Am I Missing Something?

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Why only 4 stars?Because I got bored watching scene after scene over acted and stretched out too long. It's an easy story to guess where it's going.Don't get me wrong. The actresses were fine in their roles but the story went lacking. Who couldn't guess where the girls friendship was going and who couldn't guess the ending? Photography is beautiful, especially the snowy beach scenes - wonderful composition and color - and the mother sitting on the bathtub - beautiful!

In the opening image a surge of water smashes through shards of ice. That's the emblem of the three central women's growth in his drama.Alice Beacon (Kate Trotter) first appears as a hard, frozen face in a cab, behind black glasses, under her husband's ghost's cold hand. (The workaholic lawyer pops round to give her advice — but still smokes in bed.) When she leaves Toronto to return to (frigid) North Bay Alice is in another cab, but now radiant and ebullient. The Beacon she provides is summarized in her advice to her daughter, Suzanne (Christine Horne): "Life slips away so quickly…. Most people are too asleep to notice." And in their last scene: "Lose myself, find myself. It's all the same in the end…. If your heart breaks I hope it breaks wide open." What lit up Alice is the Wonderland she discovers through Suzanne's lesbian friend Tru (Shauna MacDonald, who with Kate Johnston also wrote and directed his fine, sensitive film). In Tru's world a waitress wears a "Pussy Whisperer" t-shirt. The love that gradually grows between the 60-year-old widow and the 30-ish Tru (nee Gertrude, Hamlet's randy mom) does break Alice wide open. She dies of an aneurism on the train home. But she dies at last alive, in her first throes of passionate love — that was missing in her shotgun marriage — and on a new level of understanding both of herself and with her daughter. Though Suzanne compulsively tries to "protect" her mother from that grand passion, the experience breaks through her carapace against her own emotion. Alice forces her to confront the mysterious feelings she has preferred to evade through work. The experience brings Suzanne as well as Alice out of the shadow of the father's death.Though Tru is apparently the worldliest of the three women, Alice lights her way anew too. Tru has been compulsively untrue to her lovers, too self-absorbed wholly to commit to them — or even to remember their name — and too cowardly to confront the superficiality of her engagement. She lives on an island. Her joy with Alice and her tension with Suzanne discover a new depth of feeling and an openness that enable her to resume and correct the last relationship she'd fled. The spiked shirt she wears in her melancholy is an emblem of her earlier defence against vulnerability. Two pictures distinguish Suzanne's and Tru's lives. Chez Suzanne an androgynous face wears a muffled mouth, an emblem of the boyish woman whose life is strictly her law career. In Tru's kitchen, where she indulges her zest for food, French music and brightness the pic is of brilliant flowers. Alice has lived Suzanne's life — sandwiched between two generations of neglectful lawyers — but Tru brings her into joy. It proves contagious. With a crisp script, first-class direction and superb performances, this film clearly deserves wider audience.

Most movies treat the notion of love and age as a laughable combination. Tru Love does not. It treats its characters with dignity and tenderness, and the result is a fine exploration of love and connection. Alice, recently widowed, comes to Toronto to visit her daughter Suzanne. Suzanne is cold and distant, and uses her job as a reason to avoid engaging with everyone, including Alice. Even her house is impersonal. Alice, on the other hand, is of an age when she has nothing to lose. She breaks our hearts as she tentatively allows herself to follow her unexpected attraction to a rudderless young woman, a friend of her daughter's. None of this sinks into mawkishness or cheap shocks. The writers and the director clearly love each character for her strengths and weaknesses. Each of the actresses, especially Kate Trotter, is marvellous. And for once, Toronto is presented as Toronto. Don't miss this movie!

True Luv (2013) was co-directed by Kate Johnson and Shauna MacDonald. It's an interesting, unusual film about love between two women of different generations. Tru, played by director MacDonald, is a free-spirited lesbian who helps out a friend, Suzanne, played by Christine Home, when Suzanne's mother Alice, played by Kate Trotter, comes to visit. Suzanne makes the word "workaholic" really sound inadequate. She's beyond that.That leaves Tru, who doesn't appear to have a job, and Kate, who rarely sees Suzanne, with time to be together. Suzanne may be too busy to see her mother, but she's still not happy about Tru seeing her mother. The rest of the movie moves forward from there.We saw this film at the Little Theatre as part of the outstanding Rochester ImageOut LGBT Film Festival. It will work well on DVD.