High Art

A good film diminished somewhat by resorting to tired narrative devices… I’m always somewhat frustrated when GLBT romances simply follow the cliches of heteronormative cinema: not that gay couples are actually so different, but that the films are already cast as “edgy” in the eyes of society, so have a real shot at doing something different and honest, and to repeat what we’ve seen before except with two women is doubly disappointing. Here Ally Sheedy & Radha Mitchell give a couple fine performances, with plenty of honesty the script doesn’t necessarily provide, as a photographer who hasn’t worked in ten years and an ambitious young editor at a photography magazine, both beginning their acquaintance by more or less exploiting the other, but they’re drawn to one another and gradually fall in love. Appreciated is the fact that it’s not really a lesbian romance per se, Mitchell’s character is not suddenly discovering a lesbian identity, but rather falling in love with another person in a natural way. The highlight of this for me was Patricia Clarkson as a drug-addled German actress still obsessed with her days working with Fassbinder, channeling [Marlene Dietrich by way of?] Ingrid Caven in, say, Mother Kusters — a German accent suits her raspy voice fine, oh yes. Anyway, an engaging if not entirely original film.