MOVIE REVIEW : A Thoughtful Tale of a Lost First Love

Mindy Kaplan’s “Devotion” is flat out one of the best lesbian dramas ever filmed: witty, perceptive, funny and wrenching, honest and straight-to-the-heart, and so well drawn that anyone who ever experienced a devastating first love could identify with its heroine, so brilliantly played by Jan Derbyshire.

Derbyshire’s boyish Sheila Caston, a popular stand-up comic, in fact draws straights in her audiences with her wry, humorous takes on relationships. She’s often on the road, but as the film opens she’s back home in Vancouver, where she shares a sunny dockside home with her lover of five years: the devoted, darkly beautiful Julie (Kate Twa), a painter, sculptor and gallery owner.

At 35, Sheila is hitting a fulfilling prime in both her private and professional lives. When, out of the blue, she receives an offer to star as an openly gay woman in a sitcom, she feels she’s at last arrived in the big time.

Then she meets the wife of the husband-and-wife producing team who’ve made the offer. The woman, cool and elegant Lynn (Cindy Girling), turns out to be the first love that Sheila hasn’t seen in 15 years, when Lynn’s rejection of her came very near to destroying her. All of a sudden the bantering, upbeat Sheila is plunged into emotional chaos as she tries to fend off inquiries as to why she doesn’t seem herself. The overwhelming question for Sheila is not whether to go ahead and accept the career-making offer, although she is under much pressure to do so, but whether she is in fact still in love with Lynn.

As for Lynn, she’s worked on the TV project for two years, apparently, at least in part, as a way of making amends to Sheila. But what if Lynn, whether she’s yet faced it or not, finds she herself is still in love with Sheila?

*

Without any underlining whatsoever, Kaplan reveals some exceedingly painful truths for lesbians and gays. One is that those individuals who haven’t resolved their own sexual orientation can wreak havoc on the people who’ve fallen in love with them, and in this instance this includes Lynn’s loving husband of 14 years (Steve Adams). Another is that in falling in love for the first time, a gay person is often exceedingly vulnerable, confronted inescapably with his or her sexual orientation and all that implies.

Kaplan tells this emotionally charged story with simplicity and directness, but her finest inspiration is to let us know how devastated Sheila truly was by Lynn’s long-ago rejection. Sheila could easily have gained sympathy from Julie and her friends had she confided in them fully but senses deeply that for better or worse she’s got to work out her confused feelings all by herself.

Twa and Girling are very real as women experiencing their own emotional crises, but Derbyshire is really something, tearing into her part like Bette Davis with Margo Channing in “All About Eve”; like Margo, Sheila is essentially strong and honest and direct, a professional performer who tends to go too far in her emotional life. Derbyshire’s Sheila is a veritable paradox of strength and vulnerability, a risk-taker, warm and funny and flamboyant, and you very much want her to pass this crucial test in her life. You’re not likely to forget Derbyshire’s Sheila any more than Davis’ Margo.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film has some lovemaking and some strong language, complex, intense emotions and adult themes.

‘Devotion’

Jan Derbyshire: Sheila Caston

Kate Twa: Julie Rosen

Cindy Girling: Lynn Webster Mathews

Steve Adams: Bill Mathews

A Northern Arts Entertainment presentation in association with Auntie Em Productions & Dancing Arrow Productions. Writer-director-editor Mindy Kaplan. Producer-composer Arlene Battishill. Cinematographer Mario Araya. Production designer Cathy Robertson. Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Grande 4-Plex, 345 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, (213) 617-0268.