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They’re the recognisable components of many a comedy: couples seeking help for their problems through therapy, a woman expected to embrace matrimony because she has reached a certain age, and female pals traversing life’s good and bad times. In BFFs, they are the basic building blocks of a film just as heavy on well-known narrative and thematic beats as it is on nuance, finding heart and humour within its take on the formula.
Kat (Tara Karsian, TV’s Review) and Samantha (Andrea Grano, The Young and the Restless) are the long-term best friends forever of the title, the latter a pillar of support at the former’s latest agonising birthday party. After a dressing-down from her mother (Pat Carroll, Bridesmaids) over her apparently societally unacceptable state, Kat is gifted with yet another insult courtesy of a gift certificate to a getaway called Closer to Closeness, a healing retreat for unhappy paramours. With no romantic significant other to join her, she takes Sam, the pair pretending to be in a relationship. Their ruse may start as a joke between straight women, but it opens up another line of thinking: maybe the love they’re both looking for can actually be found within each other.
Karsian and Grano write and produce as well as star in BFFs, their commitment to their odd-couple characters evident. Though painted with the same plethora of stereotypical issues that often plague femmes in films, Kat and Sam never feel flimsy or forced, nor does their nervous, uncertain contemplation of turning their platonic relationship into something more. As actors, their best moments are together, their charismatic – yet never too-cute – rapport sparking whether they’re laughing or bickering. As screenwriters, they understand the intimacy of close bonds beyond the clichés of trust exercises ringing true and the awkwardness that emanates after unexpected encounters.
Indeed, the movie works best as a showcase for their talents on-screen and off, despite the ensemble nature of the cast. Playing members of other pairs attending the resort, the likes of Sigrid Thornton (Face to Face), Larisa Oleynik (Hawaii Five-0) and Sean Maher (Much Ado About Nothing) aren’t asked to do much more than go through the motions of their supporting roles – and yet, they each bring the requisite texture necessary to make the group appear more authentic than other features on the topic, as well as contributing to the frank yet funny atmosphere. A same-sex skewed version of the terrible 2009 comedy Couples Retreat, thankfully this is not.
Director Andrew Putschoegl helms the film – his second after 2005’s Window Theory – with standard rom-com aplomb, and though that may seem the easy, obvious option, it suits the warmth on display, as well as perfecting the underlying balance of earnestness and amusement. BFFs is an atypical look at typical scenarios, thoughtful and familiar in tandem, and aware that trading in trope short-hand and simplicity sometimes cements the clearest insights.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
BFFs
Director: Andrew Putschoegl
US, 2014, 90 mins
Mardi Gras Film Festival
February 19 – March 5
http://queerscreen.org.au/mgff/
Melbourne Queer Film Festival
March 19 – 30
http://www.mqff.com.au/
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