four hours of sleep. I’d come home and couldn’t sleep.

“Everyone was so nice about it. There wasn’t any reason to be crying,” Bishil recalls. But just living in Jasira’s mind was sometimes hard. “I didn’t realize the toll it took on me, until now.”

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rachel.abramowitz @latimes.com