Just perfect...

An action-packed slog

Absolutely Fantastic

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A very interesting film and certainly a good example of John Sayles work. He wrote, directed and played the male lead in the film. Sayles, who wrote Lone Star, Silver City and Passion Fish among many others, is much better in writing and directing than acting, but he certainly portrays an asshole husband in a loveless marriage well.Linda Griffiths, in her first film, gave an incredibly touching performance as a woman who realizes that she is a lesbian after having two children. She goes through the emotions as she realizes the first person she ever loved is leaving her for an old girlfriend; she deals with the loss of her family; and she stumbles through as friends don't quite know how to deal with her.Anytime a marriage breaks up it is hard, but I believe it is doubly hard in this situation and this film really gives a good picture of what all have to go through.

I don't know what is more depressing: that the great John Sayles crafted this piece of cartoon character lesbian propaganda or that people today who have the tremendous increase in psychological knowledge available to them and should know better still can't see that Sayles was glorifying a narcissist.The "hero" of our film, Liannna, is attracted to emotionally unavailable people of either sex. Yet she takes no responsibility for her sick actions. She has no problem with unethical behavior, whether it be having sexual relationships with authority figures or a meaningless one-night stand of loveless sex with a stranger. Are we to stand up and cheer because she learns to act like her sexual predator husband in the bar? Lianna trades a loveless marriage with Dick for a loveless lesbian affair with Ruth. She abandons her two young children for a life of hedonism and doesn't give her devastating actions a second thought. All that matters is her being a naughty and daring pioneer for the sexual revolution. By the end of the film Lianna finds out everyone else is just as self-centered as she is.The sad conclusion drawn from watching Lianna is that John Sayles betrayed his audience. He used our moral outrage at Dick's unconscionable behavior to justify Lianna's initial actions, but she turns into another Dick. But now I know why he had to resort to such a cheap cinematic trick to engage the audience: throughout the rest of the film Sayles fails to make the case that this life is worth examining or this character is worth caring about.

I think if you are interested in the subject matter, the content of the movie carries it. The comments thus far have been extremely positive, which is not quite in line with the current rating. So my comment would be to warn you that there is a lot of mediocre acting and the photography was not great. I'm sure the budget of the movie had a lot to do with it. And in some way the lack of great lighting, etc., and the "lameness" of the movie tends to work in its favor to present the subject matter as very ordinary, very commonplace, in opposition to how society wants to view this as something very unusual. I'm not a long-winded person. The need to pad this out to meet an IMDB requirement of ten lines would seem to ensure that there will be a lot of filler in these comments.

John Sayles' ability to get you acquainted with his characters shines again in this study of a wife and mother who is coming to terms with her sexuality. Unlike the tawdry stories that focus solely on the sexual aspect of lesbian relationships, Sayles explores and reveals the complexity of discovering homosexual orientation - what it means to Lianna as her sexuality emerges from repression and what it means to her and others that she chooses to live truthfully with it.There are some very rare vignettes in this film that bely what it is like to discover the attractiveness of women for the first time. Sayles does such a masterful job at portraying this process of discovery - it is joyful, playful, and exciting. These scenes remind me of Truffaut's "The Man Who Loved Women" (also badly remade in the USA, starring Burt Reynolds), but they seem to have a more natural depth and feel. Sayles' movies are typically populated with real characters, not posing movie stars. This film is true Sayles...so much is at stake for Lianna, and you are drawn into the aspects and dimensions of her life, the complexities and facets of the human sexual nature and of life in general, and what it means to come to terms with being gay.