"I can never forget
the Thistle Hotel. I can never forget that strange winter night. I had asked her
to dine with me, and then go to the Opera. My room was opposite hers. She said
she would come but - could I lace up her evening bodice, it was hooks at the back.
Very well." These are the first few sentences of Katherine Mansfield's
1907 short story "Leves Amores," on which this short film is based.
Mansfield, a celebrated literary figure, was treated with daily ice water baths
to help rid her of attractions to other women, and events in the writer's young
life are also interwoven into the film. Evelyn (Blake Lindsley, Mulholland
Dr.) is a resident of the Thistle Hotel in 1915 San Francisco, feeling "old"
and alone, thinking back to the days when her lover's (Kara Zediker, The Sex
Monster) parents separated them. When Alice (Chad Morgan) moves in across
the hall, the younger woman is drawn to Evelyn, and for a night at the opera,
the hooks on her dress must be attended to. When they return late in the
evening, "I went with her into her room to undo those troublesome hooks....
and Youth was not dead." Produced with the American Film Institute,
this short period piece is very well done, an awakening of passions for two independent
women. |