Opening at one or two theaters this week is a slightly larger-than-marginal road picture called Finding North. It won't play for very long, make any top ten lists, or even gain a cult following among its core audience of homosexual indie film-goers. Frankly, I'm only mentioning it because it stands out so much for what it isn't. It isn't about phony cut-out indie character types. The leads, a suicidal gay man and a harried thritysomething outer-borough unemployed Italian girl with a weight problem, are truly believable. Either in the writing, casting, or directing, something went, to quote Bialystock & Broome, horribly right.

The premise is thin, and echoed recently in other indies like Dream With the Fishes and Dark Harbor. A man plans to kill himself once his partner falls to AIDS. A bored ex-bank teller, who lives with her buttinski parents, is just looking for something to add adventure to her life. Well, the two meet up, and "He" decides to take "She" on the road trip that was planned for them on cassette tapes by his dead lover. They communicate, meet wacky characters, don't communicate, reach understandings, cry, grieve, laugh, eat chicken fried steak, the whole nine yards. Again, no particularly new ground is being covered here, but when characters are believable (a rarity in indies) it is often enough to cover for a less-than-adventuresome narrative.

I realized I was more than just riding passively along with this slight film during one tangential scene. As a comic relief, a buff motel pool boy (!) is seen in various stages of undress and rigorous flexing, followed by a humorous reaction shot from the gay man. What I noticed was that I was able to anticipate and therefore more fully enjoy the joke when it came. In short, the film made me, the most red-blooded of American men, think like a gay. That sort of sympathy can only come from some level of good storytelling. It was the same phenomenon that came when I chuckled at Zhang Yimou's To Live over a Mao Zedong reference.

Is Tanya Wexler the next Zhang Yimou? Probably not, but if Finding North is any evidence of what she can do with a microbudget and a so-so script she did not write, I say we've got a good new indie filmmaker on our hands. And being the niece of Haskell Wexler doesn't hurt much either.