Liz In September

By: Amos Lassen

Filmmaker Fina Torres introduces us to Liz, a party girl and a girl who likes other girls. Every year she celebrates her birthday with her friends at a Caribbean beach retreat but this year is different. She doesn't feel well but neither does she want anyone to take pity on her. She hides the fact that she has a terminal illness. When a new young woman, an outsider arrives, Liz's friends dare her to seduce her but, Eva, the new girl is deeply hurt because of the recent death of her young son and also because nothing turns out as she expected it to do. Liz is well aware of several truths in her life- she has known since she was a child that she is gay and that beauty is power but most of all she knows that she will never be a victim. She is determined to make the best of the time she has in this world. Then she meets Eva whose son died of cancer and she feels both pain and guilt about his death. This hurts her relationship with her husband and they are both experiencing a sense of isolation.

Eva decides to take a vacation alone but her car broke down and she has been left stranded on the road. She manages to get to Margot's Inn where she meets Liz and her friends. Liz has such self-assurance that she bets the others that she can seduce the straight newcomer. Against all odds, the encounter between these two opposite women changes their lives, setting new perspectives where love, life, and death, away from any morals, play as simple steps of nature.

"Liz in September" is based on "Last Summer at Bluefish Cove" by Jane Chambers. It became an important work of lesbian-themed theater in the United States after its successful premiere in Los Angeles in 1981.

Eva meets with Liz and her friends on a Caribbean beach- one of those places where nature and tropical light illuminate life with an intensity that does not support a lackluster everyday life as wife. As Liz and Eva together deal with Liz's disease, Eva's memory of the death of a son, gives an existential depth to her own sexual discovery.

We see a wonderful play on light (happiness) and darkness (death) here. With white symbolizing purity we think of the purity of marriage and of physical and sexual health while darkness here is associated with the death of Eva's son and Liz's illness. There is also something here reminiscent of the films of Terrence Mallick with the way voices speak simply. Yet this is by no means a simple story.