If
the traditional way in which relationships emerge is that
parents select partners who marry, have children, and stay
together is the uncomplicated paradigm, what is the paradigm
for success in complex twenty-first century America, where
relationships are formed by individual entrepreneurs who do
not have to fit into stereotypic roles? In Kissing Jessica
Stein, directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, entrepreneurial
chessgames emerge in which the players have to make up the
rules as they go along, but they can end up checkmating themselves
and starting the game all over again, sacrificing their relationships
to find their identities. The film is based on Lipstick,
a New York stageplay that lasted six days but caught the attention
of Hollywood studio executives. Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather
Juergensen, the writers (who are the two principal characters,
Jessica Stein and Helen Cooper, respectively) came together
to write the story in response to their own false starts in
developing male-female relationships. Although straight, they
found themselves portraying how two thirtysomething women
fell in and out of love. The film begins to delineate the
character of journalistic copyeditor Jessica as she is underwhelmed
while meeting men in response to a personals ad, presumably
under pressure from her mother Judy (played by Tovah Feldshuh),
who has invited countless men over to dinner so that she will
find an acceptable husband for her hard-to-please daughter.
Meanwhile, bisexual Helen works alongside gays in organizing
art exhibits for a gallery but has occasional torrid sex with
a boytoy, a young African American parcel courier. One day
Jessica uncalculatingly answers Helen's personal ad because
she quotes Rilke. When Jessica arrives at a bar to meet Helen,
she almost immediately tries to run out, realizing that she
is venturing into an unintended Lesbian encounter, but Helen
persists, the two get better acquainted, Helen patiently allows
Jessica to come out sexually, and the two move in together
as lovers. Months later, problems emerge. Jessica's brother
is about to marry, but she has not arranged to invite Helen
to the wedding, thus shutting her lover into a closet of her
life; but that problem is solved when Helen is invited after
all, and the family calmly accepts the two women as lovers,
proving that Jessica's fears of family rejection were unfounded.
A more serious problem develops when Jessica stops having
sex with Helen, presumably bored, so they split but remain
friends who cherish "the way they were." Interweaved
in the story is the pursuit of Jessica by her boss Josh Myers
(played by Scott Cohen), who ultimately learns with equanimity
that she has been rejecting men for many years because of
a Lesbian impulse that was bottled up inside. Professionally,
when he stops pursuing Jessica, he overcomes writer's cramp,
while Jessica quits her work at the newspaper to become a
freelance artist.. Thus, as self-stereotyping ends, and the
various characters find and change roles that give depths
of their personalities freer expression, the ending is upbeat.
Kissing Jessica Stein may serve to explain
what some thirtysomething professional women are now experiencing
in the more cosmopolitan corners of America, as well as gay
men who experience the same pattern in their lives. But unanswered
is the question of just how happy they will be after so many
ephemeral encounters by the age of fifty or sixty. That film
has yet to be made. MH
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