Revisiting a format made popular by Depression-era films such as Three on a Match, Stephanie Rothman’s independent feature follows three young, single women as they make their way in the Big City – here, the tie-dyed Los Angeles of the 1970s, where a spirit of personal liberation and new possibilities is in the air. Honey (Sarah Kennedy) is a farmfresh newcomer who arrives in the city with no money and no job, who finds a job as a paid companion to a lonely millionaire. Denise (Laurie Rose) is an artist who paints billboards for a living and gets involved with a street musician with a dark secret. Jill (Lynne Guthrie) is a law student who takes a job as a cocktail waitress and finds herself involved with a gangland enforcer. With humor and irony, Rothman elegantly undermines the voyeuristic conventions of the exploitation film genre while exploring themes of female friendship, ambition, and sexuality.
“I packaged it as I was hired to do as a pretty, sexy, graphically strong (I hope), comic film. Today film scholars call this Second Wave Exploitation, but when I made it it was known as a low-budget exploitation film that had to be more transgressive than major studio films to compete. Even then, to my surprise and pleasure, there were a few scholars and reviewers who saw beyond those trappings to its core message. For me it has always been a film about the quest for identity that we are all on when we are young. It is a serious film about three underemployed young women whom no one takes seriously – enough. By the film’s end, they have learned such life lessons as: an open heart can lead to the warmth of friendship; the impermanence of love and the pain of loss; desire for the wrong man is not good for one’s ethics or ambitions; and most surprising of all, learning how to be a capitalist can lead to becoming a utopian socialist.” (Stephanie Rothman)

Dave Kehr