By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/20/23 – The closing night film of Outfest 2023 will be Sav Rodgers’ very personal documentary Chasing Chasing Amy, which premiered at Sundance and was recently in the lineup of Frameline in San Francisco. Chasing Chasing Amy looks at the development and creation of Kevin Smith’s 1997 film Chasing Amy and the complex legacy that it holds with LGBTQ+ people. The film sets out with a simple question: Why, as a 12-year-old, did director Sav Rodgers become obsessed with this romcom Chasing Amy, and what does the film’s seemingly progressive (at the time) gender and sexuality politics, which includes frank depictions of out and happy LGBTQ+ characters, hold up to a modern lens? The documentary also puts a major focus on the impact that Smith’s film had on Sav Rodgers and his coming-of-age journey before and during filming. Chasing Amy and the interviews with director Kevin Smith serve as the connective tissue to this larger journey on which Sav Rodgers is traveling in the course of making his documentary.
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The life of young filmmaker Sav Rodgers and the impact that Chasing Amy had on him serve as the real backbone of this documentary. The journey that Rodgers takes audiences on is more important and relevant than the discussion of the 1997 film. Rodgers must confront so many things about himself, and about the film that helped save his life as a youngster growing up in Kansas and not knowing anything about “queer” people. The film follows a fairly direct narrative mode through the events of several years in the life of Sav Rodgers. It starts out with Rodgers speaking about how a simple 2019 Ted Talk led to the film’s creation and why he became a No. 1 fan of the 1997 Chasing Amy. While Rodgers’s film begins as a celebration of the place Chasing Amy held for him as a young man, it evolves into something far more complex that grapples with the underlying heartbreak of Chasing Amy’s development, its influence on Rodgers’ gender transition, and his changing relationship to the film and Kevin Smith.
The 95-minute documentary does meander a bit and the strongest parts seem to be the interviews with the original film’s director Kevin Smith and with the lead actress Joey Lauren Adams, who was romantically involved with Smith prior to during the making of Chasing Amy. Fans of Chasing Amy will be interested in hearing the things that filmmakers and writers like Guinevere Turner and Princess Weekes have to say during Chasing Chasing Amy. From the start, Smith’s film was poorly received by the lesbian community who found it hard to believe that a lesbian woman (played by Joey Lauren Adams) would suddenly fall in love with a straight white man (played by Ben Affleck). This is important because Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy is a queer story told by a straight white male from his perspective. Sav Rodgers was not particulary interested in the relational story behind Smith’s film but more in his own evolving relationship with the love interest in his own life – namely, Regina “Riley” Rodgers, who he has known since both young people were 17.
As Sav Rodgers explained in an interview: “We could have made a lot of different versions of Chasing Chasing Amy, but ultimately, the version that we decided on was that every scene has to be about my evolving relationship to Chasing Amy, and if it doesn’t fit within that paradigm, it doesn’t fit into this movie.” In the interviews with director Kevin Smith and actress Joey Lauren Adams, we hear their respective “truths” about the film and their own relationship at the time that shaped the story. At the same time, we encounter the effect that the revelations from these interviews have on Sav Rodgers as a trans man in a long-term loving relationship with a young lesbian woman “Riley.” As Rodgers sums it up at the end of the film: “Amy was a life raft when I needed it. Now I have new dreams.”
This documentary attempts to weave in current discussions in the LGBTQ+ community about representation of lesbians. Chasing Chasing Amy seeks to and largely succeeds in answering those questions rather than just avoiding the negative aspects and focusing on the impact that Kevin Smith’s film had on the life of Sav Rodgers. Smith’s independent film was a commercial success and made both Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams into stars. Its success in movie theatres supported the standard heterosexual belief of most viewers that a lesbian just needs to meet the right man to fall in love. In contrast, Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994), a pioneering film about a lesbian love relationship, got little critical attention. Actress Joey Lauren Adams in her interview with Sav Rodgers recalls that, being in her 20s, she too was harassed by Harvey Weinstein at Sundance after he previewed Chasing Amy. There are quite a number of interviews with Kevin Smith, with whom Sav Rodgers develops a warm friendship to such an extent that Smith acknowledges that Rodger’s documentary project “gave me my movie back.”
Ancillary to the coming-of-age romantic story of Sav Rodgers and “Riley” is some talking heads who offer various insights into the seeming bisexuality in Smith’s film and, to some extent, what happens within a transman/lesbian relationship. What is complicated in Kevin Smith’s film was the bisexuality of the character of Alyssa Jones (played by Joey Lauren Adams). Dr. Sarah Jen, from the University of Kansas Bisexuality Studies, offers this insight: “It is hard to pinpoint bisexuality as media representation. Because it really operates between two polar extremes. There is the invisibility and there is the hyper-visibility. The invisibility refers to the fact that bisexual stories have not been told for very long. Language is really important. If you don’t have something to call yourself, how to you explain it to the people who are important to you. The hyper-visibility is the stereotype attached to bisexuality. And Chasing Amy brings up all of those things, including the idea that bisexuality is associated with promiscuity. People often think that bisexual people are confused because they are not being true to themselves. A lot of that is due to the social scripts laid before us. It’s the cultural context.”
Sav Rodgers’ film is, in a sense, the portrait of a filmmaker as a young transexual man whose own love story is interwoven with the fiction of Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy. The messiness of real life does intrude on the filmmaker’s journey but hopefully the determination exhibited by Sav Rodgers will be shared by the film’s viewers. The closing night at The Montalbán Theatre in Hollywood on Sunday, July 23rd, 7:00 PM. If you are not planning to attend the event, the film will be available on Outfest Streaming online July 24, 12:00 AM – July 20, 11:59 PM.
