"Tokyo Cowboy" A film review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL September 9, 1995 The Pride Film Festival will be coming up in Tampa next month and although I won't be there to experience it, I have had the opportunity to preview a number of the films that will be screened at the Festival. I thought I'd get a head start on it by reviewing one of them this morning, a Canadian charmer called "Tokyo Cowboy" that will play at the Festival on Wednesday, October 4. This 1994 film, made in British Columbia, is the first feature film by director Kathy Garneau. Its comedic and dramatic effects are the result of a variety of situations in which there are various kinds of culture clashes: Japanese/Canadian, gay/straight, cowboy/non-cowboy to name the major ones. The title character is a young Japanese man named No Ogawa who lives and works in Tokyo but whose fantasy life is filled with cowboys, fuelled by old Hollywood western movies he watches on his VCR and memorizes the dialogue from. When he is fired from his job as a cook because he's pretending to use his spatula as a six gun and flips the food on the floor, he decides it time to head out for cowboy country for real. One of his treasured objects is a photograph of a cowgirl on a horse. Her name is Kathy Beatty and she had been his pen pal from Canada when they were kids. He sets out to find her and become her cowboy. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Canadian west, Kathy Beatty has grown up, sold her horse, gone to art school in Vancouver and returned to the small ranching community where she grew up. This apprehensive homecoming is only becauseher partner, Shelley, has a teaching job there. Terrified of what will happen should anyone in this small town discover that they are dykes, she is reclusive and ill tempered, and refuses to have anything but the curtest interactions with her mother. When she gets a letter from No Ogawa saying he's coming, Shelley is more interested in it than she is and teases Kathy for having had this long correspondence with a man who clearly still harbors fond feelings about her. Shelley has her own problems with men who have romantic feelings toward her, in particular the local postman, Bob. When No arrives on Mrs. Beatty's doorstep dressed in cowboy clothes but walking and talking like the very model of the polite Japanese he is, she takes him in, harboring fantasies of her own that he might be just the one to make daughter Kathy develop an interest in men. When he finally visits Kathy and Shelley, they are very kind to him and enjoy his company, but he's crushed to learn that Kathy is no longer a cowgirl and has no interest in helping him become a cowboy. And he really finds Shelly to be more like the girl in the saloon in his fantasy than Kathy. Sitting in the local bar bemoaning their respective disappointments, Bob and No join forces. Bob agrees to be No's teacher in his "Five Step Method for Becoming an Cowboy" --walk like a cowboy, talk like a cowboy, ride like one, shoot like one, and lasso yourself a gal. As No progresses on his five steps, he sees himself always as the hero in an old Western with his new Canadian friends in various supporting roles. Needless to say, achieving these five steps is not exactly easy for No, especially the fifth, given the gal he's set his sights on. Kathy and Shelly's relationship, meanwhile, is becoming strained by Kathy's reclusiveness. Finally they throw a party and invite all of Kathy's old friends--a group that includes its share of racial bigots and homophobes. Needless to say this precipitates a whole array of crises of various sorts, but I won't go into the details further other than to say that it's a comedy so it will turn out ok in the end (except, perhaps, for poor old Bob). What's fun about this film are the likeable characters, the good-natured spoofing of cultural differences, and the funny ideas about the West that No has picked up from all those years of movie going. It's treatment of the issue of coming out to old friends and family is also very deftly handled, I thought, making its point clearly but without making that the central focus of the film. "Tokyo Cowboy" will definitely be a crowd pleaser at the Pride Film Festival at the Tampa Theater on October 4. Mark you calendars. For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film.