Maria Maggenti's light romantic comedy, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love offers a cheerfully normalizing view of queer relationships. The film is weakened by some amateurish acting, and the plot climaxes with a bit of heavy-handed wackiness, but writer-director Maggenti has a sure visual style: the film's tone is winningly sunny and bright, both visually and emotionally, and Maggenti seems to try to make all the politically correct choices. A story of teen love, the film includes a mature lesbian couple as well as a glimpse of two old women lovers in a motel; a story of love between girls, it also notes the solidarity between lesbian and gay male teens. The film maintains its light tone by glossing over the difficulties of the many issues it raises.

The two girls of the title are high-school seniors Randy and Evie, and they and their households are presented as cultural opposites. Randy is working class, her home a place of genial chaos. Evie is upper class, and lives with her doting mother in a large and elegantly furnished house. Randy likes rock and roll and draws cartoons; Evie likes opera and reads poetry. Randy is flunking math and won't be able to graduate; Evie finds school easy and is headed for college. Randy roller-skates to her job at a gas station; Evie is flutteringly ignorant about her expensive car. Randy is white, and Evie is black, a configuration that disrupts the stereotypical conflation of race and class hierarchies. Love bridges all these apparent gaps as the two girls meet and fall in love, and the potential conflicts of race and class are touched on only gently. Evie worries that Randy's aunt Rebecca has a problem with her being black; Randy suggests instead it might be a problem with people who can afford to go to Paris.

Similarly, the problems of being a queer teen are acknowledged but downplayed. Randy's mother, an Operation Rescue fanatic, has kicked her out, but the happy upshot is that Randy now lives in "just your normal, regular, typical lesbo household" with Rebecca and Rebecca's lover Vicki. Evie's friends abandon her when she tells them about her relationship with Randy, but by the end of the film they are reading Rubyfruit Jungle and eager to see Evie again. Evie herself seems to experience no conflict about her feelings for Randy, and though Randy warns her that they could be beaten up for holding hands in public, no such violence occurs. Homophobic verbal harassment is marginalized by long shots, and physical threat is answered by a straight ally with a fly swatter.

By placing teen romantic love in context of the love of family, friends, and former lovers, the narrative foregrounds the theme of love rather than the politics of identity. Certainly, the film takes queer pride for granted. When Randy mentions that she "came out to a girl at school today," her aunt responds "That's great, hon, I'm proud of you"; triangles, rainbow flags, and ACT-UP logos are prominently displayed in their house and on buttons and T-shirts worn by Randy and her friend Frank. But this is not a coming-out film. Randy is already out, and Evie tells her shocked friends, "I didn't say I was gay, I said I was in love." Indeed, many in the film move comfortably between same-sex and other-sex relationships. When the movie opens, Randy is involved with Wendy, a married woman. The normal lesbo household is soon joined by Rebecca's ex- lover Lena, who needs a place to stay after breaking up with a boyfriend. The two old women seen briefly near the end of the film refer to their husbands. That the word 'bisexual' is never mentioned is in keeping with the emphasis on celebrating (lesbian) romance rather than on defining lesbian identity.

Unlike many romantic comedies, however, Two Girls in Love offers plenty of reminders that love doesn't last. Evie herself says as much early in the film, when she breaks up with her boyfriend. When Randy tells her coworker Regina she's in love with Evie, Regina reminds her that that's what she said about Wendy. Evie's parents are divorced; Rebecca has an ex; and the ex has an ex. Indeed the film's closing dedication suggests that perhaps love shouldn't last forever: it reads, "For my first girlfriend, may our relationship finally rest in peace." But the film also affirms the endurance of ties, both in that dedication and in Rebecca's insistence that her home is always open to people she loves. If some of the humor of the film comes from the girls' naive belief that they can promise to love each other forever, the fallacy of this lies not in anything specific to lesbian love, but in the patterns of love in general.

By Joan M. West and Dennis West

Cineaste v21, n4 (Fall, 1995):41 (2 pages).

COPYRIGHT Cineaste Publishers Inc. 1995. Used in the MRC web site with permission

After studying philosophy and Greek and Latin classics at Smith- College, Maria Maggenti moved to New York where she worked briefly in television commercials and the production of gay rights and AIDS activist documentaries before enrolling in NYU's Graduate Film Program, where she was awarded a teaching fellowship after her first year. From 1990 to 1994 she produced several short films, including Name Day, which received the Warner Brothers Production Award and the Grand Prize at the 1993 Hamptons International Film Festival. In May 1995, during the twenty-first annual Seattle International Film Festival, Maggenti discussed her debut feature film, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, with Dennis and Joan M. West.

Cineaste: How did you develop the story idea and script for your film?

Maria Maggenti: The script was originally written and developed in a very small screenwriting class at NYU. For me, it started with one image - a girl in high school, a very butch, tomboyish girl, who had a bunch of love notes shoved in her jeans pocket. I didn't know who she was right away and I didn't know what my vision of her meant. From there I worked outwards, with everything developing from one main character like a ripple effect. As I began to construct the narrative around her, I realized I was writing about my first relationship, the first time I fell in love with this girl, who was the one with the baggy jeans and the love notes shoved in her pocket.

