by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Kristen Bush, Rebecca Ridenour, Peggy Roeder
Intro:
... a short but incredibly cute portrait of a Gay relationship that avoids the dour extremes that still pollute areas of the sub-genre, relying on blissful intimacy and rock-solid improv skills to tell a convincingly authentic love story.
Improvisation in cinema is a delicate art. It’s a booster shot of spontaneity that can add freshness to the material (as the Duplass brothers and Judd Apatow discovered, along with just about every other American comedy director after them), but it can also lead to a wandering tone and story that can make the whole exercise feel like it’s missing a point. Film narrative (ideally, at least) is life cut down to the most interesting bits, and without steady direction, those bits can be difficult to isolate.
This is what makes Emily Railsback’s fictional debut stand out as much as it does – it’s a primarily-improvised film that isn’t lacking in character or story or even thematic content. She builds on her documentary work to tell the story of lesbian couple Elsie (Kristen Bush) and Bette (Rebecca Ridenour) as they deal with raising a daughter in the midst of the financial and emotional turbulence of the COVID lockdown.
Bush and Ridenour’s performances, by design, are the film, working from a general framework written by Railsback and Doreen Bartoni. The result is endlessly adorable chemistry and seamless, natural, realistic dialogue throughout. It’s occasionally difficult to conceive of all this not being written down to a greater extent. Admittedly, not everyone is able to keep up with the leads (the guy selling a Subaru sticks out in not-so-great ways), but since these two make up the core focus, the film succeeds.
The drama between Elsie and Bette is refreshing for a modern queer film, in that the tension isn’t found in the expected prejudice and/or trauma (which, while both are certainly valid, can become flat-out nauseating when handled incorrectly). Instead, it’s from simpler things: work, buying a car, dealing with the landlord, finding time for sex and/or wine. There are moments of ulterior tension, but never to the indulgent extreme; at worst, it’s pangs of worry about random dudes trying to chat them up… or wondering what their aunt expects their child’s religious upbringing to look like.
The undercurrent of religious theming here is where the structure really gets to show off, as an initial moment showing Elsie giving a lecture on the changes within Christian teachings (“I will flood the Earth” vs. “I will die for humanity’s sins”) sets up a surprising amount of thematic text concerning the relationship between LGBTQ and organised religion. Again, moments of frustration pop up, but there’s a discernible lack of bleakness in that balancing act, alleviating a certain in-built dread that many Queer folx possess about religion interfering with their lives (they tend to notice that the faithful are loudest whenever the Gays get to do… well, pretty much anything nowadays). This is more about the joy of existing than the fear of someone taking it away, which is quite nice to see.
American Parent is a short but incredibly cute portrait of a Gay relationship that avoids the dour extremes that still pollute areas of the sub-genre, relying on blissful intimacy and rock-solid improv skills to tell a convincingly authentic love story. It’s just cool to see the Gays allowed to be happy for a change.
