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Let's hear it for the girls: Girl Play is a little movie about lesbian love that fulfills its mission with charm to spare
Advocate, The, April 12, 2005 by Anne Stockwell
Girl Play * Starring Robin Greenspan and Lacie Harmon * Based on Real Girls by Greenspan and Harmon * Directed by Lee Friedlander * Goff-Kellam Productions and Wolfe Releasing
Not to stereotype, but reading the production notes on the lesbian romantic comedy Girl Play, my first thought was, This is the kind of situation that could produce a lot of exes. Written by real-life couple Robin Greenspan and Lacie Harmon about their own love affair, the film stars said couple reenacting same. What's more, Girl Play is produced by a second couple, Gina Goff and Laura Kellam. Where so many relationships meet, one imagines conflict in the air.
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So it's especially satisfying to report that Girl Play is charming--and that its creators mesh so well as a team. Girl Play is helmed by out director Lee Friedlander (who also collaborated on the screen adaptation of Greenspan and Harmon's original stage play) and scored by out composer Laura Karpman, and it's already proved to be a queer-festival crowd-pleaser: At Los Angeles's 2004 Outfest, the film was voted Best Lesbian Narrative Feature, and Harmon and Greenspan shared the award for Best Actress in a Feature Film.
Now Girl Play is headed in your direction: After a theatrical opening in New York on April 1, the film is set to be released this year by Wolfe. Video on a DVD that includes such extras as a behind-the-scenes documentary.
In both releases the film seems likely to find its audience, although non-theater fans may fidget during separate expository monologues, spoken directly to the camera, which Greenspan and Harmon carry over from their stage performances.
Greenspan's setup: She's caught between her overbearing mom (Mink Stole, in an affecting performance) and her domineering girlfriend (a bit overplayed by Katherine Randolph). Greenspan sees herself as a nice, risk-averse Jewish girl who's done with sexy adventures. She's settled, yes. Happy? Not so much.
Harmon, in contrast, tells us about her past as a commitment-phobe. One of the film's funniest sequences is her flashback account of being dragged on a romantic getaway with the lover she no longer loves. Male or female, we've been in that place where the whole sex-focused weekend looms, and it's either put up or break up. Like most of us, Harmon does both.
Carting their inner baggage, the onscreen Greenspan and Harmon meet for the first time to rehearse a romantic play in which they are costarring. Dora DeLuise, camping it up, plays a voyeuristic director who assigns them "intimacy exercises" involving kneeling, facing each other, and doffing their shirts.
Shifting point of view from Greenspan's and Harmon's narratives to real-time scenes, Friedlander capably builds the tension as the two on-screen costars find themselves ever more inconveniently attracted to each other. Film fans tired of seeing lesbian characters played by hetero actresses can relax knowing that these women verifiably groove on other women.
The creative team also makes a virtue of limited production values; by and large, Girl Play blissfully does not try too hard. We know what's going to happen, but Friedlander and company hit the right notes in getting us there.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Liberation Publications, Inc.
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