(3 of 4)
The movie is a replay of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, a bloody study of macho alienation and Method posturing. Jean-Hugues Anglade, the French star of Betty Blue, La Femme Nikita and the forthcoming Queen Margot, bites off huge chunks of scenery as the nutty gang leader; his performance is a great geyser of bad acting.
White female, fun-loving, 20s, wants to meet some hot babes.
Go Fish, written by Guinevere Turner (who is also a charmer in the lead role of Max) and Rose Troche, and directed by Troche, offers a radical take on lesbians: they're human beings. Imagine! They can be funny and horny. They look for love and, when they're not looking, fall in it. Max, "a carefree Sappho lesbo," hooks up with gawky Ely (V.S. Brodie), who finds it hard to commit to anything, even a haircut. And just like real people -- oh, yes -- lesbians can be long-winded, tortured and smug.
The movie makes an asset of its minimal budget by interpolating abstract footage and a few surreal "trial" sequences that both tease and pay homage to gay feminism. For the uninitiated, there are a few comic "inside" glimpses, as when Max and her clan gossip about lesbians in history, from k.d. lang all the way back to Eve. At heart, though, Go Fish is a chummy date movie about the mundane, urgent business of finding a lover. Max could be any teen on the Friday-night prowl, but with a nice bending of Hollywood theology: girl meets girl, girl gets girl, nobody goes berserk.
Very white males, 20s, wish the world would accept them for what they are: American yuppies, and isn't that enough?
Whit Stillman always stands out in the grungy group portrait of American independents: he's the one in the navy-blue blazer and old school tie. In Metropolitan, released in 1990, he created an engaging circle of Manhattan debs and preppies, enthralled by their own obsolescence. In Barcelona, on a larger canvas, Stillman paints a sympathetic portrait of two Americans -- Ted (Taylor Nichols), a genteel businessman, and his snarkier cousin, Fred (Chris Eigeman), a naval officer -- adrift in Spain during what the film, with beguiling pomposity, calls "the last decade of the cold war."
Two movies into what deserves to be a long and unfettered career, Stillman has fashioned a subspecies of civilized male that is as well defined as a Fitzgerald beau or a Cheever suburbanite. They are the young, Reagan-bred Republicans who astounded their parents by turning out exactly like them, but with a coating of Lettermanesque irony. They see The Graduate from the viewpoint of the spurned, stuffy groom. They believe that being a salesman is "not just a job but a culture." They read the Bible while dancing alone to Glenn Miller's PEnnsylvania 6-5000. And when they encounter sensuous senoritas who declare, "I don't go to bed with just anyone anymore -- I have to be attracted to him sexually," these paragons of starched Waspness engage in prime Whit Stillman cross talk:
Ted: Spanish girls are very promiscuous.
Fred: You're such a prig.
Ted: I wasn't using promiscuous pejoratively.
Fred: I wasn't using prig pejoratively.