Rules of the Road
MFF's '91's Grand Prix winner Su Friedrich's (Sink or Swmi) latest film is a slyly subversive take on dominant male car culture and the difficulty of carving out a feminine or lesbian space within its over-arching discourse. Friedrich combines footage of a 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser, shared by a lesbian couple, with a voiceover tale of their relationship's history. This questioning of social space and its conventional heterosexual coordinates is best summed up by the weird role-playing ambiguity of Prince's 'If I was Your Girlfriend', heard as the penultimate song in Friedrich's textually overripe crypto-icomc dissection of guy-car culture.