Love And Resistance: What "Indie" Was In 1995

Maria Maggenti And The Incredibly True Adventures Of Two Girls In Love

The mid-1990s were a different place. Here’s a conversation with writer-director Maria Maggenti about her debut feature, The Incredibly True Adventures Of Two Girls In Love.

MARIA MAGGENTI WAS OBSESSED BY AN IMAGE OF “A GIRL ON A SKATEBOARD WITH A POCKET FULL OF LOVE NOTES.” It was the first glimmering of the thirty-two-year-old, first-time director's impish romantic comedy, The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love. Made for $60,000 in three weeks (after thirty days of rehearsal), it's modest yet artfully crafted smart farce, the high school movie John Hughes could never make, a sometimes hilarious and subversive girl-meets-girl first-love fable with feelings. The abundant charm of the two leads is crucial: Randy, a disadvantaged white tomboy (Laurel Holloman) who's shown kissing another woman in the film's opening scene, lives in an "all-American, typical lesbo household" and works in a garage. She falls in love with Evie, a well-to-do African American girl (Nicole Parker) whose single mother dotes on her. Comic mishaps ensue, including a farcical ending straight out of Frankenstein.

Esquire reduced Two Girls to blurbable unreality by saying, "At last, a lesbian movie for the whole family." Maggenti's touch is surer, working perspectives on race, class and sexuality into a form that's hard to do well—romantic comedy. Even big-buck machines like Sleepless in Seattle and While You Were Sleeping forget about charm, in their eagerness to manufacture contrivances like two lovers who don't meet until the end or a romantic lead in a coma.

Maggenti is an engaging talker, a wide-awake bundle of long, curly hair and infectious energy. While she says the story is "based on my own life, my own incredibly true adventures"—after graduating from Smith, she spent several years doing "shitty jobs" in New York City so she could work with ACT-UP as "a full-time disrupter of American society through nonviolent civil disobedience!"—her seriousness is striking in contrast to her funny, sometimes goofball movie. "I really believed that we were saving people's lives. I literally thought I would save my friends' lives. I literally thought they would not die because of us shutting down Wall Street and making our videos and disrupting the mayor's office and all those things. And they died anyway. So I had that mid-twenties loss of innocence and I said to myself, what the hell are you doing? What are you going to do?"

The ACT-UP videomaking offered Maggenti an answer. "I decided to go to film school, not because I love the movies, but because I hated them. I hated the way women were portrayed, I hated the hegemony of the heterosexual experience, I hated the way race was portrayed, and class. I thought, I have to learn how to do that, because this is making me sick. I just thought, I have to get out of the real world." Since it was near her home, she applied to NYU, and didn't expect to get in, after writing an essay declaring she wanted to be "a lesbian Spike Lee." "To be perfectly frank, I thought I was going to scare them off and they'd say, 'Oh we don't want that radical dyke in our school!' I got in. I went. And I was miserable every day for the first year! Cried every day. But I took to the medium. Strangely enough."

Obviously, Maggenti resists the popular tendency to view minority-voice filmmaking as lesbian, gay or black instead of as just movies. "People have asked me, did you make this movie to be a crossover movie, did you use this form because it would make the subject matter more palatable? No, I did it because this is the stuff I like, with a beginning, middle and end with some goofy stuff in between. Lesbianism is not a niche market, it is a life experience. I wasn't capitalizing on a bottom-line moment. This is why I am so committed to independent filmmaking, so I can make more movies like this."

Her upcoming project, "Us Them and Me," is an urban sex comedy, "an only-in-Manhattan story about what's it like to be a grownup in a non-traditional life." This brings us to the subject of Billy Wilder, which makes Maggenti even more excited. "Oh my god, one of my favorite films is The Apartment. I've watched that film so much, it's my own personal cult movie."

For a Best Picture Oscar winner, The Apartment is a dark, even vicious movie, miles more cynical than Two Girls, I suggest. "Yes! But all of Wilder's stuff is like that. It always has the same premise. People tell lies, and at the end, they get resolved without telling the truth, which I think is fascinating. My next film is exactly like that. I worship the man, okay, I know everything about him. When I went to L.A., I asked the publicist, 'Do you know Billy Wilder? Is there any way you could get a meeting with him?' It's like seeing the Pope or something."

So how adult will this new comedy be? "I don't live in a twentysomething world and I don't live in a world that's referential and postmodern in the way we understand it in this moment. Really, to me all [the great movies are] in black and white and deal with real issues through specific characters. I'm fascinated with sexual identity: How do we know who we are in terms of sexual identity?"

It's a confusion as close to her heart as "incredibly true" first love. "This emerged for me in the last year because I've been a lesbian for fourteen years and I fell in love with a man. I started seeing him and oh-ho-ho, oh boy, in the little universe that I live in, man, everything got tilted askew. A lot of it's very heartbreaking, but now that it's in the distance, a lot of it's funny, and I realize that in the sexual anxiety that it raised, there are many questions that I would like to figure out how to answer—what is a straight person, what a gay person, what is a lesbian? In addition to what I'm totally obsessed with, which is, what is a grownup? And when will I be one?" She pauses, bears an immense smile, eyes wide open. "I'm fascinated by this."

“Us, Them And Me” has not been produced.

The Incredibly True Adventures Of Two Girls In Love is showing in Chicago at Doc Films, Thursday, November 21, 9:30pm. Listings here. You can also watch it on Netflix here.