Chasing Chasing Amy [Tribeca Film Festival Review]
Kevin Smith’s film Chasing Amy has a complicated legacy. It’s one of the most notable indie productions of the 1990s, having grossed $12 million at the box office on a $250,000 budget. And while it offered a portrait of a gay woman during a time when members of the LGBTQ+ community were rarely depicted onscreen, the woman ends up falling in love with a man, which some members of that community felt reinforced a negative stereotype. The movie’s impact is examined from a personal perspective in the enlightening documentary Chasing Chasing Amy.
Director Sav Rodgers discovered Chasing Amy on video at age 12. He immediately became obsessed. Coming into awareness of his own queerness, he appreciated seeing the character of Alyssa Jones fully accepting herself, with no apologies. Years later came a successful TED talk explaining how the movie saved his life during a time of bullying and rejection, as did the drive to make a documentary exploring the work that influenced him.
A large part of the doc is a look back at Chasing Amy’s legacy. Smith talks about how he formulated the story based on his own personal insecurity in a relationship. Star Joey Lauren Adams, who was his girlfriend at the time, discusses her pride in the film, yet also how a healing project for him turned painful for her because of being inextricably associated with his baggage. Both are brutally honest in discussing the behind-the-scenes issues.
Writers and scholars are on hand to discuss the movie’s strengths and weaknesses as a piece of Queer cinema. They offer substantive, diverse thoughts. Many of the shrewdest observations come from actress/filmmaker/Alyssa inspiration Guinevere Turner, who notes that her friend’s cis-male story of a lesbian is ironically (and perhaps maddeningly) more well-known than Go Fish, the one she wrote with director Rose Troche, both of whom are actually gay women.
Existing alongside the cinematic analysis is footage detailing Sav’s relationship with girlfriend Riley. As he explains Chasing Amy’s significance to its key players, we watch as the couple becomes engaged and Sav follows through on an important personal revelation. Putting himself and Riley in the documentary so prominently risked veering into self-indulgence. That doesn’t happen because the two are inherently likable and their love affair is perfectly tied into the themes of Smith’s movie. We truly get a strong sense of Sav’s central point – that his connection to the film was inspiring on a profound level.
Chasing Chasing Amy is as important as it is entertaining. Sav Rodgers gets to the heart of how motion pictures can touch us, how they can comment on the culture around us, and how art in general can evoke differing reactions. Of course, it also serves to remind us that love is love, and love is good.
Chasing Chasing Amy is unrated, but contains strong language and sexual content. The running time is 1 hour and 32 minutes.
