Girl Play

I watch a lot of WLW that let me down because I have expectations they will be good. Girl Play is the opposite. I went into the movie assuming it was going to be really bad and I would hate it. But while I can’t say it’s a good movie, there ended up being a lot more salvageable content and half-decent jokes in Girl Play than I expected.

Girl Play is about two lesbian actresses who fall in love while acting in a play where they play lovers. One of these actresses, Robin has been married for years. However, she and her wife fight often and she sometimes feels trapped by her domestic “dream life”. By contrast, the other actress, Lacie is afraid of commitment. Lacie primarily sticks to one night stands and loses interest in relationships and sex once commitment is on the table. Robin and Lacie were friends before the play but as they play fictional lovers, they develop real feelings.

My main problem with Girl Play is its framing. When it opens, we see Robin and Lacie on a stage and they more or less monologue about the events that transpired. As such, the film reveals a lot of its plot through voice over or monologue instead of any dialogue or visual scenes. Much as I understand this is a cheap and easy way to frame a movie, I think doing so did the movie a huge disservice.

This framing would have worked pretty well if this was a stage play. It’s easy to imagine going to see a play that is just these two actresses monologue and occasionally interacting in front of a basic stage set up. However, this is not a play. It’s a movie. Girl Play actively avoided taking advantage of the visual opportunities offered to them by the fact that it is a film. It’s infuriating watching scenes that could be a dialogue between two characters be done as a voice over. It’s more frustrating to see equally dramatic scenes or revelations happen on this blank stage set and then be referred to in past tense. Having these scenes take place in real time with the actual characters would have been a huge benefit to the film.

Still, some, even most of the writing works for me. The situations Robin and Lacie find themselves in are often funny and they offer funny observational comedy about them. There’s a lot of fairly humorous summaries of dialogue between Robin or Lacie and other characters in their life. Hell, some of the situations or observations even caused me to silently chuckle. Much as this is a positive, it further frustrates me that some much of this film could have easily been translated properly into funny situation or physical comedy. The groundwork is all there! It just lost all its steam in the execution.

I do think the movie ends abruptly. Lacie and Robin confess their feelings and decide to give a relationship a go and then, end credits. The way it ended, I don’t think these characters will make it in the long run. Lacie still has major unresolved issues with commitment. Maybe that’s the point though. Either way, Girl Play only runs ~80 minutes. There was absolutely room for them to have an ending that lasted longer than approximately two minutes.

Its lazy framework absolutely lets Girl Play down. But there is some pretty good aspects if you can look past it. Actresses Robin Greenspan and Lacie Harmon do really well with their lengthy monologues and the monologues themselves have some good writing. Still, the way Girl Play was filmed lends itself more to a play than a film. And if that’s the case, just make it a play. Girl Play’s major crime as a movie is not taking advantage of all the ways that filmmaking specifically can be used to tell a story. And that’s a shame because the story Girl Play is telling is not bad.

Overall rating: 5.3/10

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