Contemplative and gorgeous, The Royal Road is an innovative, cinematic feature shot on 16mm film. Deceptively simple California urban landscapes become the framework for the film's lyrically written voiceover: an expression of yearning butch lesbian desire and candid self-reflection interspersed with a stream-of-consciousness array of non-fiction tangents including an exploration of El Camino Real (the original road connecting California's Missions during the era of Spanish and Mexican rule), a reflection on the life story of Casanova, a capsule history of the Mexican-American War and a defense of nostalgia. The film's centerpiece is a brilliant five-minute lecture on nostalgia and socialism by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner. The Royal Road combines rigorous historical research with lyrically written personal monologue and relates these seemingly disparate stories from an intimate, colloquial perspective to tell a one-of-a-kind California tale. Shot on 16mm film and contemplatively crafted of long takes, the film is also suffused with a passionate philosophical belief in the significance of the analog (vs. the digital) image.
