Try It, You Might Like It.

“Kissing Jessica Stein” light, entertaining, worth a look?

 

BY KRISTIN PETTIT

0, who kissed Jessica
" Stein? Helen Cooper did,
permitting the “something

new” buzz that’s giving the New
York-based romantic comedy
Kissing Jessica Stein a shot at a
larger audience than its initial
guesstimates. It got the nod at the
LA Film Festival 2001, and sure-
ly the promoters saw the time as
ripe for a promotional push.
After all, the popular
media have paved the way, con-
sistently, for gay themes or at
least adomments — some, admit-
tedly, gratuitous or cheap shots 7
for decades now. It was a short
hop from the trendy, media-ori-
ented cocktail parties of the
activist sixties, studded as they
were with token (“presentable” or
otherwise) gays and lesbians, to
the now-frequent representation
(of all kinds) throughout the elec-
tronic and‘ print media. Boomers
easily recall when Archie Bunker
staggered with the realization that
his much-admired butch buddy is
a fag. . _
My sister told me to
catch Kissing Jessica Stein when
I was in New York this past
February. She loved it. I tried
wheiil saw it advertised in jello-
colored lights on the marquee at a
theatre in Park Slope, Brooklyn,
on my last aftemoon in the
Empire State, but I was too late
by 20 minutes. I let it go, think-
ing I’d make do with a DVD
down the line. The film’s release
was limited, so I doubted it
would play in Vermont.
North Avenue came

through for me, however, and l

’ saw Jessica kissed (and kissing

back, sort of) at the cheap seats in
Ethan Allen Cinema. The sparse
crowd yukked it up. Me, too. I
draped a knee over a seat and let
themovie come at me in the
familiar, breezy way the major
network sitcoms have of washing
over the viewer.
I saw it the next night,

too, and I read what Ircould as a
Son of prep for this piece (and,
also because it was fading, the
Way much of the media we rou-
tinely consume to stall the brain
Or distract the tight chest is

designed to do). I liked it more
than I had initially. The first night
disappointment I felt was that

K] S had little more impact or lin-
gering reverberation for me (and
I’d guess anyone else) than, say,
an evening with the “Friends” or
a romp with the Romanos
(“Everybody Loves Raymond”).

On the car ride home I
was thinking how much Jessica
Stein (lead and writer/producer
Jennifer Westfeldt) reminded me
of Lisa Kudrow and how, from a
certain angle, Helen Cooper (co-
lead and writer/producer Heather
Juergensen) resembled Ray
Romano’s wife Deborah. It was
as if the movierwere a,TV prod-
uct which had moved with no.
fanfare into a Cineplex and found
it to be a homey, natural fit.

But there’s nothing
remarkable about that because it’s
a safe bet that the two engaging
actress/writers who conceived
and nurtured “Jessica” from its
origins as a theatrical sketch on
“dating hell” written in the
Catskills a few years back have
apparently logged as much time
with the tube as the rest of us.
Movies are the most collaborative
medium and never more so than
here. Reading an interview with
Westfeldt and Juergensen as I did
(eclipsemagazine.com), reveals
that, inladdition to directors, stu-
dio types (it was optioned for‘
awhile before the women bought
it back) and all the other profes-
sionals, audience input seems
uncommonly key in shaping this
film’s final product.

And among the film’s
weaknesses that nagged at me is
the sense I had that people with
clipboards and penlights were
poised behind the movie screen,
and every time a laugh erupted in
the audience, they high-fived one
another and made a note. I mean,
the film has the feel of being too
carefully worked and controlled,
calculated to appeal to the lowest
common denominator without
driving away more persnickety
types.

What led up to the night
Jessica Stein got a great big
smacker right on the lips?

‘ Jessica Stein, a copy edi-
tor for a trendy publishing outfit,-
finds she has no love in her life

save for her devotion to language
which is immaculately written,
certainly, and conventionally pol-
ished and articulate when spoken,
thank you very much. Knocking
on the door of her 30th birthday,
an age in our culture that signals
full-fledged adulthood, Jessica
feels a little like Nick Carraway
(The Great Gatsby): ‘.‘I was thirty.
Before me stretched the porten-
tous, menacing road of a new
decade.” Weary of the company
and the dubious charms of a New
York, he heads back to his mid-
western roots. Jessica, however,
is very much a New Yorker.
She’ll stay in the Big Apple, but
she wants to find and manage the
next phase of her life, and for her
this appears to mean life with the
right guy and all that follows.

