I was hoping that this movie would actually be interesting. I'm used to artsy films and can usually appreciate them. However, this film was just not my cup of tea at all. First of all, the plot seemed too shallow. The main character finds love with some random woman she was set up with and there is no explanation as to how or why they fall in love. I think the problem was that Troche was trying to hit on some major lesbian issues while at the same time portraying a lesbian love story, but in the end came out too scattered and unstructured. The characters seemed way too stereotypical, almost like they had to reinforce the whole dyke image. Granted this movie was released back in 1994, I knew plenty of lesbians back then who were a lot more feminine and not as obviously gay as the characters in this film. I felt a bit annoyed that they had to sort of scream dyke so loudly by the way they dressed, talked, and wore their hair. That's not to say that I have anything against the butch image, but as a "lipstick" lesbian myself, I felt like the femmes weren't properly represented. The only things that seemed to really give the movie any actual substance were the scenes in which Evie's mother threw her out of the house after she found out she was a lesbian and also the scene in which Daria was being interrogated and jeered at by other lesbians for having sex with a male friend. Those are real issues for us today as lesbians and I liked how she touched upon them, but I felt like Troche could have done more with Daria's scene. So many lesbians out there judge their own kind too much and bisexuality has become so abhorrent in the gay community due to its current trendiness. All in all, it felt like the movie, quite literally and figuratively, was just too black and white for me. (I can disregard the bad acting as this WAS an indie film and many of the actors looked like they were real lesbians with no acting experience who were looking to do a film about their lives.) Troche seems to portray the lesbian world and life as similar to straight life and yet totally different. But it's just not that black and white. Sexuality, in my opinion, is very fluid and I felt like the theme of the movie focused too much on what a lesbian was SUPPOSED to be, feeding into too many stereotypes and clichés.
