Tru love (2013)

The yearly LGBTQ film festival in Turku is a treat of both feature movies, shorts and documentaries. All movies are not great, but it is great to watch new films from various countries. This years I watched Tru love (dir. Kate Johnson/Shauna MacDonald), a well-meaning but rather conventional film about a woman who falls in love with her friend's mother. The main character: a rugged type with committment problems. The friend: the straight girl who has second thoughts about who she is. The theme in itself is good, and the film explores a mother-daughter relationship in a way that reveals fragility and hang-ups. Sadly, the directors do not steer away from melodramatic traps and the directors also seemed to have been preoccupied in a problematic way with offering a Haunting Lesbian Love Story. The storytelling is, to put it short, not very skillful. The film is partly bogged down in schematic ideas about how a conflict is to be showed on the wide screen. How about the way this film is executed? The cinematography tries to evoke a poetically wintry New York. The result, I must say, is quite flat. The magic never happens. The result - the composition of images - is at times embarrassingly calculated and there are few moments when it does not feel belabored. The big flaw of Tru Love is that it does not rely on subtlety, that is, the viewer's capacity to realize how things are. Every aspect of the relationships are spelled out meticulously - which pretty much ends up killing the movie and the dynamic between the people in it.