`Costa Brava' Takes A Fresh Look At Lesbian Romance

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XX 1/2 "Costa Brava" ("Family Album"), with Marta Balletbo-Coll, Desi Del Valle, Joaquim Remolins Casas, Joseph Maria Brugues. Directed and produced by Balletbo-Coll, from a script by Balletbo-Coll and Ana Simon Cerezo. Grand Illusion. No rating. -----------------------------------------------------------------

This low-budget lesbian romance may be the first movie to announce how long it took to produce. The end credits begin with a declaration that "this film was shot in 14 days," and adds that all the 35mm stock was donated by film production companies.

This is not a surprise. The picture feels slapdash and improvised, and it frequently flies off the track. But it also has a freshness and a lack of pretension that works in its favor.

Mostly filmed in English, it's the story of a Barcelona tour guide named Anna (Marta Balletbo-Coll) who falls for Montserrat, an Israeli-born teacher (Desi Del Valle) who's new in town and frustrated with the bureaucracy of her school. They spend a lot of time talking about failed relationships, high-maintenance boyfriends, and certain personality types who rarely pan out.

"I'll never have an affair with an actress again," insists Anna, who once fell in love with a drama major. She's still carrying the torch.

Anna, who is working on a monologue about gay/straight relations called "Love Thy Neighbor" (she's hopefully sending a videotape to a San Francisco theater company), is openly homosexual. Montserrat is more skittish, insisting at first that she likes sleeping with men but prefers the company of her own sex.

Nevertheless, once their affair gets under way, Montserrat starts to worry that in her field - seismic engineering - lesbian couples are not accepted. She decides to put career before love.

"We have to talk," she tells Anna, then launches into a catalog of reasons why they can't be together. Anna takes it all in stride, brushing off her arguments.

Balletbo-Coll also directed, produced and co-wrote the script, which consistently stays ahead of the audience in scenes like this one. It never turns into the melodramatic breakup you're expecting.

She came up with the idea while attending Columbia University and making shorts. "Harlequin Exterminator," a coming-out film in which she introduced the Anna character, was her thesis film; it won a prize at the San Francisco International Film Festival five years ago.

Back in Barcelona, she directed another short, "Intrepidissima," about a tomboy forced into shopping for dresses with her hysterical mother. In 1993, it won another San Francisco festival prize.

Last year, "Costa Brava" won the audience awards for best picture at both the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.