Seeking Dolly Parton

"Seeking Dolly Parton" opens promisingly enough as our two soon-to-be-lovers meet on a train platform.

Cerina (Anya Monzikova) is a pretty, Reese Witherspoon-ish blond who has only been in relationships with men. Charlie (Kacey Barnfield) is a beautiful Kate Beckinsale-esque brunette Brit who has only loved women. It's a brief but potent scene that ends (almost) with one asking the other, "Do you want to have my baby?"

In the VERY next scene, the two women are already living together, feeding into that lesbians-move-in-the-next-day-and-mate-for-life stereotype. It is funny, until you realize that a lot of the film feels culled from a third-party-with-a-penis peeping tom a relationship between two women. And my suspicions, that the film was written and directed by a man (Michael Worth), were validated in the closing credits. More on that later.

So guess what Cerina and Charlie decide to do almost immediately? If you said 'have a child,' you get points. Lately, there seems to be an entire subgenre of LGBT films emerging, the gay sperm donor dramedy. Problem is it's already become predictable. "Seeking Dolly Parton" tries to provide some deviation from this new-but-already-tired-tale but ends up inverting the film's focus. More on that later as well.

So, our couple asks their friend Jon (Raffaello Degruttola), who is living with his grandmother and struggling with his sexuality (and he's in his mid-to-late 30s, I'm guessing) to be their baby-daddy but he gets cold feet.

Cerina decides that her ex, Josh (Michael Worth, hmmm, name look familiar) would be the perfect choice (especially since they seem to have run out of options) and, although Charlie is terribly apprehensive, she goes along with it. Josh soon moves into their home and the complications pile up.

Of course Josh, who is a photographer, butts heads with Charlie, who happens to be an artist. One of the most moving scenes has Charlie sharing memories of her father.

The film has a few too many awkward scenes--not people behaving awkwardly but the scenes playing awkwardly--when they should have been exciting (like the dinner party sequence) and I found the guitar score to be distracting in places, but I was also engaged in the narrative. And the climax is wonderful yet so contrived and predictable (I know, I felt schizophrenic during a lot of this movie).

Degruttola's performance is problematic. I never believed this character was struggling with an attraction to men. It felt more like the actor was uncomfortable with portraying a man who had an attraction towards other men. Even the scenes with his grandmother felt forced.

Barnfield is charming and deeply affecting. She anchors the film and gives it gravitas even when her character is called on to know every euphemism for male masturbation--another example of how glaring the fact that the film was written by a man and not a gay woman is. Why would a lesbian even care?

Worth is an interesting actor, more than writer. He's brooding and intense. And he does show directorial promise. I was struck by the love and care he puts into each frame and how he enjoys experimenting with the camera.

His Josh turns out to be a lot deeper than we we're led to initially believe and, in the end, the film becomes more about Josh and less about the ladies. It's a deceptive trick, but we end up more invested in his character and that's a bit problematic in a film that purports to be a romantic comedy about two women.