Review of Chasing Amy (1997) by Ethan R — 28 Aug 2012

My Kevin Smith experience coming into the film consisted of Clerks, a few bits of Dogma, and a couple of Batman comics Smith had written. I'd heard this was his best film, so went to check it out. And hot-damn is it good. The key here is the brilliant chemistry from a pre-uncool-period Ben Affleck, a surprisingly savage Jason Lee, and a whatever-happened-to-her-worthy performance from Joey Lauren Adams. They form a quasi-love triangle that Freud would have a field day with (it was their mothers, obviously) that sits at the narrative and thematic core of the film. I think most people bothering to look at this listing know the basic plot: "Ben Affleck falls in love with a lesbian". But is she a lesbian? That's one of the many sexuality-related questions that the film poses, and one I've been pondering ever since. Adam's Alyssa is, in the simplest terms, a sexual mess, flicking between men and women in a way that seems more about her confronting whatever demon has beset her at the time, than about the person she's entered the relationship with. The simplest and, in my opinion wrong-est, explanation is that Alyssa is bi-sexual. But when you consider how knowledgeable she is in the world of sexual mores, the fact that she neither identifies as such, and has such trouble moving from women to men and back again, I'd suggest that her psychology is such that it has her moving from attraction to ONLY men to attraction to ONLY women which causes the distress that we see in her.

All that aside, the script is excellent, easily the best work of his I've seen. The performances are strong across the board. It was Lee who really struck me, tip-toeing that line between Westboro-esque hate speech and the straight-white-male's regular passive homophobia with aplomb. Adam's is excellent as the film's centrepiece, but get's a bit too weepy a bit too soon in one particular scene, which diminishes the impact of a subsequent scene where tears were called for. The climax is right out of left-field, and could have been appalling, film-ruining, mess in the hands of a less assured director who wasn't working with a cabal of his mates, but Smith handles it in a way that leaves it believable. A great film.

Watch.