Guest Review by Dan Berman
With Tattoo: A Love Story, director and Writer Richard W. Bean takes you on a wonderful journey into the human heart and displays with great passion how looks don’t always matter; and how two completely different people can find what they need the most from each other.
The story begins when a student brings to class for show-and-tell, Virgil, a tattoo-adorned Harley biker. During the show-and-tell, Virgil enthusiastically makes mention to the 3rd grade class that they can draw tattoos on themselves with markers.
The next day the third grade teacher (Sara) discovers that the entire class has covered themselves with colored markers. Now, what's a third grade teacher to do but to seek out the person who started the whole mess? She encounters Virgil at a nearby video store. The painfully shy and quite Virgil unwittingly enters her confused, and mixed up life. It’s truly a fascinating film to behold because it shows conflict, fear, and anger in their confused relationship.
The film takes you on an emotional roller coaster through moments of happiness, sadness, anger and even depression. It opens the doors and invites you into their lives. The film, I admit, is not perfect by any means but it’s truly still worth a trip to the local video store. The film is truly presented from the heart and can be, by all means, put into the category of "date film".
Richard Bean is an award winning playwright and filmmaker who has worked on 15 feature films including Chasing Amy, The Opportunists, over 50 short fiction films, commercial films, and documentaries including Witches for Lifetime Television, and Raging Planet: Fire! For the Discovery Channel.
Tattoo: A Love Story is really what I like to call an "optional film" because, as is the case with any film but more so with this one, some will like it and some will not. It doesn't take on the issue of interpersonal relationships from all angles with real conviction; it simply hits the surface of a typical relationship and presents their experiences.
Tattoo: A Love Story made its New England Premiere at The Nantucket Film Festival.
Dan Berman
Tattoo: A Love Story (2002)
