Chasing Amy (1997)

Kevin Smith's third feature takes the messiest subject available in 1997, a lesbian who falls for a man, and handles it with the confidence of a man who has given the matter several months of serious thought. The film is built around queer identity from top to bottom: coming out, bisexuality, and the way Alyssa's friends police her for dating a man. For its era that is genuinely uncommon. The lens, however, belongs to Holden, and Holden is a nervous young man with a comic book and a wounded ego.

The dialogue runs long and loud, full of set-piece arguments about sexual history, insecurity, and the unwritten rules of desire. These are staged as fights between characters, not sermons delivered to the audience, which spares the film the worst of its instincts. Hooper, the Black gay activist who performs straightness to sell his comic, adds a thread of racial satire the movie never develops past a joke. The cast is mostly white, and the queer leads are played by straight performers, a detail the era did not think to question.

What remains is a picture about a man learning, at length, that women have pasts. Alyssa is permitted to defend herself and to refuse the threesome proposal, and she does both with real force, which counts for something. But the story keeps returning to Holden's hurt feelings as the engine of its drama, and the ending hands him the moral victory of having grown. The comic industry deal sits there as a personal grudge, never as a system worth interrogating. Nobody is thinking about the climate, or the body, or the wiring of the mind. It is a romance of its moment, and the moment has aged.