When I first watched “Go Fish,” Rose Troche’s 1994 film, it was in the middle of lockdown during 2020. I was watching at least three movies a day, using my quarantine to educate myself on as many films as possible. In that very isolating time, Troche’s film felt like a shock to the system. To this day, it is unlike any other film I have seen. An independent, Chicago-based film circling around a lesbian friend group, “Go Fish” showed me things onscreen I had never considered, or been able to see, about myself.
“Go Fish” depicts not only a sweet lesbian romance at its center, but also a diverse range of lesbian friends. It depicts our community in a way I have never seen since. While it offers a fun romance that its audience desperately needed at the time, the film also takes on different issues within the lesbian community. The outcome is a moving, strikingly realistic, and grounded portrayal of a community, which continues to offer audiences today a slice of representation we are still so often hungry for.
In my conversation with Guinevere Turner, who plays the main character Max in the film and is also the screenwriter, she reflects on her film that helped create a culture shift not only in Queer filmmaking, but in independent filmmaking and beyond.
“The year was 1992…” she set the scene for me. She had just moved to Wicker Park, a neighborhood in Chicago. As an AIDS and Queer activist, she met her then-girlfriend Rose Troche, who had just graduated from film school. One night, while sitting at a bar (she can’t remember — was it Berlin, The Closet, or Big Chicks?), they were discussing a scene from the 1991 film “Switch.”
“There’s a scene in this movie where she goes to a lesbian bar, and it’s a piano bar. There’s framed photos of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo on the walls, and they’re slow dancing. Half of them have suits on. They’re doing a very binary butch-femme thing. And we’re like, ‘What the f is this bar?’ This bar doesn’t exist. This whole vibe doesn’t exist.” In their anger, Turner and Troche realized that they needed to do something about the representation issue that this film presented.
“Even the movies we loved, like “Desert Hearts,” “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing” they almost always were isolated women trying to figure out their sexuality or struggling in some way. None of them had a real community of women, and it didn’t reflect our lives. We’re just, you know, fighting with each other, hooking up with each other, worried about money, all these things. So we were like, ‘let’s make a film.’”
They began with a short film. They would shoot on the weekends with friends who went to film school in the city so they could use the school’s gear for free. She and Troche broke up in the middle of this process, resulting in a tumultuous time for the film. But for the sake of the project — and the fact that their apartment was already an established setting — they decided to keep shooting and to turn it into a feature.
“We really didn’t have even close to the expectations that it was going to do what it did in terms of getting into the Sundance Film Festival. We hoped we might get into some Queer festivals, but we didn’t know we would be legitimized in this sort of mainstream indie way. And then got distribution. Then we spent the next year traveling all over the world with, you know, on a balcony in Madrid, but with like two dollars in our pocket. The distributor flew us around to do press and for the various distributors in different countries. But it was an incredible experience. And wonderfully, we were forced to become friends again as we were just like, okay, we’re the only two people having this experience, and it’s so incredible.”
I was curious about the community aspect of making a film like this — not only with what was depicted onscreen, but also behind the camera. They made the film with friends for very little money and were surrounded by Queer people during the process.
“It was pretty great. I mean, once Rose and I were not speaking to each other, but still working on a movie together, it was a little stressful. I had to do a sex scene with V. S–, who plays Ely in the movie, and she was and still is one of my best friends, but not in a sexual way at all. So it was just super awkward because my girlfriend was directing and her girlfriend was holding the boom. There’s a shot toward the end of that scene where I just laugh. That’s me just genuinely being like, ‘What is this? This is weird.’ Like, I would almost rather do this with a stranger than with my good friend. We’re like, so in it to win it for the visibility and for sexiness, in the lesbian world and in a lesbian film.”
Making a film like this, Turner says, wouldn’t be possible today. They made it “in such earnest,” without thinking about their careers or money. “Look at how much we meant it, look at how uncorrupt we were.”
One of the many things I find so impressive about the film is how it is so joyful and celebratory of being a lesbian while also posing some difficult questions within the community. A scene that was burned into my brain when I first saw it was when one of the characters is kidnapped by her friends after she sleeps with a man and, in an almost experimental scene, is interrogated by her community about her gender identity. Turner discusses how she had felt that same sort of judgment in real life because of how she would dress or present herself.
“I wanted to find a way to discuss that. And to be honest, I am not sure I would have been so adamant about putting that whole sequence in the movie if I had known how mainstream it was going to be. Because we got a lot of questions from journalists like, ‘Is this a problem in the lesbian community?’ And we’re like, no, we’re not talking to you.”
Turner was interested in how people can be very rigid about what the lesbian identity can be, and the double standard when it comes to gay men. After she wrote the scene, some people working on the film wanted to quit over it. Troche was hesitant, but willing to explore the topic. These reactions made Turner all the more motivated to shoot the scene. “I was like, no, this proves a point. What is this fear? Why is the lesbian identity not ironclad enough for us to talk about this? Like, this happens.” Since the film’s release, many people have approached Turner about the scene, thanking her for depicting something that had also happened to them.
“It’s the sort of thing that people say in screenwriting and in writing in general, that somehow specificity becomes universal. It’s sort of like a riddle that people say that sometimes I think, ‘What are you talking about?’ But I’m like, yeah, we got so deep that what she was identifying with was just a lesbianness that isn’t necessarily articulatable… that she just felt seen. That was amazing. I continue to be amazed that a new generation watches it, thinks about it, loves it, and identifies with it because, among many things, it’s so analog.”
Turner is right — audiences are still discovering this film. It was waiting for me in 2020 to blow my world open, and now “Go Fish” will be playing at the second year of Sapphopalooza at the Music Box Theatre, and Turner appearing for a post-film Q&A. I will be there, along with my girlfriend, who has never seen the film. I am excited to show it to her, and for the rest of the audience who may be first-time viewers.
To gather into one place, among a primarily sapphic audience, and experience this work onscreen will feel very special. It is a unique and rare experience to feel so represented onscreen while being surrounded by your own community at the same time. This is the beautiful thing about film, and specifically about going to see films in the theater. “Go Fish,” thirty-two years later, still feels like a rarity. It continues to fill that representative gap we as Queer people feel, while still awakening new conversations with new audiences. I hope to see you there.