The script took about a year and a half to write. It was a standard first screenplay kind of process - I had my index cards, an outline, character sketches, and backstory. It was a very long, involved process, with many drafts. It became the story of Randy and Evie, taking us from the middle through the end of their relationship. It was a very dark story of teenage sexuality and their relationship to adults.

I abandoned the script in March 1994. I said to myself, "This is the biggest piece of crap, nobody's ever going to want to make this. I don't even want to read it anymore. I can't do another draft. I'm at an impasse. In fact, I hate these girls! I don't want to be with them."

A good friend of mine, Melissa Painter, who's also a filmmaker and who became one of our Associate Producers, called me and said, "I really think we can make this movie as a low-budget, independent feature." And I said, "I can't make this movie, the script is horrible." She said, "Come on, get a nice draft together. I'm going to find us some low-budget, New York independent producers." We got a list from a friend of ours at Good Machine, a well-known independent production company in New York, and eventually gave the script to two producers. They called us in and said, "We like the script very much," which I couldn't believe. Their first question was, "How did these two very different girls get together? You take for granted that they're in a relationship but we want to know how it started."

Well, as the writer, I knew the backstory, so I pitched them my story of how they got together - partly what I knew from backstory, partly out of what I made up on the spot, and partly out of a complete lie. They said, "We love that idea. That's the script we want to read." And I said, "Great, no problem!" - because I thought they were going to give me the money to make this movie - "When do you want to read it?" They said, "We're leaving town in eight days, so if you could get it to us before we leave, that would be the best." And I said, "Sure!"

When we walked out, I said to Melissa, "What am I going to do? I haven't written that script!" She said, "Go back to your apartment. I'm going to lock you in, and you're going to write it." And that is what happened. In eight straight days - without an outline, without my 3" x 5" cards, without any of that stuff - I sat at my computer in my hot, stinky apartment in New York City and I wrote it.

Cineaste: Did you see the script primarily as a lesbian love story or as a coming-out tale?

Maggenti: Neither. I always saw this as a story of first love, because for me being gay is just another authentic American experience and there's not much you can say about it. It's part of the world, and because it's part of my world and I completely take it for granted as normal, there was nothing to explain. So I don't believe this is a coming out story, nor would I call this a lesbian film, which of course implies that there's such a genre, which there isn't. It's a film with lesbians in it which describes the experience of two girls falling in love with each other.

What I was concentrating on was how it feels to be seventeen and in love for the first time. I went back to notes that I wrote in high school to my first boyfriend, I called my friends from high school, I really plumbed all of those depths. When I sat down to do the revision, to write that script I told the producers I had, I was truly surprised when it turned into this comedy, complete with a farcical ending. I had no idea it was going to turn out like that.

Cineaste: Is your long title in the spirit of Tom Jones and other long-titled English novels of the period, or more in the spirit of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure?

Maggenti: I'd have to say that the first answer would probably be the most accurate. I'm not at all a child of pop culture. I don't know anything about TV, or contemporary music, or fashion, so my main references come from literature, from classical music, and from screwball comedies of the Thirties - Gregory La Cava, Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges. That was my cinematic diet when I was growing up. I am not by nature a film-head. I'm a literature person, a storyteller, and I'm more interested in stories and character and subtext. That's why those old movies are so pleasurable and interesting to me.

Cineaste: How do you feel about the R-rating your film received and how that might prevent it from reaching younger viewers?

Maggenti: My mother called me from San Francisco, where she saw the film at a press screening, and she said, "How do you feel about getting an R-rating, because all those kids won't be able to see it." I said, "Mother, let us be realistic. Because it has an R-rating, kids will go to see it. If it was rated PG-13, they would not be caught dead in the theater. If a film has an R-rating, it means something adult is going to happen, and when you're young, that's what you're interested in - the adult stuff, not the stuff about you as a kid." So I was thrilled that we got an R-rating.

Cineaste: Did you deliberately portray the African-American characters against expected stereotypes?

Maggenti: Yes, absolutely and positively. I was very specific about wanting to subvert some of the filmic stereotypes about black families and about class. I am very interested, for example, in how class and privilege influence feelings about sexuality, relationships, and one's relationship to the wider world. When we first meet her, Evie is still in a very protected, sheltered place in her life. Within a year or so she will probably have a very different consciousness as a black woman, but when we meet her she's very well taken care of and I wanted to portray that kind of life for a young black woman. She's based on me and my relationship with my mother and the details of the world I grew up in. I wanted very specifically to make her an African-American character in an African- American family because I hate those movies where everybody's white. That's so tedious and boring.

In the scene in the diner where Evie loses her friends, I was trying to get across that Evie is truly shocked that her friends are not OK with her loving this other girl. She is shocked because she has never had anyone say no to her. She's beautiful, popular, smart, she's going to college, so she's truly shocked when they say, "It grosses us out and were not going to be your friends anymore." She comes from a privileged background, so she has this sense of entitlement.

