BFFs (Andrew Putschoegl, 2014): USA

Reviewed by Moa Hellenaes. Viewed at Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

This is my absolute favorite film at the festival. It is a comedy about two friends who will do something different together and we are all anxious how it will turn out. I recognized some of the actors in the film but not the main characters. The director’s name is Andrew Putschoegl and has done films like Holiday Road (2012) and Window Theory (2005).

Kat (Tara Karsian) and Samantha (Andrea Grano) celebrate Kat’s birthday with her family and friends. Kat is probably the one who enjoys it the least and she does not like getting gifts, she usually just throw the stuff away or give them to Samantha. One of the gifts Kat gets from her mother is a weekend at a couples workshop even though Kat is single. The two friends decide to use the gift certificate anyway for fun, since both of them are singles. They just see it as a free weekend.

At the retreat there are four couples and they all need to make different exercises during the weekend to fix their relationship. They pretend to be a lesbian couple who have many but small problems in their relationship. The other couples at the retreat and the people who work there are very nice but they are all kind of odd. Kat and Samantha do what it takes to fit in and not reveal that they are not even dating. They do the exercises, attend meetings and just enjoy a free weekend at a beautiful place. They have no idea what will happen next but when it finally does, they are even more clueless what to do about it.

I think they all did a great job with the acting. Especially Kat, I loved her face expressions and how she mediated what she felt. When she had to be serious but just wanted to burst out laughing. In this film they had a lot of background music, either music that they edited after shooting or when they actually played music in the film. It had a couple of montages and I thought the colors of the film reminded me of autumn. Red, brown and dark green colors.

Tara Karsian and Andrea Grano who play the main characters are the writers of this film. They are friends who have known each other for a long time and people always tell them that they behave like an old, married couple. Andrea started writing a script about the two of them and showed Tara, she loved the idea and they wrote the rest of the story together. They started the film in May 2012 and it was released now. They only shot for 15 days which is very fast. Tara revealed that they did the shooting at the place where Britney Spears went to rehab after shaving her head. Just a little fact that was fun for us to know.

This film is absolutely worth anyone’s time. It is a comedy with a serious background that will make you feel good. I laughed a lot and loved the Q&A after when I heard that they actually are that funny in real life too. I fell in love with both of them and wish they were my friends. Such a wonderful friendship that they hopefully will have forever.