An Intimate Friendship

An Intimate Friendship was so bad of a movie that after watching it, for the rest of 2018, I gave myself a minimum IMdB rating WLW movies must have for me to watch them. This is because An Intimate Friendship is so terrible I became worried that if I saw a movie as bad or worse than this within the same year, I’d lose all hope in the WLW film genre and possibly the entire concept of lesbianism.

An Intimate Friendship is about a group of four young, female friends. When one of them, Danielle comes out as a lesbian, everyone has a lot of feelings about it and handles it poorly. The tagline on the movie’s poster asks, “what would you do if you realized your best friend was gay?” The answer according to this movie is be a dick about it, constantly complain about how this issue affects you. In the case of Danielle’s best friend Faygen, the answer is be a dick about it but out of some sort of latent, gay attraction.

The relationship between Danielle and Faygen doesn’t work because they have no chemistry as friends or lovers. Admittedly, nobody else does either. None of these people make me believe they’ve known any of the other people longer than about a week.

Faygen spends most of the movie in a relationship with a shitty guy. Her gay awakening and relationship with Danielle is compressed into the third act. It’s really rushed and doesn’t work. Faygen and Danielle have several relationship milestones in the course of about 12 hours. They confess feelings for one another, kiss and then have sex all within the same scene. And they’re not granted any sort of honeymoon period after that. No, immediately the next morning they have their first argument. It’s a pretty serious one about major ways Faygen runs her life that Danielle disagrees with. They resolve the argument in time for them to be together by the time the credits roll but I don’t think this relationship is gonna last long-term.

On a technical level, this movie is a disaster. I’ve no idea what the budget for this was but it was clearly really low. Maybe that shouldn’t be a factor but for me, it is.

The sound quality is the most appalling. It has that sort of flat yet echo-y quality that makes it pretty obvious that they were using the built-in mic on the camera. And it doesn’t seem to be a very expensive camera. If I had to guess, this movie was filmed with one camera that’s maybe one step up from a commercial camcorder you’d get back in 2000. While I get that this film doesn’t have millions of dollars to spend, sound is one thing I think you really shouldn’t ignore. Bad sound really does make your movie seem amateur and cheap and this movie needs all the help it can get not to appears as such.

It’s not like this is a movie filmed with limited means that had a good idea though. No, the script for this movie sucks too. What’s so staggeringly frustrating is how badly the other characters react to Danielle being a lesbian. It’s the year 2000 and these characters are all young, white, middle class women who don’t practice religion. Overall, they seem like a group of people who’d be most likely to accept homosexuals not just in theory but knowing one.

Instead, Danielle’s coming out is met with one character dramatically storming out and Danielle pleading for acceptance which her friends never fully give her. And there’s no basis for their discrimination, really. No factors like politics or religion or some bad experience with a lesbian. They’re just dicks because drama, I guess. Their reaction is what I’d expect to see from a coming out drama made in 1975, not less than 20 years ago.

I can’t believe this is any way reflective of the reality of coming out in 2000 was for someone with as much privilege as Danielle. Because if I do accept this as true, that would just make me too sad. 

Worst of the characters is Danielle’s sister Kelly. She’s just a total asshole and it’s not really based in anything. Maybe there was a backstory for this character but it failed to read through on the screen. Instead, Kelly seemed like a villain of such extreme hate that doesn’t fit into this paltry little narrative. She has no depth of character, no character arc and I feel no sympathy for this character.

Don’t watch this movie. There’s no reason to. There are no redeeming features about this movie. It’s not even the sort of staggeringly, remarkably bad or fun bad. It’s just bland and without talent. I regret watching it.

Overall rating: 1.5/10

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