April's Shower

Pleasantly surprised! I thought this was going to be another soggy, predictable, boring lesbian coming out and romance movie. This movie was poignant and hilarious, with many plot twists and memorable lines. It was not entirely light-hearted. One of the characters is the mother of a baby who has died, for example. Including this subplot sent the message that even someone who has suffered such a tragedy is still an ordinary person who is part of life and able to experience laughter and love. The love story at the center of the film was passionate, imperfect and deep. Above all, the movie was polymorphously sexy. One particularly charming quality that this movie possesses is the portrayal of romantic love between two people in the midst of a loving community of friends, all of whom are having their own struggles of the heart. It hit the some of the same postmodern romantic lesbian comedy notes as "Kissing Jessica Stein." I appreciated the fact that many of the characters were clearly meant to be Italian-American (this was evident to me even before they were "outed" as Italian in the film), with references to Catholicism and pizza and construction without descending into flat stereotypes, kind of like the way Jessica Stein's Jewishness was treated in that movie. Lizzie-20 needs to lighten up and look up "camp" in the dictionary.