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Go Fish (1994), Rose Troche’s feature-film debut, was mostly shot on weekends over a period of two years. Made for just $15,000, with an amateur cast largely comprising Troche’s friends and people she thought looked interesting around town, the movie’s stilted acting and the limited budget make it clear just how much of a labor of love it was. But that feeling strikes you differently than it does watching other low-budget movies made on a wing and a prayer, because there’s an uncommon urgency there — an almost tangible feeling that, if Troche did not make this movie about these people and their community, then who would, and when? 

Go Fish is as much a romantic comedy as it is a movie about a milieu, made up of young lesbians trying to figure out life and love in Chicago. When it’s in rom-com mode, the couple we’re rooting for is a sex-starved college student named Max (Guinevere Turner, Troche’s then-girlfriend who also co-wrote the movie) and an older, shyer woman named Ely (V.S. Brodie). Elsewhere, Troche is as much interested in the sense of warmth and community they find together together as using them and those around them like conduits for essayistic ruminations on lesbian identity, from its joys to internalized homophobia’s corrosiveness. The opening scene finds a professor character posing to her students how rarely the historical contributions of lesbians become common knowledge; another character, who sleeps with a man for the first time late-film, has a nightmare where all her friends question her sexuality’s validity after just one straight hookup.

Go Fish is sometimes awkward but generally charming in its rough-around-the-edges-ness. It is, perhaps, a better hangout movie than it is a romantic comedy. Turner and Brodie’s chemistry never quite comes through, though one could argue that its sense of tentativeness is fitting for a pair apprehensive about taking a romantic leap. (Not least because the Brodie character is still loosely tethered to a half-hearted long-distance relationship.) Troche went on to make some more well-received movies and work consistently in TV; she’s more recently said that she does not see the movie as a great one — and that it can be difficult to have your name associated with such a specific moment in time and not very much beyond that — but that she’s proud of it.

Troche’s “work of love” made for and by lesbian women both helped form lifelong friendships and, to her eye, remediate queer representation that had in broader culture been villainized by the AIDS epidemic. Its sense of purpose is still potent. Where most movies closely associated with the time and place in which they were made might feel more like a relic than something endurably dynamic, Go Fish’s vitality has a way of strengthening with time.