Plot
It is spring. Randy Dean is a high school senior with poor grades, only one school friend (Frank, a gay Latino), secret cigarette and marijuana habits and a cashier’s job at a gas station with Regina. She is pursuing a dead-end relationship with Wendy, a married woman who drops by the gas station when it pleases her. This often entails a follow-up visit from her jealous husband, Ali, who roughs Randy up and orders her to stay away from Wendy.
One day Evie Roy stops in a pristine Range Rover, unsure if her tires need air. Randy recognizes her from school and talks to her for the first time. Evie is an only child living with her well-off, cultured mother, Evelyn, who has a difficult relationship with her (re-married) husband. Randy and Evie start passing notes in school and hanging out with each other, although Evie does not reveal this to her cliquish friends. They hang out in meadows, trading music (opera and Mozart from Evie, punk rock from Randy) and talking. At the gas station, Randy rejects an angry Wendy, claiming she has a new girlfriend, Evie.
Evie breaks up with her boyfriend after he complains of her distant attitude towards him. Later, apparently on a spur of the moment, she lends Randy a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which Randy starts to devour.
Inviting Evie to her family’s small house for dinner, Randy reveals to her that she has lived with her lesbian aunt Rebecca and Rebecca's lover Vicky since Randy's mother abandoned her to devote all her time to an Operation Rescue-like group. On the front steps of Rebecca's house, they kiss for the first time. Evie records it in her diary later, apparently wondering what it all means.
Randy and Evie experiment with how “out” they can be as lesbians, nervously holding hands at a local diner. Remembering Randy’s warning of how intolerant the town can be, Evie nevertheless breaks the news to her three closest friends. One girl is supportive (if confused), but the other two are hostile to the idea: one of them says, “God, Evie, if you were gonna turn gay you think you could at least choose someone who’s pretty.”
Randy’s grades continue to plummet and the school warns her she will not graduate; Randy hides this information from Rebecca. When Evie’s mother leaves on a business trip, the girls take the opportunity to cook a huge meal, indulging in wine and marijuana. That night, they make love, then fall asleep in Evie’s mother’s bed.
The next morning, Evelyn returns prematurely. The kitchen is a mess and used wine glasses are scattered about. Furiously searching the upstairs, she discovers the girls but does not recognize Randy as a girl until she runs past her on her way out.
Meanwhile, Rebecca has learned that Randy will not be graduating high school, and she, Vicky and her ex-girlfriend Lena go to Frank’s house, where Randy had told them she would be staying the night. Rebecca threatens Frank until, panicked, he turns over Evie’s phone number. Rebecca calls, but Evie and Randy have already absconded and she is left talking to a furious Evelyn.
Evie and Randy, crying, scared and accusatory, take refuge in a motel. Randy finally calls Wendy, who comes out, pays for the room and tries to comfort the girls. Ali sees her car in the parking lot, however, and comes bursting in, eventually attracting Evelyn, Rebecca, Vicky, Lena, Frank, and Evie’s three friends, who were driving past reading aloud from Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (apparently still processing Evie’s news). The movie ends with Randy and Evie kissing and hugging in the open motel room doorway while everyone else argues in the background at top volume.
Asked if she was aware how close the final shot was to a classic Hollywood romantic comedy, Maggenti said,
| “ | I never thought of that but a lot of people have mentioned to me that the shot looks like a marriage portrait… That final shot is actually a very ambivalent shot, leaving them at the threshold of adulthood, a relationship, their families, everything. | ” |
Read more about this topic: The Incredibly True Adventure Of Two Girls In Love
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
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“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
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