GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

JUNE 6, 1997

Evenings Out

Girl rage, girl sexuality, girl love

All Over Me remembers what it was like

to be in love with your best friend

"How did we ever survive being teenage girls?" sisters Alex and Sylvia Sichel asked each other when they began research for their feature film debut, All Over Me. "We went back to that confusing time in our lives when self-esteem and self-expression were at war with each other. We kept coming back to the person each of us clung to in that time of transition: our best friend. Everyone secretly knows their best friend was their real first love."

All Over Me follows a crucial period in the life of an adolescent girl as she starts to understand exactly who she is and how important it is to be that person without apology. Set in the streets of Hell's Kitchen, the film presents a refreshingly different side of New York City, one where Patti Smith, not Frank Sinatra, is the patron singer/saint, where gay punks and grandmas share the streets, where girls roller skate and rock out.

"We talked about how important it is for us to express ourselves as girls," Alex Sichel said. "Our girl rage, girl sexuality, girl love. The real story. Not the version we've been told to believe. The one we have to tell ourselves."

Claude (Alison Folland, who played an impressionable teenager in Gus Van Sant's To Die For) and Ellen (Tara Subkoff) are best friends, 15-year-old girls who live across the neighborhood park from each other.

As different in temperament as they are in appearance, sturdy, self-effacing Claude and fragile, volatile Ellen have long been at the center of each other's universe. There is an unspoken sexual tension between them, illustrated early in the film when some physical horseplay suddenly crosses an invisible line into a more erotic zone.

Ellen (Tara Subkkoff) and Claude (Allison Folland).

As Sylvia Sichel puts it, "The boundaries start to blur. The line gets pushed." Alex Sichel agrees. "As adults, we think that sexuality and friendship have such very clear lines, but in fact there was a time when that was definitely not the case. We disconnect from that time. We don't want to remember."

With school almost over and summer in the air, Claude and Ellen have begun to discover more of the world outside Claude's room. For the first time in their lives, their needs are not the same.

Claude has a job at a neighborhood pizza parlor, where she works with Jesse (Wilson Cruz of the television series My So-Called

Producer Dolly Hall and director Alex Sichel.

BILL FOLEY

Life). She is focused on practicing for the band she and Ellen planned to put together. But now Ellen has a boyfriend, the rather thuggish Mark (Cole Hauser) and he has become a bigger priority than the band, and perhaps a bigger priority than Claude.

"I think that from a woman's perspective we were all either Claude or Ellen at some point in our lives," comments producer Dolly Hall, who also produced last year's lesbian romance The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love. "Things start to happen to you and suddenly you don't understand why you have this really strong connection to a person who may be very different than you. I think that's really profound, and also very universal."

While Claude sincerely, if awkwardly, tries to adapt to Ellen's new romantic status, Ellen is far less welcoming to Claude's new friend Luke (Pat Briggs, singer for the band Psychotica), a gay punk rocker who has moved into the apartment downstairs. Ultimately Luke, who wears his sexuality as comfortably as his black nail polish or his guitar, and whom Ellen instantly pegs as "weird," becomes the engine that changes Claude's friendship with Ellen forever.

In spite of Ellen's frostiness and Mark's outright hostility, Luke becomes friends with Claude, and encourages her to pursue her interest in music. “He kind of has to force Claude to be friends with him. I think he understands her better than she understands herself," remarked Sylvia Sichel.

Events unfold that cause Ellen to spin out of control. She is doing drugs and becoming even more emotionally volatile. At one point, Claude rescues her from a near-overdose, only to see Ellen join Mark and his friends minutes later in a tequila toast.

Claude ventures out to the punk rock club Luke told her about. There, she meets Lucy (Leisha Hailey of the pop music duo The Murmurs), who is Claude's age and has just performed with her band. Lucy is comfortable with her sexuality and is attracted to Claude, and Claude begins to open up to desires she has never understood. She cannot be with Lucy, however, because she knows that she is in love with Ellen.

Patsy >

BILL FOLEY

Claude tentatively tries to assert herself with Ellen, proposing that they escape New York together. Ellen lets her know, in no uncertain terms, that the plan will never happen, insisting that their relationship is nothing more than a friendship. Faced with Ellen's inability to look at the truth, Claude decides she must separate from the person she loves most in order to be true to herself.

Music is a vital element of All Over Me, and fulfills a number of needs for Claude.

"Claude is looking to music to help her express some of her feelings," said producer Hall. “I think that's why she wants to be in a band and write songs and be in that world, which seems to be a little more accepting of people who don't quite fit in.”

The soundtrack pulses with energy and feeling, and includes songs by some of the most talked-about artists in alternative music, including Ani DiFranco, Sleater Kinney, Helium, Babes in Toyland and Cornershop.

Sylvia Sichel spent hours alone listening to records that music supervisor Bill Coleman hunted down, and became a convert. "The music is so full of feeling. It's great," she said.

Watching over Claude in her room is a big poster of Patti Smith, the iconic rock poet who was a founding mother of punk rock with her 1975 album Horses.

"Claude has done her homework, she's researched the girl rocker thing." Alex Sichel explains. "In a way, the soundtrack tells the history of righteous girl music, which is Claude's music."

In the end, Claude realizes that she must let go of the person she loves most in order to be happy and true to herself, a painful process that will be recognizable to anyone who has ever had a close friendship deteriorate.

"We wanted to go into the center of this feeling the exact moment when a girl has to make choices for her own survival," the Sichels said. "These choices are often at the cost of her best friend-the person who has always been more important to her than she is to herself."

All Over Me is currently playing at the Esquire Theater in Cincinnati, and the Cedar-Lee Theater in Cleveland.