Local heroine

Cheers for Foley's Home Before Dark

Film critics turn thick-skinned when independents start wailing, "You've got to see my film on screen! You've got to see it with an audience!" Sure, as if an ugly-duckling videotape would improve when blown up and unspooled before a live-and-kicking crowd. But then along comes the exception, Home Before Dark, an autobiographical first feature by Cambridge's Maureen Foley, produced by Michael Williams and David Collins of Boston's Scout Productions.

It's probably okay on tape, a well-acted little story that translates as a TV find for HBO or Movie-of-the-Week. I was fortunate enough to watch it last spring in a theatrical setting, a packed house at Boston University. And Home Before Dark ignites in 35mm.

There were mammoth laughs over Foley's shrewd satirical jabs at growing up Catholic in the 1960s and at the dynamics of playground friendships. And the emotions in the room were palpable -- wrenching sighs, wiped-away tears -- as Home Before Dark veered dark itself in its sad, affecting family story. As in Foley's real childhood, a car accident wiped out several siblings, left a home in psychological disarray, and forced a nice little girl to grow adult-responsible far too soon.

Still, there's hope at the end of Home Before Dark, and the BU audience responded to that, too. Cheers for a splendid, tender picture, among the best features ever made in the Boston area.

Since I saw it, Home Before Dark has been sneaked twice, at the Brattle's Festival of Women's Cinema and at the Nantucket Film Festival, where it was the prestigious closing-night offering. What's more, Foley's movie has passed the crucial test for a first film, a rave review in Variety: "Modest coming-of-age film packs a wallop . . . "

Major players (Sony Classics, Fox Searchlight) are calling persistently. The gutsy Scout producers have refused to mail out cassettes, insisting that, yes, potential distributors see Home Before Dark on a screen and, it's hoped, with real people in the seats.

Meanwhile, I met with Foley for a lentil-soup Cambridge lunch. A veteran teacher of screenwriting at Harvard University's Extension School, she wrote Home Before Dark with no thought of directing. But then she was told, "It's your story. Why don't you do it yourself?" So she did, and her husband, Rob Laubacher, a research associate at MIT's Sloan School, served as executive producer.

A first film needs at least one bankable star; Home Before Dark attracted, as a repressively mannerly aunt, Katharine Ross, the legendary star of The Graduate and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. "She's married to Sam Elliott, has an 11-year-old daughter, and wanted to be a mother for a while," Foley explains. "She's not upset not to be working. She gets offered plenty of projects."

A Home Before Dark script was sent to Ross in California on a Friday. By Monday she had signed on.

Foley continues, "If you haven't directed before, you might want your highest-profile actor to arrive late in the shooting schedule. Katharine insisted, `I want to be there the first day. I'm doing you a big favor. It'll help get things together.' She was right: Katharine's warm and cooperative, a very good collaborator, and her presence brought everyone to their highest level."

Foley's opening day as a movie director? "Driving to the Newton set at 6 a.m., and seeing about 40 cars, and equipment, and knowing Katharine was going to be there, I wondered if I'd made the biggest mistake of my life. Should I turn around and drive home?"

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Over at the MFA, If Only I Were an Indian . . . (screens July 31 and August 1, 2, 3, 9, and 14) is a documentary you'll enjoy a lot, or only a little -- it depends totally on your sensibility. Seekers and pathfinders, Iron John fans, and new-ager utopians will discover an articulate Meaning-of-Life response to the failures of the urban world. Cynics and ironists may balk, even snicker, at the same earnest images. Feminists certainly will be wary.

Canadian John Paskievich has fashioned a typical National Film Board cross-cultural documentary, flying three Manitoba-based native elders, two Cree and an Ojibwa, to Czechoslovakia (it's 1991, pre-split) to meet with a group of Czechs who have formed an Indian tribe. They live in tents, dress in loincloths and moccasins, and are dead serious about the 19th-century Native American life.

It's all so weird, but there are no laughs. The three Native Americans are won over by the sincerity of the Czech Indian utopia, and so is documentarian Paskievich.

I'm one of those skeptics, however, and I kept wondering why there are no scenes showing any interchange between the male and female Czech Indians, even the married couples. Braves and squaws are photographed, and seem to exist, in separate provinces. Strange, even as the women explain how glad they are to be recovering their femininity through squaw tasks: cooking in the ground, papoose rearing, and sitting by while the bare-chested warriors roughhouse.

There is one chortle: a brave recalls his spiritual trek to Lakota country in South Dakota, where he was laughed at because "Czechoslovakia" is close to a Lakota Indian idiom for "greasing one's penis."