First Love

The incredibly true adventures of two girls and their director.

By Cindy Fuchs

As its title implies, Maria Maggenti's The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love juxtaposes romantic comedy and queer intervention. Two high school girls — white, lesbian, working-class Randy (Laurel Holloman) and black, straight, upper-middle-class Evie (Nicole Parker) — meet and fall in love, then must contend with an array of community and familial anxieties. "I wonder if my life is always gonna be like this," wonders the tomboyish, rollerblading Holloman, "kind of rough around the edges." The film is a celebration of nonconformity within a conventional narrative framework.
Recently, in Washington, D.C., I talked to Maggenti and her two lead actors about the experience of making True Adventures.

CF: What do you think about categorizing this as a "lesbian film"?

MM: I don't agree with it at all, because there is no such thing as a "lesbian film." I position this film more as an independent film... it's a romantic comedy about first love.

But you don't want to dis your community and pretend it's not a lesbian film, because it is about dykes, or my personal experience, right? On the other hand, you don't want to be marginalized by the straight community, which is inevitable as soon as you say it's got content that is homosexual.

So you're in a tough place. The thing that's interesting is that this will change in the next five to seven years; it already is changing... It's an ironic moment that this film is being released when Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms have never been more powerful, and that the public dialogue [is] extremely conservative. But on the cultural landscape, things are changing and that's because our community has changed.

CF: How did you [Parker and Holloman] get involved in the project? What did you like about the script?

NP: There were a lot of things, one that there was a young black woman who had read a book, and whose parents read as well. This really is a day-in-the-life kind of movie, everything speaks for itself. It was so in-the-moment; I hadn't read a script that captured reality like this.

LH: I was doing an off-Broadway play at the time called The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, and I saw an ad in the trades, calling for a tomboy. And I was playing a tomboy on the stage, but my headshot had long brown hair.

MM: It was a really prissy headshot...

LH: ...yeah, and all these lights.

NP: I looked more like Randy.

LH: I took the script to this health food restaurant and read it, and I was so impressed. I mean I'd read so much crap, and this was amazing. So I went in to audition. I wore jean shorts, I rollerbladed over there. I knew who Randy was. I didn't have a stitch of makeup on. I was very tomboyish as a child, so it was easy.

MM: I thought, I'm never gonna find [Randy], I need a big fat baby dyke, and all these skinny chicks are coming in. They're all beautiful, I don't want that. And she came in for the audition, and she had obviously really understood Randy. I didn't want Actresses. I wanted young women who could be young women and be real. And hers was a remarkable audition actually, thrilling. When they came for their second callback, I knew I wanted each one individually, but I didn't know if I could cast until I saw them together, whether or not they had chemistry and all that.

And we did a scene and then I asked them to do an improvisation, a risky improvisation, a bold one, because it was about sex and desire... It was also really hot, it was beautiful and erotic. And they'd never met before... I knew we had found them, but we said, thank you very much, have a nice day, and we'll call you. And we all shook hands and they said thank you and when they walked out we all went, "YES! It was incredible, we love them!"

LH: And then we sit around for a week.

NP: It was the worst! It was the third day, and I get a call saying, we're just letting you know that we're still in the decision-making process and we'll call you. Three more days go by. And then they call and say, we have to have lunch.

LH: Lunch! I called my agent and said, I don't want lunch if it's not good news.

MM: I knew they could do the part as actors, but could they do the part as young women, could they live with having people ask them if they're lesbians? Could they kiss each other and have sex with each other for a movie? I needed to know if they could handle that, because that was going to be the biggest challenge. When we went out to lunch, I said this is the kind of picture it's going to be, and I need you to be fully a part of it, I can't have you going around afterwards saying, oh it was just a part and I'm not like that, you know, that kind of anxiety. So Nicole and I went to lunch first, and she's nodding and she has this beautiful, inscrutable face, and I realize that she's thinking, do I have the part?

NP: She's asking, can you handle this, the nudity, and the sex, and I said yes, but do I have the part?!

