Go Fish Reviews

An arty girl-meets-girl picture, GO FISH aims to rectify the sins of dull, earnest lesbian pictures, the sort of films that one of its irreverent characters dubs as "touchy-feelie, soft-focus sisters-of-the-woodlands" films. And it does, with verve and style that belies its minuscule budget. Max (Guinevere Turner) is a pretty, sassy young lesbian who can't seem to find the girl of her dreams. Cat-loving, decaf-tea drinking Ely (V.S. Brodie) has an out-of-town lover and isn't sure she's ready to re-enter the world of dating. Their friends decide they were made for one another, and set about trying to help the course of true love along. Project Matchmaker is headed up by Max's roommate Kia (T. Wendy McMillan), a motherly college professor whose lover Evy (Migdalia Melendez) hasn't yet come out to her traditional Latin family. Free-spirited Daria (Anastasia Sharp) is the group's token lothario (lotharia?), whose aggressive girl-chasing is the subject of much discussion (remember the joke about what lesbians do on the second date--call a moving van). Not much happens in GO FISH. Max complains that Ely is ugly (she is) and has a severe case of hippie-itis (she does). Ely gets a bold new buzz cut after she hears through the grapevine that Max has been making fun of her earth-mother hair. Daria gets laid a lot, and, in a striking fantasy sequence, endures interrogation by the sexual correctness police, who suspect her of having slept with a man. Evy visits her mother, who's horrified by rumors that her daughter's been seen hanging around with dykes. The friends have a dinner party. Max and Ely finally have a date and wind up sleeping together. Everybody talks about what everybody else is doing, and with whom. What makes GO FISH so entertaining--and it is entertaining--is the often fresh and funny dialogue, and the many ways in which it cheerfully shatters the morose lesbian stereotypes that occasionally work their way into mainstream films. If the film's characters are occasionally a little too untroubled (after all, trouble leads to conflict, and conflict produces drama), its refusal to bow to cliche is admirable. Shot over a two-year period, GO FISH is the truly independent baby of writer-producer-director-editor Rose Troche and writer-producer-star Turner; it's characterized by a palpable sense of team spirit. The film gives the impression that its locations are the apartments of the filmmakers' friends and that the characterizations have as much to do with the performers as the script. Unlike such lesbian problem pictures as DESERT HEARTS (1985) and CLAIRE OF THE MOON (1993), GO FISH is entirely free of anguished breast-beating and endless worrying about what it means to be a lesbian. Its message--that lesbians are just regular people (if people remarkably untroubled by ethnic prejudice) who have the same problems and experience, the same joys and frustrations, as everybody else--is never far from the surface. But it's a surprisingly breezy tract, good-natured, iconoclastic, and often very funny. GO FISH has its share of the technical flaws that often plague independent features. In particular, the sound quality is variable, and is occasionally so poor that dialogue is difficult to understand. But the black-and-white photography turns financial limitation into aesthetic virtue, and the inventive use of voice-over and almost abstract transitional images, like a blurry, spinning top, go a long way to unifying material that was clearly shot over a long and fragmented period of time. Though some of the supporting performances are wooden and smack more of correctness than individuality, the main characters are well fleshed-out and fiercely personalized. Turner and Brodie's performances are particularly noteworthy: shy Ely displays a surprisingly sharp wit once she emerges from her shell, while pert and apparently self-assured Max reveals an endearing awkwardness. A great success at festivals, GO FISH was distributed commercially by the Samuel Goldwyn Company and precipitated a small art-house boom in lesbian-themed films in 1995. (Nudity, profanity, sexual situations.)