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Jennifer Montgomery has been making what many deem "personal films" for the last decade. Her first 16mm feature-length work, Art for Teachers of Children ( 1995), played widely in the United States and abroad. A fictionalized autobiographical film, it explores an affair between a female prep school student and the male school counselor who takes nude photographs of her. Montgomery's other work includes short super-8 films such as Home Avenue ( 1989), Age 12: Love with a Little L ( 1990) and I, A Lamb (1992), as well as the video Poet in the Ring (1992). Her most recent film, Troika (1998), premiered at the New Festival of Lesbian and Gay Film in New York City last June, and has since played at such venues as New York City's Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Cinemateque, Los Angeles Film Forum, Pasadena Art Center, Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo, the Milwaukee Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and various colleges and universities.
A film about sex and power, Troika is composed of two narratives woven together. One is an adaptation-or, rather, a reenactment-of an interview by journalist Jennifer Gould with right-wing Russian demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky that was conducted in August 1994 and published in Playboy in March 1995. The interview takes place on a boat traveling down the Volga River (Montgomery actually shot the reenactment in Connecticut) during Zhirinovsky's campaign for President. A young woman, Masha, translates the conversation between Gould and Zhirinovsky; the dialogue therefore takes place in both English and Russian, with some subtitles for the conversation not translated aloud. Initially they discuss politics, but Zhirinovsky steers the conversation into seedier waters, at one point suggesting that the women have sex with his henchmen while he watches. The other narrative is a story of two women, Jennifer and Z, who are in the process of dissolving their relationship. Things begin going downhill as they prepare to go to Russia and continue to fizzle as they are traveling. The same actress plays Jennifer in both stories, but while she essentially reads the words of Gould in the interview scenes, in the other narrative she is a fictional character.
These separate narratives are conjoined in a number of ways. Jennifer and the translator appear in both story spaces....