MM: And I said, yes, do you want the part? And she said yes. And we were crying and hugging, and then when I went to meet with Lou, and I had to go through the same thing.

From the beginning, the energy among the three of us was very emotional, and very trusting... It was really a great time. Even though the script was funny — it's a comedy — when we were doing it, it was serious.

NP: We were having our periods at the same time.

LH: For me the best thing about the process was not to have a director breathing down my neck, saying , "No, you have to stick with the script," or the writer going, "She just changed that!" It was so organic, so freeing. When I watched the film for the first time, there were things I didn't remember doing, because I didn't watch the dailies. And I just realized, we were there. Like [Nicole] had done something, and my body would physically react to it.

CF: Is this unusual in your experiences, this open emotion on the set?

MM: We had an almost all-female crew, and we had a lot of dykes on the crew (and a lot of girls from Philly, by the way), which also created a feeling of safety for the actors, in terms of being able to be together and feel comfortable and not feel like men were gazing at them. We had established an extraordinary rapport over those 30 days of rehearsing and we had a very well-run set.

NP: People ask me what it was like working with all these women, and it was empowering, but that wasn't the thing that was so overwhelming for me. It was more like, I have never been in an environment where everyone was working, they were so committed to their jobs. It was tight tight tight, not a worry in the world. I mean, even on an all-women set, you can get involved in side things, too.

MM: Right, you have the female gaze.

CF: What other kinds of images would you like to see on screens, as next projects maybe?

MM: My next project is about how we understand when we're grownups, especially if we live outside of the economic system on some level, or lead unconventional lives. And that comes from me as an artist, and someone who never had a job, and a person with a very fluid sexuality, who's identified as lesbian, and then not identified, and I'm interested in all of those things. I was very conscious that Evie was a black character and not a white character, and the reason for that was that I'm sick of seeing movies with all white people. Just as I'm sick of seeing movies that only have straight people in them. And when I say that, I don't want to sound too reductive, because there are great movies that are straight love stories and I love those movies, they have a transcendent quality. Most of them are from prior to 1950, right? [laughter]

I don't have a sense of the responsibility of filmmakers, necessarily. But I'm irritated by what most of them find interesting, like young male filmmakers... These two have different things to deal with because they're actors. The pressures on them are even greater to find material that isn't all about tits and ass.

NP: Something I learned from this film is that I've never, as an audience member, seen a household like Randy's, lesbians with their children. So I'd like to see some images of black families, whatever their economic status, something that doesn't show us just individual traumatized characters.

LH: I feel like I'm still an apprentice in so many ways. Since I've done this movie, it's set a standard for the type of parts I'm auditioning for. For instance, there's a girl, she's smart, who is with a boy, who's the lead, and he has an affair with his teacher, and she's a bombshell, and then he ends up getting back with the girl who's smart and who's going to go to Harvard or something. And it was like a white boy's wet dream. [laughter] I was not into this. And I really need the money, so I'm thinking, but she's smart, it's okay. So I know that somewhere along the way, I hate to use the word, but I'd start half-assing it... Now granted, this is a business, and I'll probably have to do some things that I'm as not passionate about, but if I can do them and take that money and go on to do something else or invest in an independent film, that would be great.

CF: I have a question that has to do with the fluid sexuality that Maria mentioned. The film doesn't really insist that [Nicole's] character is "lesbian" per se; the movie seems more complicated than that.

MM: It is. What I was trying to explore in that character, and Evie is my character... was the way that class will give you a sense of entitlement around sexuality... When I came out, I thought that everyone would have to come out with me. I just didn't understand that anyone would give me a hard time. I end the film with a dolly shot away from them, and I do that specifically, because I don't answer the question, what will happen. It's a happy ending because people are feeling good, but technically, it's an ambiguous ending, because I literally pull away from them. They're at the doorway, where will they go? That's the big question. And that came from me as someone who is no longer 17, who looks back with a certain wistfulness and bittersweetness about first love. It's about the twists and turns of my own sexuality over time, and not being able to manage an identity that made everyone comfortable.

The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, a Fine Line Features release, opens Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse. It's recommended.