CLAIRE OF THE MOON and GUN CRAZY
A ten-step two-film review by Ron Hogan
Copyright 1993 Ron Hogan
1) CLAIRE OF THE MOON is the first film from director Nicole Conn. It is the story of two women who become roommates at a writer's retreat. Claire is the author of "Life Can Ruin Your Hair," a woman who hates therapists and "fucks strangers" in a search for intimacy. She is paired with Noel, an author/therapist and a lesbian. The film's setup is pretty obvious--it doesn't take a genius to figure out that by the end of the film, Moel and Claire are going to wind up having sex. But it isn't a case of the lesbian seducing the straight woman. It's a case of two women, in a developing process of dialogue, discovering hidden facets of each other, and of themselves, and coming together as a result of their mutual discoveries. It is a meditation on intimacy--what it is, how people think it can be achieved, and what they will do to achieve it.
2) The location of this film at a writer's retreat allows for a literary or academic focus on issues of intimacy and sexuality, while at the same time allowing for representatives from multiple discursive positions. So in addition to Claire and Noel, there's a Southern Gothic romance writer, an academic feminist, a New Ager, a housewife who wants to write, and the lesbian couple that runs the retreat. While the film's primary focus is on Claire and Noel, each of these characters has something to contribute to the debate.
3) Films of a political nature such as this often have one problem-- they are strong on politics but weak on film technique (witness the recent thrashing of RAIN WITHOUT THUNDER). They serve as propaganda pieces, but without artistic, particularly cinematic, flair. This can often be traced to a rejection of the political values considered to be inherent in Classical Hollywood Cinematic technique, though this is of course not only the case. A very few films are capable of challenging both the form of mainstream filmmaking as well as the content. I am pleased to say that CLAIRE OF THE MOON is one of these films. I was struck several times in watching the film of the resemblance of certain stylistic tropes to ones in the Cuban film MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT, which include the insertion of "imaginary" scenes, or those which are intended to represent the thoughts or fantasies of the characters, with no marker of transition between filmic reality and filmic fantasy. And a remarkable scene on the beach, shot in slow motion to accentuate the patterns of wind which blow sand and Claire's jacket, with no sound but the music and the heightened sound of the wind. A hyperreal scene that is all the more powerful for not being objectively realistic, or even pretending to be as is the case with mainstream films, but to highlight certain aspects of reality to give the scene a powerful effect. The unreal takes on a psychological reality of its own.
4) The same can be said for the way in which the sensual/sexual scenes of this film are handled--especially in a sequence in which the two women tell each other their sexual fantasies. By establishing a rhythm of editing out of a very few shots (somewhere around 5-10), Conn creates a lyrical effect to Claire's fantasy that has to be seen in order to be fully appreciated. The film does not skimp in its sensuality--both in a scene in which Claire has sex with a man she picks up in a bar, and in the eventual culmination of Claire and Noel's process of intimation. These scenes--well, to me they seem to capture more of the real feeling of sexuality, without breaking it down into a set schema of erotic moments as usually seems to take place in the Hollywood film. It's hard to describe.
5) I do think I can say, however, that the lesbian scene in this film is handled much more erotically than the corresponding scene in DESERT HEARTS, which does strike me more as a tableaux of sexy moments rather than an act of sexual intercourse. Which leads me to comment on the LA TIMES review, which calls CLAIRE OF THE MOON "the best lesbian drama since DESERT HEARTS." Which it is, to be sure, but the remark is a fairly insipid one. After all, how many lesbian dramas have there been since DESERT HEARTS? Not avant-garde films like Su Friedrich's DAMNED IF YOU DON'T (1987), but mainstream or at least art-house release? I can't think of very many--and FRIED GREEN TOMATOES does not count for the purposes of this debate. I think the film should be commended for its achievement--it is an incredible film for a a first time director, and an incredible non-mainstream film with a definite political view. But such films are rare, and glib reductions by newspaper critics which neatly file these films into types (i.e., the lesbian film) serve to keep these films in alienated positions within the film spectrum as much as they single those films out for acclaim.
6) The second film I want to discuss in this review, like CLAIRE OF THE MOON, is a film about a woman directed by a woman, and a first film: Tamra Davis' GUNCRAZY. It is the story of Anita (Golden Globe nominated Drew Barrymore), a teenager in a California desert town, who is surrounded by peers who think Japan is in Europe, and who is called "sperm bank" by several people--in reference to her promiscuity, which stems from a desperate craving for affection, some way to escape the emptiness of her life. And her landscape *is* bleak--living in a rundown trailer with her runaway mother's ex-boyfriend, surrounded by mindless youth, dead husks of automobiles and refuse, with the only nonmundane character in town (besides her best girlfriend) being a slightly insane fundamentalist preacher and snake handler.
7) Until she becomes the pen pal of Howard, a convict in a California prison. She find herself falling in love with him through his letters, especially when it turns out that they both share a fascination with firearms. While she waits for him to be paroled, she learns how to shoot, and turns out to be a damn good shot at that. Their courtship, once Howard does arrive, focuses on guns--which she supplies for him as tokens of her love--"I remember how you wrote in your letter that .9mm's were your favorite," she says, handing him a gun.
8) But guns aren't only the thing that brings their lives together, in place of sex. Guns end up becoming the means by which their lives will unravel, going off at the wrong moments and plunging them into a course that has to end in gunfire and death. At the same time, though, they seem to be a means for Anita to take charge of her live--to make shit happen instead of having shit happen to her. But she soon learns that her desire for the power that guns can provide is not strong enough for her to attack the innocent--she only uses them in desperate acts of survival.
9) Howard and Anita are two alienated people in a hostile landscape. As Howard's parole officer tells them, "As far as I'm concerned, you're both trash." The film works to tell us that this is not the case, that as Anita says, they "*are* nice people." The conditions of Anita's life are a fault of her circumstances, not her character. Howard knows this, knows that Anita is a good person, and so he takes every step, once they know that the law is closing in, to ensure that Anita has a chance to become the good person she is capable of becoming.
10) I wish I could come up with some insightful comparison between these two films, something along the lines of "women's pictures" or some other Critspeak. But all I can come up with is that these films are both about journeys of self-discovery, and of the creation of bonds of intimacy. That one is a variant on an action film, and the other is an intellectual art film, that one couple becomes intimate through words and ideas and the other couple through guns and desperation are surface differences. Underneath the genre distinctions, films deal with the same basic types of issues (see Robin Woods writing on genre); only the means by which those issues are addressed differ.
Ron Hogan rhogan@usc.edu
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