A second detail I'd like to mention about class is the fact that Evie gives Randy Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which is probably one of the most dense and difficult pieces of American literature ever written. It's a crazy poem, a crazy book. Evie gives it to Randy, who reads it and understands it, and that is in opposition to what the culture expects of her as a working-class girl. This is a girl who's failing math, who everyone thinks should just take the GED and work in a gas station and thereby fulfill her function in life. But she is able to say, "He is writing about the power of nature," which is what Whitman was writing about in the passage she reads. That is a beautiful, extraordinary, poignant thing to me. So the film is about the obstacles, inner and external, that these two girls face and the way that they transcend them together.

Cineaste: How do you conceive of comedy as a way to approach these very serious issues?

Maggenti: You never deal with issues in comedy, you deal with individuals. So it's important that the characters are real to you, that the emotions that motivate the actions of the characters are real and genuine. And I think the girls are emotionally real throughout.

Comedy is a great strategy, however, for seducing people who are prejudiced, it allows them to slide past what otherwise would really upset them - you know, the two girls hold hands, they kiss, then they have sex - but at the end you're kind of rooting for them. You want them to be together and not get caught. That's incredible! And one girl is black and the other is white, so it's really amazing!

When I wrote it, of course, I had some very serious things on my mind, and, to be honest, I don't know where that comic sense came from. Myactresses didn't think they were being funny, which is key, because the more serious the character is in the moment, the funnier their earnestness is to everyone else. As a strategy, comedy can be very useful but it can also easily fall flat on its face. So I'm grateful to my editor, all my rough-cut viewers, and my actors, that the film is actually successful with audiences.

Cineaste: You seem to continue a comedy tradition by bringing all the characters together for a grand finale.

Maggenti: Yes, it's a kind of crazy, over the top thing, which I love. That must come from my high school period of watching French movies and being very influenced by them. It's a wonderful narrative convention, and great fun, to bring everybody to that fever pitch and to leave you hoping that everything turns out for the best. That final shot is actually a very ambivalent shot, leaving them at the threshold of adulthood, a relationship, their families, everything. It's the beginning, in a sense, and yet the camera dollies away from that at exactly that moment.

Cineaste: Were you thinking about the tradition in American comedy in which films end with a heterosexual marriage?

Maggenti: I never thought of that but a lot of people have mentioned to me that the shot looks like a marriage portrait. I was very specific about the dolly move, I knew what that meant to me. I did the shot based on my breakdown of the dramatic beats in the scene, and how to use the camera for subtext, but you don't go into it saying, "I'm going to do a semiotic camera move that will convey the idea of marriage." Remember, this is my first feature, I'm an apprentice in this process, and still learning, against great obstacles - we had no money, we shot it in twenty days, all those kinds of things - how to master this medium. Thank God it's not a prodigy art and I can hopefully spend the rest of my life learning it.

Cineaste: Other than the protagonists, most of the characters are caricatures. Did you use this approach in order to suggest the centrality or the reasonableness of the protagonists' worldview?

Maggenti: Well, I don't think they are caricatures. They are over the top in places and that, indeed, is intended to emphasize that the two girls live in reality and everyone else is crazy. Actually, during the shooting I did an interesting thing. I would do a take where the adult character would be very real and then I would do another take where the adult character was over the top. I did this throughout the whole shoot because I knew I would choose for myself what tone I wanted and it worked better to have the girls seem normal and healthy and everybody else crazy. That's exactly how it feels when you're seventeen - all adults are weird.

Cineaste: Why did you people Randy's family as you did?

Maggenti: I wanted to do two things. There's something very specific in lesbian life, which I don't think is true in the rest of the world, whereby your ex-lovers become your family. It's amazing how that happens. The next thing you know, all your ex-lovers are your friends and you're all spending Thanksgiving and Christmas together. I really wanted to express that, which is why Lena, the ex-girlfriend, shows up. I also wanted to show an all-female household because it makes sense to me and I know that's where Randy came from.

Cineaste: Do you feel the film is particularly relevant to contemporary American society?

Maggenti: I think it's incredibly important and ironic, actually, that this movie would be released in the same summer that Phil Gramm, Bob Dole, Jesse Helms and Rush Limbaugh are all talking about morality and the family and their fears, I guess, about the changes that have transpired over the last twenty to twenty-five years. It's relevant because I'm presenting a portrait of American society that - although I know it makes some people uncomfortable - is accurate. There are lesbian families across this country, in the oddest places you can imagine, and there are upper class black women raising their daughters - who are intelligent, ambitious, and attractive -and there are girls, again sometimes in the oddest places, who fall in love with each other. So, yes, I think the film does have great relevance.

I didn't want to make a film where you felt like you got hit over the head with a big message. And I don't think I did that. But I did want to very matter of factly present a picture of American society at this moment that I know has not been portrayed yet.

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