Wow. There are four rather fine things in this, and one that ruins it all.
First the good. The key role is perfectly realized. Though the supporting actors and the way things are staged are mundane, this actress and the writer/directer created someone memorable. This was Napoleon Dynamite before he was cool.
While dialog and pacing are uneven, the music isn't. It is uniformly apt. The performance and the music alone are just about enough to sustain the thing until the end.
And there's one brilliant piece of stagecraft. Some paintings figure in the plot. These paintings have impressed our heroine who -- it is made explicit -- is our narrator. She describes them as miraculous and when they are shown, they are blank, white glowing rectangles. Until this point, the imaginary and real segments are clearly distinguished, and when we see this clever trick, we move forward on our chair, waiting for what is next.
And the final great thing is the way the thing is structured. In several ways, we are told that this is an artwork that is about artwork and the "message" is both in the story and how the story is told: there are matters of authorship and genuineness; a bit about filming and being filmed; other bits about reality and representations of reality. Hey, we see, this is one smart woman behind this. And we lean ever more forward in the chair, ready to leap.
And then the end hits us with such a banal notion that we are gobsmacked back. Hey! Is that all? All that energy and cleverness to tell us something Art Linkletter or Reader's Digest could (and does)? Jees.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
