Claire Of The Moon

Still stands up as a seminal sapphic film. Comes across like a dated 70's film with overly meaningful looks and some cheesy links but it is still refreshingly open and totally watchable even now.

In her poem 'Mirror', Sylvia Plath examined the way humankind often refuses to face reality (the mirror),preferring instead to live in a 'romantic' dream world where the edges of reality are blurred - reflections in a lake or '-those liars,the candles or the moon'. Claire is a serious satitical writer whose sex life seems to be under her control but is obviously not fulfilling. At a female writers' retreat,she meets Noel, an 'out' Lesbian and, after some initial hostility, begins to grow towards her.

The writers are a mixed bunch. A mature,rather large Southern lady who wrote doorstop bodice-rippers represented the 'straight' view of sexuality; the other younger writers say what they think is trendy knowing that both Noel and Claire are their intellectual superiors.

The film creaks a little with its dialogue, as if every utterance has to have significance. One line which stands out in stark relief is said by Noel '-sex between women is as raw as it gets-' Claire's sex life,picking up a lover at the local bar, is also beginning to lose its drive and she starts to realize how empty her life has become. Noel knows what she is; she becomes the mirror of reality for Claire.

The piano piece 'Clair de Lune' ( pun intended,I think),is a metaphor about the romance of the moonlight, but, when the sexual tension breaks near the end of the film, Claire does not live her fantasy anymore, she may have found real 'love'. Unfortunately, the passion and the physicality of this new-found 'love' came over as rather passionless,probably due to writer/director reticence at the time. It is the same reticence in Nicole's later film 'Elena Undone', which had blackly comic undertones,which denies the audience a chance to feel Elena's physical longings. The audience is all too familiar with the male look; he sees the obvious attraction of the woman- her face,her hair, her eyes perhaps her smile - is the 'look' similar for women?

For its time,'Claire of the Moon', if one stayed with it, was a brave film to make, following 'Another Way' and followed by Lesbian-themed films like Donna Deitch's 'Desert Hearts' and the heist thriller 'Bound'. The cinema had not quite come out of the closet even then, which may have restricted the impact of the film at the end.

i wanted to like this film. I recently bought Nicole Conn's latest effort *Elena Undone', which is a lovely film and a very mature piece of work; this one however is nearly 20 years old and her first attempt. It looks and feels late 80s/early 90's and some of it, bizarrely, could almost have come from a 'Movies for Men' film. The story is preposterous, Trisha Todd plays the part alternately stroppy and maniacal, and it feels like a really self-indulgent exercise in right-on sisterhood. Maybe it was good at the time......the best bit is in the extras, the bit where the two lead actresses snog for real, says it all.....

One of the most boring movies I ever seen and quite a bad acting.

This film is magnificently appalling. Bad acting, bad script, bad plot (which I lost after about 10 minutes). Big hair, big shoulder pads, big disaster.