Tales of the City is a film about which one has to impose oneself into a different mindset in order to write. This adaptation of Armistead Maupin's classic novel adopts a lampoon of chronicling story yarns, taking place in a progressive neighborhood in San Francisco where the least accepted felt in the time in which the film takes place was a place wherein they could live freely amongst their own, and the otherwise accepted were the ones who are subject to adjustment. At the same time it involves elements that are larger than life, its structure creates an atmosphere that is so close to life that it is larger than film.
It starts as the sumptuously sexy Laura Linney plays a naïve girl from the Midwest seeking a change in her life, impulsively to San Francisco, soon finding herself living in a neighborhood where things are out of control only because they are the natural way of the world unlike the perception of a reticent, sheltered American woman. Her life knots with her various neighbors and an incidental mass of quaint, intriguing, odd, bizarre, perfectly normal characters. It's an upturned impression of San Francisco in the 1970's, exploring what the rest of the world saw as "alternative lifestyles" and "underground culture," and what they saw of themselves. This includes a host of wonderfully entertaining performances, especially by the endlessly charming Parker Posey.
For anyone willing open their mind to the exploration of gays, casual drug users, free thinkers, different sorts of mysterious, nonconformist people, and the repressed, Tales of the City is a striking portrait with a picturesque environment, and the comings and goings in the lives of the multitude of characters strike a chord with us that love is as unpredictable as everything else, and that there always very well may be fathoms of new discovery and progression in our existence.
It starts as the sumptuously sexy Laura Linney plays a naïve girl from the Midwest seeking a change in her life, impulsively to San Francisco, soon finding herself living in a neighborhood where things are out of control only because they are the natural way of the world unlike the perception of a reticent, sheltered American woman. Her life knots with her various neighbors and an incidental mass of quaint, intriguing, odd, bizarre, perfectly normal characters. It's an upturned impression of San Francisco in the 1970's, exploring what the rest of the world saw as "alternative lifestyles" and "underground culture," and what they saw of themselves. This includes a host of wonderfully entertaining performances, especially by the endlessly charming Parker Posey.
For anyone willing open their mind to the exploration of gays, casual drug users, free thinkers, different sorts of mysterious, nonconformist people, and the repressed, Tales of the City is a striking portrait with a picturesque environment, and the comings and goings in the lives of the multitude of characters strike a chord with us that love is as unpredictable as everything else, and that there always very well may be fathoms of new discovery and progression in our existence.