Looking for Cheyenne.

"The French, lesbian-centered Looking for Cheyenne is grown-up fare," writes Ernest Hardy in the Voice. "Director Valérie Minetto, working from a screenplay she co-wrote with Cécile Vargaftig, has fashioned a beguiling comedy from a Marxist-inflected thesis that is filled with characters who rage against the machine with pessimism, optimism, and naïveté - sometimes in rotation."

"As is often the case with French films, the characters' sociopolitical stances can be far less relaxed than their sexual outlooks, and that dichotomy gives this import its real depth," writes Gary Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. "This one's worth looking for."

Updated through 12/9.

"Despite the intimate nature of the relationships that make up this slight and ultimately repetitive chronicle of lost love, Looking for Cheyenne is on the whole a chilly, murky, and passionless enterprise," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "Perhaps sensing what little material she has given herself to work with, Ms Minetto embraces almost every conceivable form of modernist and postmodernist conceptual lily gilding to plump up a sigh of a short film into some sort of personal and political feature-length statement."

But back in March 06, Lisa Nesselson wrote in Variety: "An utterly refreshing look at work, love and politics centered on two attractive young women who are nuts about each other, Looking For Cheyenne is suspenseful, funny, touching, sexy and painlessly pertinent."

Update, 12/9: "In many ways, Looking for Cheyenne is reminiscent of the HBO film Gia - a tragic lesbian love story that succeeded because the performances were so grounded in reality," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical. "Looking for Cheyenne caps a semi-decent year for French film that began with one of my favorites of the year, The Page Turner. Let's hope 2008 will be better."

Posted by dwhudson at December 7, 2007 9:51 AM