Claire of the Moon (1993) A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp (C) 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Lesbianism examined in the same hushed and reverential tones reserved for a terminal illness. Potentially interesting idea made stagy and boring.
CLAIRE OF THE MOON is such an impossibly serious and sober movie that I was waiting for someone to sneeze, just to break the ice. It's a perfect example of what my wife calls an S.F.E. movie, where S.F.E. means So F***ing Earnest. Movies like this need wit and brashness to be absorbing. CLAIRE is one strained speech after another, written delivered with all of the energy and spontenaity of a DMV clerk.
CLAIRE takes two women, Claire and Noel, both writers, and throws them together in the same cabin at a women-only writer's retreat. Claire wrights light comedy, while Noel is a scholarly authority on porn and sexual behavior. Obviously, the two of them are going to have plenty to talk about, and for the entire one hundred and twelve insufferable minutes of this movie, that's all they do: talk.
The movie sets up its (microscopic) plot with beat-a-dead-horse-into-glue obviousness. The evening talks at the camp are chaired by a motherly type named Maggie, a self-professed lesbian, and when Noel owns up to also being a lesbian, Claire looks like she's been hit with a sockful of wet sand. The movie then quickly degenerates into lots of scenes where Noel Glances At Claire With Significance, and Claire Looks Out Over The Water Reflectively. (Ugh!) The most amazing thing about the movie is how people so intelligent can talk so much and yet get so little through their thick heads.
All of this, of course, leads up to a scene of complete inevitability: Claire and Noel, in a scene that should have come an hour earlier, because then the movie ends without even the benefit of reflection about what's just happened. We never get a hint about how any of this has changed anyone, only how they felt about things that didn't even happen yet.
The problem with CLAIRE... is not lesbianism as such, but the leaden way it's handled. Why is it that any "serious" (a better word would be adult or at least thoughtful) examination of sex in a movie almost always winds up producing a movie that's unwatchably boring? The way this movie deals with lesbianism, we might as well be watching an overheated docudrama about AIDS.
Many other movies have used the same subject in ways that are a thousand times better -- more engaging, more creative, more intellectually and artistically interesting. Look at John Sayles' LIANNA, or the interesting and little-seen DESERT BLOOM; both of them have more life and vibrancy than CLAIRE. What this movie needed was a good swift kick in the pants.
One out of four rustic cabins.
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