Getting nowhere with
the men she’s meeting (and they
are a dreary lot from the brief
look at them we get), she keeps a
date she made with a woman
whose personal ad appealed. She
loved the ad but because a
woman had written it, she pro-
ceeded carefully and kept the
“option” she is about to explore
very much to herself.

The other half of the
equation is Helen Cooper, an
assistant curator in a lower
Manhattan gallery. Regardless of
(or because of) her sexual athleti-
cism with men, she feels a frus-
trated emptiness and enlists a gay
friend’s help in crafting a person-
al ad that will hook her up with a
woman. They settle on a passage
from literary giant Rainer. Maria
Rilke, hoping to avoid wasted
time with unsuitables. (That
would do it.) Luckily Rilke is a
favorite with Jessica.

So we’re off.

The two pretty girl-girls
provide some real laughs trying
to imagine and act-out what they
think the roles might be between
two women. We get fumbled,
competitive door-openings and
two fists thrusting greenbacks at
a cabby. As they move through
the preliminaries, the familiar
stereotypes emerge. Jessica’s
more repressed nature is
expressed in her quirks (no stom-
ach-touching) and in her micro-
managing (bringing along a cata-
logue of female sexual appliances

on the eve of what might be their
first complete love-making,
relieved to know that “lesbians
accessorize”).

Helen is more sponta-
neous_ and free-floating, eager to
dispense with logistics, set—ups
and certainly appliances, saying
that the one thing they don’t have
to work with, so to speak, doesn’t
figure absolutely or even promi-
nently in where pleasure lies for a
woman. Does Jessica agree? Yes,
she says she does, but still, this
may take awhile.

Intemiixed with the love
story are friends and family,
Jessica’s primarily. Her relation-
ship with her mother (Tovah
F eldshuh) has a moment fairly
late in the story that suggests by
its tone what another movie about
two women together, each for the
firsttime, might be like. But this
touching variation in the domi-
nant style passes.

Aside from Mrs. Stein,
Jessica’s world is fleshed out by
ex-boyfriend and current boss
Josh (Scott Cohen), her very
pregnant co-worker and friend
Joan (Jackie Hoffman), her broth-
er, her grandmother  In Helen’s
Chelsea world we see the gallery,
enjoy-the quips and encourage-
ment of her gay couple friends
Martin (Michael Mastro) and
Sebastian (Carson Elrod), one of
whom tells her she’s an “affront
to the gay community.” L

But I don’t feel that the
film is an affront. It doesn’t have
the gravitas or complexity or
firmly argued stand that can pro-
voke, enrapture, incense or awak-
en an audience. And the women
who wrote it and acted it have
said so, straight out. They thought
they had stumbled onto a topic
that would be engaging in con-
temporary culture: can two ‘
straight women (such as them-
selves) extend a close, caring
relationship into the sexual
realm? Will it work? Is sexuality,
in fact, as immutable an identity
as many strident believers have
insisted? Or is it more along the
lines of that perennial mothers’

.dinnertime urge of “try it, you

might like it!”

Also, to lighten up a tad,
both Westfeldt and J uergensen
were primarily concerned with

 

delivering a romantic comedy
with what has been called a
“risqué hook.” They want to sug-
gest there is much to be gained
by moving beyond self-imposed
perimeters through trying on new
behaviors, new identities, so to
speak. Presumably they feel this
sort of “appliance” might serve in
the search for one’s truest self.
So, for them, it’s a film not so
much about lesbianism or bisexu-
ality; it’s about risk-taking to
avoid trapping oneself in an ‘
undernourished little box-world.

This identity try-out
thing seems new, historically
speaking. I remember thinking in
the l970’s that it took so little for
a Vermont fann-boy to become a
surfer-boy. A tan, certain tee-
shirts, some additional vocabu-
lary and, well, he’d just about be
in Bodega Bay, California, scan-
ning the horizon, next stop
Hawaii.

Today, of course, some
might say that our frequent indul-
gence in optional life-styles is a
dodge, a frivolous digression
from the very real business of
nurturing a self that is longing “to
become,” and that holding off
this necessary adult work guaran-
tees the disconnect we all fret
about. A neurotic bind, then.

But films have been and
will be made about more than the
surface of a sequence of behav-
iors. Experiencing one of those
films encourages self-growth and
eases one’s fearful resistanc.e to
it.

To its credit, Kissing
Jessica Stein never pretends to be
more than what it is: energetic,
entertaining and light enough not
to spoil the fun. It succeeds
according to its own aspirations.

As for how it all ends,
well, it feels rushed to me, almost
as if the actresses just wanted a
wrap. But really I’d think they’d
say they were just ready for the
next role. V

"Kristin Pettit is a retired English

teacher living with her partner in
Underhill