Tribeca Festival has a long history of showcasing fascinating small films, especially documentaries. We can add Chasing Chasing Amy to this list. Directed and written by Sav Rodgers, Chasing Chasing Amy explores its maker’s long, deep connection to Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy and how, over the process of making a documentary about this connection, his own life begins to change. Told through a series of clips, talking head interviews, and journey through the original film and its complicated history, Rodgers tells a story about both himself and about the power of cinema to help shape and understand identity.
To Rodgers’s credit, Chasing Chasing Amy is not primarily a love fest for how wonderful the original film is, even as it celebrates the profound effect that this particular film had on his life. In addition to the interviews with Kevin Smith, Scott Mosier, and the cast and crew of the original film, Rodgers gives ample space to queer critics and commentators, including Go Fish director Guinevere Turner, to unpack the problematic elements of the film, from Jason Lee’s homophobic sidekick to the straight white male perspective and the biphobia of even the queer characters themselves.
Chasing Chasing Amy strangely avoids using the terms bisexual or pansexual very much, as even contemporary interviews with Smith and others continuously refer to Alyssa as a “lesbian who falls in love with a man.” And while this documentary is certainly about gender and sexual fluidity, about the way that people identify and how the way they identify may change over the course their lives and loves, the aversion to treating Alyssa as anything other than a lesbian is, admittedly, a bit odd.
Most poignant, however, is the interview between Rodgers and Joey Lauren Adams. Adams unpacks much of the trauma and issues going on behind the scenes and how the experience of Chasing Amy itself was not a particularly pleasant one in many ways. We’re reminded that even as Chasing Amy premiered at Sundance with the enthusiastic support of producer Harvey Weinstein, Weinstein was attacking Rose McGowan. While Smith doesn’t diminish the reality of what Weinstein was, though he does avow no knowledge of it at the time, Adams is fairly explicit about knowing all along—and having to face harassment from other men even as she was trying to build a career.
This is the strength of Chasing Chasing Amy, a far better film than if it had primarily been about being a fan. It interrogates, via its director’s personal experience, where the films we love come from, the fact that we must understand that films can have a profound effect on us and be problematic in themselves, and come from problematic and even traumatic events in the lives of the people who made them. Chasing Chasing Amy doesn’t shy away from the fact that Chasing Amy is far from a perfect film, while at the same time navigating the fact that it was deeply influential on the filmmaker’s life.
The power, then, lies in the fact that there are no easy answers, or even easy ways of unpacking the meaning of films and the effect individual ones can have on our lives and our identities. But it also does something that so many from marginalized communities have to navigate, of finding value in films made by and about people that are not them. So many films can never fully express our experience but we’re able to find the cracks in which we fit, finding the identities that are just a bit buried, a bit blurred, because the writer/director/perspective is straight, or white, or male, or cis, and very often all four.
Chasing Chasing Amy is about finding identity and solace in cinema and art, as often problematic and complex as that art can be—and how at times we can also leave those films behind, without losing our love for them. While this is a deeply personal film about Rodgers’s experience with Chasing Amy, it will resonate with anyone who has had their lives and identities truly affected by cinema, who have seen themselves—often imperfectly, often unclearly—reflected on the screen.
Chasing Chasing Amy is currently playing at Tribeca Festival and on Watch Tribeca.
