FILMBRATS - REVIEWS

Here we have the story of Fanny, a woman forced to live with her brother and sister-in-law due to her mental illness. Fanny doesn’t get along with her sister-in-law to begin with, and things get worse when she catches her cheating on her brother. The resulting confrontation at home makes Fanny so furious she picks up and leaves, taking her brother’s car. She finds herself looking for her father’s grave, someplace she’s never been allowed to visit before. Along the way she comes across a backwoods cabin where she just may be appreciated.

This movie has a lot of problems with disclosure that really hurt the audience’s ability to understand why everything is happening. For instance, we know Fanny is mentally ill, but only because they tell us so. They never say what she’s suffering from besides a brief mention of hearing voices (which doesn’t seem to be enough). Just from watching her on the screen, she simply seems like a fully capable adult who just also happens to be an overly dramatic person who has been sheltered. There’s a lot of missing back story that would help us out a lot. You wait a long time to get anything from the characters and you don’t get much for your trouble. The ending is also quite cryptic, but that’s more understandable.

What’s not so acceptable is the severe tonal shifts within the film. It happens when she goes out alone in the car, and again once she meets the cabin owner Oskar. And the film moves unbearably slow, so any change like this is impossible to hide. The movie isn’t emotionally draining like it probably should be, it’s physically draining. I would say a good fifteen minutes or more could be cut from the already short 87 to make this a more effective story. I just don’t understand the motivation of the editing. They don’t seem to realize how to end a scene properly. It either lingers on too long or gets cut off before running its course. They include this overly long piano montage of her driving (including too many point of view shots out the windshield) which concludes with her pulling in someplace. The next cut right after is her driving aimlessly again. What happened?

There are a few different directions the film could have gone. I could easily see this being a pretty creepy/scary story with the mentally handicapped jealous sister angle. Maybe that direction would have been better than the silent love story. I appreciate the concept, but I saw “Cast Away” and I don’t think I need another movie half covered in silence, especially one that doesn’t work nearly as well. I think Tom Hanks talked more to his volleyball than Fanny talks to the foreign language speaking Oskar. Well, I’m going to take a cue from this movie and just stop talking…now.

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