Bastard Film Review: "RENO FINDS HER MOM" Reviewed by Janine Baer (growinginthedark@comcast.net) (This review appeared in the Winter 1999 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.) If you are an adoptee who has experienced frustration in a search, you will love this video of (Karen) Reno, who goes by her last name. An expressive New York comic performer and 40-plus-year-old adoptee, Reno takes us along as she pursues every avenue for finding her birth mother and, by extension, her own ethnic heritage. This humorous but serious documentary, "Reno Finds Her Mom," first aired on HBO in 1998. Is she Jewish? Catholic? Puerto Rican? Dominican? Reno is filmed by friends as she talks with members of each of these cultural groups on the streets of New York City, explaining to strangers that she was abandoned as a baby and doesnšt know her ethnic identity. The film cuts back and forth between searching and comic segments, one of which shows Reno dressed as a detective tracking the progress of her own real search. Though over 90 minutes long, "Reno Finds Her Mom," like Reno herself, constantly keeps moving. Early in the film, Reno explains why she decided to search for her birth mother. After performing one of her shows in San Francisco, she was approached by a gutsy psychotherapist who informed Reno that she had adult attention deficit disorder, needed to treat it with drugs, and needed to find her birth mother. If you donšt know where you came from, said the therapist, you canšt know where youšre going. As odd as some of this sounded to her at the time, Reno took the advice about searching. When publishing the "Chain of Life" newsletter, I sometimes wished I could inject humor into its serious pages but I never did make the transition. Reno, like Bastard Nation, has succeeded at tempering her frustration and anger with humor to bring levity to this otherwise intense pursuit. For example, Reno uses the metaphor of there being an elephant in the living room to convey that her family had tried to ignore something REALLY BIG, including how different Reno was from the rest of them. The elephant metaphor has been used before in descriptions of adoption and other contexts of denial, but never humorously. In "Reno Finds Her Mom" a cartoon-like drawing of an elephant reappears throughout the film like a stage prop. At one point, Reno's friend comedian Lily Tomlin walks through a door on the side of this elephant drawing. These gals know how to have fun! "Reno Finds Her Mom" captures an adoptee's rage at being deprived of a birth certificate, birth family, ethnic identity, and any reflection or validation of her unique characteristics. In one scene, Reno finally loses the professional composure she had maintained when an adoption agency administrator refuses to divulge the administrator's own name. In this absurd world, not only is Reno forbidden from learning her birth mother's name, she can't even be trusted with the name of the agency official! It is too much, and the camera is there. Reno moves through this frustration like all the others. She moves on, hiring private detectives and, finally, in desperation, paying cash to a middle-woman who will relay it to a professional searcher of unknown identity to solve the mystery once and for all. Reno does meet her birth mother, off camera, and learns her true ethnic heritage. Her birth mother had misled the adoption agency about Reno's ethnic identity to facilitate her baby's placement in the racist culture of the 1950s. Therefore, the ethnic information in the adoption papers was not accurate. This film is full of 'bastard moments' realizations that adoptees are treated differently in flashbacks to Reno's childhood and during her search. It lacks adoption movement jargon or pretense. I am grateful to Reno for this film; its raw emotion speaks for many of us. "Reno Finds Her Mom" should be shown at adoption conferences everywhere rage is welcome. It can be seen in your home for $28. ($25 + $3 for shipping and handling) if you send a check to The Reno Co., 38 N. Moore St., New York, NY 10013; attention: Hannah Cohen. (This review appeared in the Winter 1999 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.) Copyright 1999 Janine Baer |