First off, I’ve been remiss this year updating the SIFF Blog. For that I apologize. I have no decent excuse other than to say being unemployed sans day job and trying to balance freelance deadlines, as well as going to plenty of festival movies and interviewing a bunch of filmmakers, my attention as far as the blog has been concerned hasn’t exactly been front and center. Again, not a good an excuse, but an excuse all the same, so please make of it what you will.
As for updating now, the film that struck my fancy and one I feel needs a bit of attention is the weird Woody Allen meets Ed Wood meets “Scooby-Doo” meets Men In Black romantic comedy Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. Written and directed by Madeleine Olnek (she’s the coauthor of the pretty great book A Practical Handbook for the Actor, which I totally didn’t realize until a few days after seeing her movie), the movie is a sweetly off-center Black and White low budget frolic that’s one part Manhattan, one part Plan 9 from Outer Space and one part it’s own entirely unique schizophrenic self. It got my attention, and while I can’t say it’s remotely perfect that doesn’t mean I didn’t end up enjoying myself any bit less.
The basic setup concerns a trio of lesbian space aliens named Zoinx (Susan Ziegler), Barr (Cynthia Kaplan) and Zylar (Jackie Monahan) sent to Earth to have their hearts broken and thus make them incapable of feeling. Why? Back on their home world conventional science says that inhabitants are feeling to much, love filling them up so completely that their emotions are leaving their bodies and destroying the ozone layer. How to fix it? Go to Earth, get into a relationship and end it as brutally as possible, destroying your capacity to feel and thusly saving the ozone layer.
Here on our planet there is lonely greeting-card store clerk Jane (Lisa Haas), a shy, rather dowdy introvert who is too scared to act on her emotions whenever she catches someone’s eye. She ends up meeting Zoinx and is immediately taken with her forthright cavalier personality, trying to come out of her shell while at the same time figuring out this bizarre bald-headed woman’s impulsively nonplussed extroverted personality.
So it takes a little while to get going, the first 15 or 20 minutes not playing as well as I’d have liked them to. Additionally, an oddball pair of secret government agents staking out the aliens doesn’t go anywhere particularly interesting, and although some of the conversations did get me to giggle (especially one revolving around the gender status of the elder agent’s wife) really all the scenes between the two did was pad this sitcom meets “Saturday Night Live” premise to feature length.
Be all that as it may, I liked this film. I loved the interplay between Haas and Ziegler, while a scene in an apartment complex hallway between Kaplan and Monahan is an absolute knockout in regards to its emotional sincerity. There are some seriously delicious sight gags, one of which involving a rotating desert case that got me to laugh out loud. Most importantly, what the films says about relationships – not gay relationships but all relationships – is absolutely priceless, making the movie something a timeless keepsake that should make it worth revisiting one, five or even ten years down the line.
I sat down with Olnek and Monahan at Seattle’s downtown W Hotel for what was supposed to be brief chat. But was supposed to be a few minutes quickly transformed into three-quarters of an hour, the three of us chatting about everything and anything forgetting about the time altogether. It was a great conversation, and while I’d like to go into all of it in detail as far as this blog is concerned I’m thinking I should keep things relatively brief.
Monahan, a local favorite at some of New York’s most prestigious comedy clubs including The Laugh Factory, The Comedy Store and Caroline’s on Broadway, wasn’t quite sure what to make of her director once she signed on for the film. “She does everything her own way,” says the actress and comedienne. “I didn’t get to read the whole script. [Madeline] just told me the premise of it [and] had me look at shorts that she did.”
“The shorts I loved, and I liked the idea of the movie, but it was odd not being allowed to read a finished script. But if she [hadn’t] done the shorts I don’t think I’d have been as gung ho about it. While we were filming I just had a script filled with my scenes, and the first time I saw the whole movie and knew the whole idea was when I saw it at Sundance.”
“That was my way of disorienting her,” laughs Olnek. “But Woody Allen does that, only allows his cast the parts of the script featuring their character, and a lot of the times the actors plot together to try and get the parts of the script that they don’t have. I thought that was very interesting when I found that out because I think for the comedy part of it the excitement comes from the idea, the freshness of it, and if you have it [the whole story] than some people plot it all out in their heads and the spontaneity of the humor can be lost. It makes the spark die down. I didn’t want that to happen here.”
So where did this idea come from? How does a filmmaker connect the dots between Ed Wood, 1950’s kitsch sci-fi cinema, Woody Allen and lesbian romance?
“Where’s the lesbian Dude, Where’s My Car?, why can’t we for political reasons assert our right to have a good time?” says Olnek with a smile. “Apart from that, I guess I kind of a felt that once you come out and once you own what you want those feelings can be a floodgate of feelings. Some people have described them as being a kid in a candy store period. But once you’re no longer in denial and once you’re owning your identity it feels like the whole world has changed and everything just feels so much bigger.”
“From there in writing [the script] I had this thought that once you’re acknowledging what you’re feeling and you’re aware of it and it can feel so big that this crush is so much bigger than [a single person], that you can see it for yourself. They’re not my feelings, that they’re so large they’re in the environment. They’re permeating the atmosphere.”
“From there, I came up with the idea of this planet where it was believed that when the [inhabitants] felt too much their feelings would rise up out of their body and effect the ozone layer so they would have to be sent to Earth and have their hearts broken. And all the overly emotional people just happened to be lesbians.”
“Since I’ve been young I’ve liked surprises,” adds Monahan, “and this movie offered plenty of opportunity to be surprised. It was a challenge but it was also really exciting, and while I was tempted to try and find out what was going on and to ask the other actresses [about their scenes] I was able to restrain myself. It’s like Christmas. My mom would tell me to not sneak into the closet to find out what my presents were and I never really did. Because of that, I enjoyed the process of making this film.”
One of the reasons I ended up becoming so enamored with the film was that, even with its faults, even with portions that sat there like a bad “Saturday Night Live” skit searching for a reason to continue, the central romantic metaphors all rang true. In many ways Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same is the antithesis of so many LGBT-themed films. It presents these romances as normal, as everyday, as nothing to get all crazy hot and bothered about. It showcases a world that hopefully, ten years from now, 20 years from now, will be a reality, and the fact that it is about women in love with one another doesn’t even enter into a person’s thought process. I like that the movie lives in a world that just is while also hinting at a world that might be, presenting the search for love as a normal everyday conundrum all of us – male, female and everything in-between – can relate to.
“I think that’s beautifully stated,” beams the director. “I think that’s what gives people hope. When you talk about what people are going to think when watching this movie, what lesbians are going to think, what kids are going to think, by telling a story that’s hopeful affects people in a way that’s positive and I think they take that hope away with them.”
“I hope people are still watching it 30 years from now,” says Monahan matter-of-factly. “I think people will. I think it’s timeless. I just think it’s an enjoyable movie and that people will want to watch it. But I also hope that, as times change, it’s not as relevant as it is now, that it will be seen as a romantic comedy and not a film [about lesbians]. It’s timeless in its humor and with the relationships, and I hope – I think – people will [take note] of that.”
“It’s about the search for love and it’s about how scary that is,” adds Olnek. “The essence of it is something that will last. At one point we thought about putting more topical stuff in, thought about having an alien carrying a newspaper with headlines about gay marriage votes and the like. But in the end the central metaphor is still there and we didn’t need the specifics. We feel it’s an eternal story, the search for love, and we definitely see years from now people will hopefully still be watching it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment