Snapshots
By: Susan Brittain
Snapshots is alternately a sad film and a hopeful film. If you are a lesbian of a certain age, you will remember how difficult, if almost impossible, it was to come out to your family and friends. Most women didn’t work before the 1970’s, so they relied on their husbands for financial support. It was a scary prospect to think about being true to yourself. The possibility was very real that you could lose your family, your friends, your house, and any future you might have.
It is with this scenario in mind that Jan Miller Corran weaves a beautiful story of love between two women in the 1960”s, both of whom are married, one of whom is a free spirit and the other conflicted about her marriage vows and what it would mean to walk away from her marriage. What’s even more amazing, is that Snapshots is partially based on a true story. Let’s let Jan tell you about it, “The story is based on a revealing and surprising sentence that my mother said a few days before she died. At the age of 94, my mother lay dying and declared that she had been “visited” by Louise. Since I had no idea who Louise was, I asked her. She said, “She was the love of my life”. With a bit of digging, I discovered that my mother did have a best friend named Louise in the 1930’s. As I connected the dots, it became clear that my mother had a six-year relationship with her.
Here I was, a gay woman who didn’t formally “come out” until I was forty, yet, never told my mother, and then I find out that the love of her life was a woman. I sat on this story for 14 years before writing the screenplay. The rest of the story is creative license to weave a story around the reveal that I hope honored my mother…I wanted to create what I hoped was a beautiful and passionate relationship between two women in the restrictive setting of sixty years ago.”
The film opens with Piper Laurie (Older Rose) fishing off the dock near her home on Table Rock Lake. Her daughter, Patty (Brooke Adams), and granddaughter, Allison, (Emily Baldoni) are coming for the weekend. Patty drinks to much since the death of her husband and is still angry about the affair he had with his secretary. Allison is pregnant and doesn’t want to tell her husband as she’s hiding her own secret. Rose has a neighbor, played by Cathy DeBuono, who makes an appearance while Patty and Allison are there. This starts a conversation between Patty and Allison as to whether the neighbors a lesbian! It’s cute comic relief.
When Patty and Allison arrive, Allison hands her grandmother a pack of pictures she had developed from a roll of film they found in one of her old boxes. When Rose opens them, she is transported back to the 1960’s when she (Younger Rose, Shannon Collis) and her husband, Joe (Max Adler) met Louise (Emily Goss, Season of Love) and her husband, Zee (Brett Dier) one summer at the lake. The couples become fast friends, and Rosie (What Louise calls her.) soon realizes the Louise is not like most women she knows. They begin spending a lot of time together while the husbands are at work, and Rosie begins to have conflicting feelings about Louise. When Louise kisses her for the first time, Rosie pulls away and says it can never happen again, she’s married. But it’s apparent that both women have fallen for each other. One night during a storm that has made Joe and Zee late coming home, the women consummate their relationship in a beautiful and moving love scene. After this night, Rosie and Louise sneak away as often as they can to be with each other.
The film moves in and out from the 1960’s to present day where Allison and her mother can’t seem to understand each other, and Patty and Rose can’t seem to find common ground. Without giving both stories away, suffice it to say that things come to a head for Rosie and Louise when Louise asks Rosie to leave Joe and come away with her, and secrets begin to be revealed in present day. You’ll have to see the film to find out what happens in both stories.
To round out this review, I’m going to let Jan tell you what Snapshots has meant to her, “The joy of bringing Snapshots to festivals all over the world has been the receipt of letters from women of all ages who remember the fear of being out. Many young women told me the film gave them the courage to openly live their lives. Older women recounted the days they had to keep relationships secret and the prejudice they felt. The sad part was realizing that nearly six decades later, LGBTQ people are still living in fear and still experience discrimination.”
Tell me what you thought of the film in the comments.