A GIRL IS A GIRL
Written and Directed by Reginald Harkema

A Girl Is a Girl is that rarest of beasts, a film that doesn't get sentimental or self-piteous about male behaviour. Cleverly adopting the style of Godard's Masculin-Feminin, that earlier exercise in youthful malaise, the film is at once sympathetic and merciless in its depiction of a young man's ricochet between a variety of girlfriends. While this could have easily degenerated into a self- absorbed glorification of its hero's exquisite anguish (along the lines of this year's High Fidelity),it becomes a complex exploration of what drives a man to love a woman, for good or for ill. This doesn't mean that the lead is treated as a villain, but that he has both noble and craven intentions, often both at the same time, and that the experience of love is often borne out of the basic assumptions that both parties carry with themselves about the nature of the opposite sex. Bold, brief, and to the point, A Girl Is a Girl rocks the foregone conclusions that govern romance, both real and filmed, and points a way out of the mess that results from assuming the worst in each other.

The film deals with the trials of Trevor (Andrew McIntyre), a late-twenties slacker, who, like, John Cusack in High Fidelity, is a far too obsessed with his record collection and not involved enough in sorting out his personal life. He distances himself from the trainwrecks that are his relationships with a battery of girlfriends, choosing to sit around with his friends getting stoned and talking about bands. But he's not merely being neglectful- he's avoiding the mess that he creates whenever his assumptions about what he wants a relationship to be clash with the inconvenient reality of who his girlfriends really are. The film begins with him trying to maneuver a bubbly model-type named Clarissa (Paige Morrison) into his bed, an attempt that has forced him to sell some of his beloved albums in a doomed effort to bankroll the expensive date he's set up. His friends, unhelpful as ever, abhor the fact that he would part with his records for a mere girlfriend, and the tension between his libidinal wishful thinking and his regression to manliness with his buddies will mark his other, more serious relationships with women.

Which women? There's Karen (Laurie Baranyay), a long-haired, no-nonsense woman who is up- front about her liking for sex and equally up-front about her not sleeping with a drunken boyfriend on the make. There's Laura (Jo-Anne MacDonald), a spunky alterna-punk rocker who has to compete for attention with the ex-girlfriend for whom Trevor still pines. And then there is Lisa(Aeryn Twidle)- the aforementioned ex-girlfriend in competition and a former model to boot - who knows all too well the investment men like Trevor place in good looks and a pretty face. Throughout all of these relationships, Trevor tries desperately to navigate between what he thinks are good intentions and what he knows are cold slaps in the face to the person on the other side of the conversation. But he's not a conventional cad. He can see himself doing all of the things that drive his girlfriends insane and is genuinely sorry for the pain that he causes, but finds himself sandwiched between his desire to do good by his girlfriends and the desires and conventions of being male- desires and conventions that rip both parties in two.

On the surface, the film seems to be about one man and his trials in the realm of love- something that countless other pie-eyed male dreamers have committed to film. There is much conspiratorial laughter to be had as Trevor wanders from blunder to blunder, his hair and dress changing from scene to scene underlining his insecurity as he tries on a variety of costumes which fool no one but himself. Further compounding matters is the performance by the excellent casting of Andrew McIntyre, whose hangdog face and tendency to underplay perfectly capture the deer-in-the- headlights horror that results when Trevor puts his foot in it again and again. This doesn't make him an object of derision, exactly, as the film seems to know all too well the trials of navigating the sexual waters, and invites us to cringe as he tries desperately to correlate his desires and the needs of his lovers.

It would be easy to write this off as masculine self-pity, as we see the events entirely through Trevor's eyes and have no idea what his girlfriends' lives are like when they're not in the same room. But this turns out the be the film's most brilliant structuring device. Trapped as we are within Trevor's behaviour patterns, we have absolutely no means of escape when his girlfriends confront him with the thoughtless and contradictory behaviour that he's been committing. The film is a series of arguments and differences in which Trevor is completely vulnerable to attack and we watch helplessly as he breaks Laura's heart with his hang-ups over old flame Lisa, or when Karen pushes him away when he selfishly wants sex after a drunken binge, or when Lisa is in the hospital for anorexia and we know that we're as caught up in the same male gaze that put her there. At no time are we allowed to take a third-person position that could protect us from the uncomfortable positions in which Trevor finds himself, and when he is called on his fumbles we take the rap alongside him.

Taking his cues from early Godard, Harkema wastes no time in getting into the thick of things. Using the intertitles so beloved by the jump cut pioneer, he runs off the litany of relationships as they happen, playfully transposing the devices of Masculin-Feminin into the context of 21st - century Vancouver. The little bits of Godard homage that appear lighten the tone of the film, a series of knowing winks to a time when youthful unrest meant more than bars and bands; so when we get a reprise of the "Miss Consumer Product" interview that begins that earlier film, or when Trevor and a girlfriend use records instead of books to suggest their feelings, the film is both whimsical and poignant at the same time. One isn't used to the rituals of dating being taken both so seriously and as playfully as they are under Harkema's watchful eye, and the editing strategy, again from Godard, jumps instead of segues, at once speeding the film up and recording the cosmic unfairness that allows the scenes to be left unresolved.

A Girl Is a Girl winds up seeming sentimentally unsentimental. Its ruthlessness with its characters are tempered by a gentle eye; one can witness Trevor's fumbling with forgiveness, as he simply plays the conventional cards he's been dealt. It's to Harkema's credit that he sees his lead's mistakes as the result of a confusing set of directives that tear him apart; one cringes at his choices but never truly thinks he's a jerk. He's simply a work-in-progress like everyone else, trying to stake claim to some ground amidst the directives that govern the behavior between men and women, directives that need to be rethought before a true connection can be made.


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