Frameline: Lez be Friends
First, the bad news, then the good news -- Lez be Friends isn't very funny. It hurts to say, since the premise is so appealing: a fake cheesy sitcom, set in the days after Stonewall in 1969 Greenwich Village, starring a lesbian and her gay friends (including a clumsy drag queen and nosy landlord). Doesn't that sound neat? The folks who were around back then all have such interesting stories; and dropping those stories into a mainstream medium from which they'd previously been excluded is such a cool idea.
But the execution ... oh dear. The film is presented as two half-hour sitcom episodes, and the jokes seldom manage to rise above Yes Dear quality. One typical exchange: when a lesbian finds out that her naive gay friend has been slutting around, she asks, "what happened to my nice Jamie?" He whines, "I am nice." And she rejoins, "yeah, nice and easy!" The laugh track responds as though this was actually funny; and it feels uncomfortably like a sitcom that should've never been greenlit.
The most bewildering thing about the finished product is that it's supposed to have been done in the style of an old-fashioned, thirty-year-old TV show; but it feels completely modern. Everything about its vocabulary -- the framing of shots, the length of the scenes, the actors' blocking, the pace of the dialogue, the lighting and audio -- could not be more 2007 if they tried. Intercut with actual vintage commercials, the failed attempt at oldfashioneyness comes off as a hopeless, depressing anachronism, like a rapping grandma or the one 40-year-old at a Bright Eyes concert.
After the jump: the good news.
The concept is sound, though, even if the form is floppy. It would be nice to see it get a second chance -- this time with a writer who knows how to tell a joke (and end a scene, instead of letting it roll endlessly on), and a director who's more adept at aping Nick at Nite, and a cast that actually match their archetypes.
Oh, but we promised good news. Okay, here it is: the movie contains lesbians. Four of 'em. Well, two of them only appear briefly. And the other is only a lesbian for a couple minutes. In contrast, the gays get waaaaay more screen time, as well as about a half hour of shirtlessness. But there's also lesbians! They're acknowledged and talked about and even made the subjects of jokes! So if your only criteria for a good time is hearing sentences that contain the word "lesbian" -- and judging by the pinpricks of regular laughter at last Sunday's screening, that's all that some folks require -- well then, this movie's right up your alley.