Tru Love (2013)

As Good As It Gets

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Blistering performances.

Why only 4 stars?Because I got bored watching scene after scene over acted and stretched out too long. It's an easy story to guess where it's going.Don't get me wrong. The actresses were fine in their roles but the story went lacking. Who couldn't guess where the girls friendship was going and who couldn't guess the ending? Photography is beautiful, especially the snowy beach scenes - wonderful composition and color - and the mother sitting on the bathtub - beautiful!

In the opening image a surge of water smashes through shards of ice. That's the emblem of the three central women's growth in his drama.Alice Beacon (Kate Trotter) first appears as a hard, frozen face in a cab, behind black glasses, under her husband's ghost's cold hand. (The workaholic lawyer pops round to give her advice — but still smokes in bed.) When she leaves Toronto to return to (frigid) North Bay Alice is in another cab, but now radiant and ebullient. The Beacon she provides is summarized in her advice to her daughter, Suzanne (Christine Horne): "Life slips away so quickly…. Most people are too asleep to notice." And in their last scene: "Lose myself, find myself. It's all the same in the end…. If your heart breaks I hope it breaks wide open." What lit up Alice is the Wonderland she discovers through Suzanne's lesbian friend Tru (Shauna MacDonald, who with Kate Johnston also wrote and directed his fine, sensitive film). In Tru's world a waitress wears a "Pussy Whisperer" t-shirt. The love that gradually grows between the 60-year-old widow and the 30-ish Tru (nee Gertrude, Hamlet's randy mom) does break Alice wide open. She dies of an aneurism on the train home. But she dies at last alive, in her first throes of passionate love — that was missing in her shotgun marriage — and on a new level of understanding both of herself and with her daughter. Though Suzanne compulsively tries to "protect" her mother from that grand passion, the experience breaks through her carapace against her own emotion. Alice forces her to confront the mysterious feelings she has preferred to evade through work. The experience brings Suzanne as well as Alice out of the shadow of the father's death.Though Tru is apparently the worldliest of the three women, Alice lights her way anew too. Tru has been compulsively untrue to her lovers, too self-absorbed wholly to commit to them — or even to remember their name — and too cowardly to confront the superficiality of her engagement. She lives on an island. Her joy with Alice and her tension with Suzanne discover a new depth of feeling and an openness that enable her to resume and correct the last relationship she'd fled. The spiked shirt she wears in her melancholy is an emblem of her earlier defence against vulnerability. Two pictures distinguish Suzanne's and Tru's lives. Chez Suzanne an androgynous face wears a muffled mouth, an emblem of the boyish woman whose life is strictly her law career. In Tru's kitchen, where she indulges her zest for food, French music and brightness the pic is of brilliant flowers. Alice has lived Suzanne's life — sandwiched between two generations of neglectful lawyers — but Tru brings her into joy. It proves contagious. With a crisp script, first-class direction and superb performances, this film clearly deserves wider audience.

So, I am biased because my mom stars in the movie, but she has been in lots of movies and I have not reviewed them on IMDb :-) This movie deserves my positive review. I respect that it is about three woman (three female leads is not the norm) and it was written and directed by two wonderful and talented women (again, two women in the driver's seat is not the norm). It explores the lives of three women - how they evolve and grow, create bonds and learn how to not simply exist, but impact the world that they live in. Life passes in an instant - we all have to make our instant meaningful. It is not enough to simply exist - we have to love and feel life! All the performances are outstanding, but I have to say I burst with pride when I watch my mom. I have seen EVERYTHING my mother has done so I am actually the best person to say that her performance is outstanding! My mom is always amazing, but she really hits it out of the park this time. Watch the movie - you will enjoy it!

True Luv (2013) was co-directed by Kate Johnson and Shauna MacDonald. It's an interesting, unusual film about love between two women of different generations. Tru, played by director MacDonald, is a free-spirited lesbian who helps out a friend, Suzanne, played by Christine Home, when Suzanne's mother Alice, played by Kate Trotter, comes to visit. Suzanne makes the word "workaholic" really sound inadequate. She's beyond that.That leaves Tru, who doesn't appear to have a job, and Kate, who rarely sees Suzanne, with time to be together. Suzanne may be too busy to see her mother, but she's still not happy about Tru seeing her mother. The rest of the movie moves forward from there.We saw this film at the Little Theatre as part of the outstanding Rochester ImageOut LGBT Film Festival. It will work well on DVD.