CHASING AMY (55)

Directed by: Kevin Smith

Starring: Ben Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams, Jason Lee, Kevin Smith

The Pitch: A comic-book artist falls in love with a fellow artist - who also happens to be a lesbian.

Theo Sez: Good to see a film that's more than (or, in this case, unrelated to) an aesthetic experience, pushing beyond Cinema to take on the questions more relevant to everyday life - it's perfect fuel for passionate post-film discussions, not least because it doesn't pussyfoot around trying to gauge political correctness but dives headlong into the maelstrom of sexual hang-ups and stormy relationships. Despite his annoying habit of undercutting the "heavy" speeches with laugh-lines and flippant kickers ("Was it something I said?"), Smith is nothing if not candid - you always feel his movies are reflections of what he himself is thinking about, all the stuff he's dealing with from his Catholic upbringing to the latent homosexuality in his work to the perils and pleasures of his new-found success (reflected in his alter ego(s), Jay and Silent Bob, now considerably more confident - and less hilarious - than they were as deadbeat losers mouthing off in CLERKS) ; all of which is why you can just about forgive him for apparently being as confused as his characters. The suggestion of homosexuality as a kind of lifestyle accessory, donned and doffed more or less at will, feels vaguely wrong (though I'm not qualified to judge), and certainly the film's attitude to sex - protesting (too much, perhaps) that it means nothing, it's "only sex" etc, yet identifying it throughout as a source of scars, fights and general bad karma - seems more than usually tormented ; but the real gem is our heroine, the kind of woman who's been through every kind of sexual perversity and emerged from it all with a kind of beatific wisdom, who's seen it all and tried it all so she can love you Only For Yourself, who's explored the limits so she can slap your face when you go too far. She's the Mother and the Whore in one tasty package, an outrageous male-adolescent fantasy - it's a film with the delicate observation of a Rohmer, only in the service of a sensibility somewhere on a par with WEIRD SCIENCE. For all its virtues, you have to wonder if its target audience isn't best described (to quote the hero) as "under- or over-weight guys who can't get laid".