Home-Made Melodrama
Using the narrative devices of melodrama (both ironically and to magnify the emotional emphasis) ‘Home-Made Melodrama’ follows the struggles of three women whose search for harmony takes them through pressures and contradictions, jealousies and insecurities. The intense, claustrophobic nature of their relationship is looked back on in scenes with the women together two years later which are cut into the melodrama as a commentary.
The film doesn't try to idealise lesbian relationships but is an attempt to confront honestly the problems of monogamy and non-monogamy.
– Jacqui Duckworth
The film's appeal is surprisingly broad, despite rough edges created by a shoestring budget… There are times when the melodrama is very overblown and the mood is terribly solemn, but the film doesn't proselytize and it does, quite successfully, attempt something very difficult: to show in close-up a lesbian relationship without being voyeuristic.
– Helen MacKintosh, City Limits
We're both drawn into this soap operatic story of three youngish London women (who predictably get into an awful triangle) and pulled away again. (By the lengthy – and claustrophobic – interior sequences, by the "women's own" documentary-style recollections of their relationships, and by an over-the-top scenario, which... somehow... seems... true.
– Mandy Merck, Spare Rib
Description source: Circles Catalogue (circa 1983). Compiled by Helen MacKintosh and Margaret Gillan. Edited by Felicity Sparrow.
