Glamour Girls with Guns.

While some of the more stuffy mature audience members were not amused by Angela Robinson's feature film, D.E.B.S, at the Sundance Film Festival 2004, the film is garnering the kind of buzz her short film of the same title did at Sundance Film Festival 2003.

"I've been coming to Sundance for four years and this is my second time with a film," Robinson told the Lesbian News in between all of her social engagements during the Festival. "It's hard when you're here with a film, you're kind of in your own bizarro bubble."

Set in an underground academy known only as D.E.B.S, this is the place where girls wear hip-hop MTV-style clothing while saving the world.

Within the D.E.B. universe there are the four girls of the Academy's "A" squad, who, along with their colleagues, have given up their rights to protect their county and still look oh, so pretty. The girls were picked based on a diagnostic test hidden within their S.A.T. tests. A test the government has created in order to find girls who are good liars and killers so they can be good spies for the powers that be.

The idea for the story germinated in Johnson when she met this girl once in New York. "She told me this tall tale about how she was on the run from the CIA and there was a test, actually in the P.S.A.T. and I kind of believed her. I found out later she was a pathological liar but the idea stuck with me. I made a little, comic out of it." The comic was such a success it eventually turned into a short film.

In the film, Amy (Sara Foster) is the straight A student with the distinction of being the only person ever to get a perfect score on the covert test. Although Amy is the brain of the gang, Max (Meagan Good) is the leader of the crew while Domique (Devon Aoki) is the promiscuous chain-smoker and Janet (Jill Ritchie) is the baby of the bunch who has not earned her pre-graduation stripes.

"It was very tongue-in-cheek; definitely I was playing with the Charlie s Angels model of having very beautiful girls kind of occupy this kind of empowered space, but I kind of feel that the movie kind of transcends that."

Part of that transcending comes with clearly defined characters in the film. Although they are in the same group, their personalities are distinct as their hairstyles when it comes to relationships.

"I think my goal was to make a new brand of superheroes, to have really empowered girls," said Johnson before a woman came up and interrupted the interview to tell Johnson her movie was "really important."

"It was wild," Johnson said, resuming her train of thought. "I hadn't anticipated it while I was writing, but all of these actresses came out to do it and the result was we made a movie with five strong parts for young women and that never happens."

D.E.B.S. establishes this narrative mindset from the beginning. Avoiding the typical opening shot where there is some major confrontation, President Phipps (Michael Clarke Duncan) appears in their house yelling for them to get up, thus setting up a comic atmosphere that possesses something sinister beneath the Laura Ashley cum Benneton exteriors.

It appears the greatest criminal in the world, Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster), has returned to Los Angeles and it is up to the girls to save womankind. Nobody is more excited than Amy who has been writing her thesis about Diamond and her alleged diabolical deeds. In what becomes a floating gag throughout the film, the four girls hang from wires far above as they survey Lucy Diamond on a blind date with Russian assassin/dancer Ninotchka (Jessica Cauffiel).

During a scuffle, the girls are discovered and a shootout commences. With bystanders run around for cover from the under covers. Amy soon meets Lucy head to toe and there is an immediate connection made. A connection young lesbians will be thrilled about, one that may have young non-lesbians asking, "Wait a minute, is what I think is happening, happening?

"I was playing with the idea of lesbian as villain and the history of that and I thought the villain context was a way to send that up and put it on its ear, that if you were to look at it from the other side, Lucy was just misunderstood," said Johnson. "The intelligence agency was really invested in her being bad and I was trying to play with perspectives and kind of looking past the surface of all these things; your assumptions about people."

Soon the two get together and the hitherto film intensifies in its elements of love, humor and a darker image about how powerful organizations manipulate women into obedience without them realizing it. While these elements could be found in the short film version, now more money was at stake and Johnson naturally had reservations when some producers came along to give her some serious money.

"I was very surprised," she said. "I was very scared that I could go with a studio but they totally got the movie, totally psyched to make it... I was worried they'd make me tone down the gay content but they actually helped me make the relationship more complex and develop the love story between them."

But the love story between the young women turns out to be one of the film's least subversive element in a film that exposes more sinister elements of relationships. While these women may seem to have brains, beauty and brawn, their lives are owned by the intelligence agency.

"The agency is the real villain in the film," said Johnson. So while the film may seem silly in many aspects there are relevant issues of privacy, loyalty to government at any cost, and the manipulation of images, information and lives.

D.E.B.S. also contains one of the best soundtracks, with regard to the narrative. "I wanted it to have a nostalgic but contemporary '80s feel in a way," said Johnson.

Accordingly, it is this kind of talent that draws people to Sundance and makes the film festival the most important one in the country for new filmmakers. "There's no kind of venue like Sundance for a young filmmaker, either to have a short or to have a feature here," said Johnson. It's been kind of miraculous. Last year they saw the short and now I'm back here with a feature film in just a year.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Above: Director Angela Robinson and Meagan Good, Jill Ritchie and Devon Aoki of D.E.B.S. Left: Sara Foster, Meagan Good, Devon Aoki and Jill Ritchie star in D.E.B.S.

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By John Esther