Mitch McCabe | Playing the Part / 1995

charmed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mitch McCabe (director) Playing the Part / 1995 [documentary]

 

In this early lesbian autobiographical-documentary, director Mitch McCabe performs as her own self as she proceeds to move back and forth between her university dorm in Harvard and her family home in the wealthy community of Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

     As the director, she quickly summarizes her family history before beginning what might have been a somewhat frightening odyssey between the two worlds had McCabe not been able to perceive her own experience as a anything other than a comedy gone wrong.

     Mitch is currently dating someone, which would be good news to share with her family, but as McCabe puts it, “she’s a she, and I don’t know how I’m going to tell my parents.”

     The situation is made more complex by the fact that both women are seniors, and Cat, her girlfriend, is from England without a visa to stay on beyond June, so their future is itself uncertain. So too, it appears are Mitch’s feelings about her sexuality and everything connected to it, as she heads home for Thanksgiving, determined to tell her parents.

      There we meet her affable businessman father, with whom she has a fairly good relationship, and her mother, an interior decorator who has carefully designed every room in their comfortable home, has notions of how her daughter should dress and behave, and has a determined perspective about what she expects of Mitch’s future life. Obviously, the two do not get on.

      Yet there is love there, or perhaps in Mitch’s case, a sense of order and privilege in being the daughter of such an organized and controlling woman. If nothing else she falls under the charm of her mother’s presence, as if her mother represented a kind of tropical breeze under whose spell one cannot free oneself, falling into a sort of fevered trance.

     The film takes us through three major encounters with the family, one at Thanksgiving, one in Cambridge when the parents go East for a visit, and the final meeting at Christmas holiday, each time McCabe becoming more determined to finally tell her parents the truth, which by the end of this film she failed to do.

       In between, she photographs herself as her stylish mother, endures a Christmas ritual party in which she is forced to dress up in Christmas finery and entertain the male guests, and basically reassesses the good life which she is now willing, but not quite able, to abandon should her parents adamantly react to the truth of her sexuality.

        McCabe’s work, in fact, might have been the first lesbian coming out movie, before even the later gay-boy movies such as Hettie Macdonald’s Beautiful Thing (1996), or the films I’ve most often mentioned with regard to “B” version of this genre, Simon Shore’s Get Real and David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen both of 1998.

        But, in the end, her film only reveals how she avoids the act and its significance not necessarily out of fear, but from a kind of lassitude, a feeling within the director’s soul that forces her instead to focus on the tensions she has in her own life between the charmed world of the American dream—which the family has long ago obtained and which has permitted her education at Harvard and even allowed her to freely explore new ideas and her own sexuality—and the queer cold world of after-college that is suddenly facing her without her having a clue of what it will bring. It is the child in the narrator, not the adult lesbian self, who is still in control of her being and one might even say of the rhythm of this movie, which permits its comic tonality. Surely things can’t be as serious as they threaten to be if she can’t exert the effort to actually speak the truth.

       Ultimately, of course, in “playing the part,” in pretending to be the same girl her parents knew from her childhood on, Mitch McCabe is a kind tragic figure, albeit one who isn’t unaware of that irony. She will most certainly lose her girlfriend, Cat, as she is sucked up into a future vortex that McCabe has not yet allowed herself to fully step into. Although she creates a chaos of her own room, hoping that her mother’s eventual anger will break her out of her trance, it doesn’t succeed as her mother growls but basically permits the status quo, perhaps sensing an unpleasant reality, McCabe returning to Boston yet again without the confrontation.

       By film’s end the narrator/director is planning her “coming out” for graduation, when her family will be arriving again in Cambridge, admitting that it has to happen then because, frankly, she’s getting tired of playing the role. But then, many play such roles throughout most of their lives. It takes courage to tell others who you really are, just as it takes courage to make such an honest film.

 

Los Angeles, April 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).