Late Bloomers

Julie & Gretchen Dyer's Late Bloomers (the sisters co-wrote and -directed), which appeared in last year's International Festival of Woman's Cinema and this year's Gay and Lesbian Film and Video Festival, is less a film about lesbians than it is about two women who happen to fall in love. Connie Nelson's Dinah Groshardt is an asexual high-school math teacher who tells her students, "Love is elusive, mathematics is available." Dee Hennigan's Carly Lumpkin is a frumpy school secretary and housewife. Carly thinks Dinah is having an affair with her husband (a co-worker of Dinah's in the math department). When they sort that out, the two begin a tentative friendship that sees Dinah teaching the clumsy Carly how to play basketball.

Neither Dinah nor Carly is attractive in the way characters from The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love or Go Fish are. These are older, mostly nerdy women figuring things out for the first time. And their affair takes on the giddiness of adolescent love: they play footsie during faculty meetings and make out in Dinah's car in the school parking lot.

Naturally the parents find out, and in dealing with this unexpected love between two female faculty members, the staid suburban community of Eleanor B. Roosevelt High School doesn't exactly rise to the occasion. Nevertheless, Late Bloomers is uplifting throughout, especially as Dinah and Carly resolve their ostracization from the community. At the Brattle Theatre, September 5 through 11.

-- Susan Ryan-Vollmar