Alison Folland is a young woman in a shabby section of New York who, after a tempestuous friendship with blond, impatient Tara Subkoff, and the murder of her gay buddy Luke, comes to terms with her own lesbianism and finds a happy and accommodating partner in Lucy, a band leader in a place that looks like the Swing Rendezvous in the Village used to look.
Maybe that makes it sound more complicated than it is. It's really a rather simple movie, a little pedantic, a delicate character study rather than a mystery or action movie. Roughly speaking, all the gays are good and all the straight people are messed up. That's not too hard to follow, is it? Well, there are a couple of exceptions, but not many. Don, the Italian owner of the pizza restaurant where Alison and a gay guy both work, is straight but sympathetic. He's briefly in about four scenes. But it's hard to care about Don's character one way or the other because he serves up these GREAT pizzas (we only get a glimpse but can practically smell it) that make Domino's and Pizza Hut look like impostors. Try to get a pizza like that at four in the morning in northern Scotland!
The rest of the straight guys are represented by the boyfriend of Alison's mother, who, in the absence of the mother, begins dangling his insinuations in front of the girl herself, who looks about 16. The straight adolescent goons who ball Subkoff when they feel like it and throw her out when they're bored with her are little more than perambulating pustules.
Folland plays a dumpy adolescent who is shy but sensitive. In fact, however, she has a splendid face with modelesque features, fey and pixie-like. Her bone structure is pretty big though and, alas, the configuration of her weight suggests a strong genetic component. There won't be much she'll be able to do about it. It shouldn't matter, but it always does.
Subkoff, her inconstant adolescent friend, has a more conventional and rather skinny figure but her voice, features, and demeanor are coarser than Folland's. She looks like Buffy the Vampire Slayer if Buffy were the vampire instead of the slayer. She has probably the most demanding role in the film and brings it off marvelously, a complex character very nicely rendered.
The photography and location shooting are just fine. And the movie does middle-class urban dwellers a big favor. You know those young chicks you see on the streets? The ones with violently pink hair done up in a fashion resembling a tangled mop? The ones with maybe a jail-house tat around their biceps? With their clothes half drooping off and that silver ring dangling from their pipiks? Well, only some of them are dangerous stoners. Many of them are just playing with their appearance, as adolescents are want to do in all cultures, and they may be a little thoughtless but fundamentally decent people. I'd watch out for the guys though, especially if they're straight. They have a slight tendency to murder people they find offensive. At least that's what the film suggests.
Maybe that makes it sound more complicated than it is. It's really a rather simple movie, a little pedantic, a delicate character study rather than a mystery or action movie. Roughly speaking, all the gays are good and all the straight people are messed up. That's not too hard to follow, is it? Well, there are a couple of exceptions, but not many. Don, the Italian owner of the pizza restaurant where Alison and a gay guy both work, is straight but sympathetic. He's briefly in about four scenes. But it's hard to care about Don's character one way or the other because he serves up these GREAT pizzas (we only get a glimpse but can practically smell it) that make Domino's and Pizza Hut look like impostors. Try to get a pizza like that at four in the morning in northern Scotland!
The rest of the straight guys are represented by the boyfriend of Alison's mother, who, in the absence of the mother, begins dangling his insinuations in front of the girl herself, who looks about 16. The straight adolescent goons who ball Subkoff when they feel like it and throw her out when they're bored with her are little more than perambulating pustules.
Folland plays a dumpy adolescent who is shy but sensitive. In fact, however, she has a splendid face with modelesque features, fey and pixie-like. Her bone structure is pretty big though and, alas, the configuration of her weight suggests a strong genetic component. There won't be much she'll be able to do about it. It shouldn't matter, but it always does.
Subkoff, her inconstant adolescent friend, has a more conventional and rather skinny figure but her voice, features, and demeanor are coarser than Folland's. She looks like Buffy the Vampire Slayer if Buffy were the vampire instead of the slayer. She has probably the most demanding role in the film and brings it off marvelously, a complex character very nicely rendered.
The photography and location shooting are just fine. And the movie does middle-class urban dwellers a big favor. You know those young chicks you see on the streets? The ones with violently pink hair done up in a fashion resembling a tangled mop? The ones with maybe a jail-house tat around their biceps? With their clothes half drooping off and that silver ring dangling from their pipiks? Well, only some of them are dangerous stoners. Many of them are just playing with their appearance, as adolescents are want to do in all cultures, and they may be a little thoughtless but fundamentally decent people. I'd watch out for the guys though, especially if they're straight. They have a slight tendency to murder people they find offensive. At least that's what the film suggests.