Sue

Anna Levine/Anna Thomson seems to have inherited the mantle of Gena Rowlands in those awful Cassavetes films of the 70's, A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria. This is woman-as-victim in a soup of hysterical emotion and over-acting. My toes used to curl in embarrassment as I watched the film spool by, hoping I'd get a respite from Rowland's suffering at the end.

Anna Levine was good as Delilah, the hooker with a slashed face in The Unforgiven, and was fun to watch as Vera, the transsexual in Water Drops on Burning Rocks (my favorite of Ozon's films) but this time she's awful in a terrible movie. Levine wears coats and scarves that seem oddly out of date, as though she was Doris Day waiting for Mr Right. She has big lips that droop but aren't expressive at all, and with the dumb dialog by Kollek, it's all very tiresome. Tahnee Welch plays Lola, the criminal hooker, with a sort of brisk efficiency which moves the story along. Tracee Ellis Ross does a great job as Linda, the aspiring social worker who leaves for California--I kept hoping she'd walk off with the picture, but no, we are stuck with Nembutal Sue.

A sympathetic look at the life of a young, unhappy woman feeling lost and lonely in the Big Apple. I could not really get warm with this movie; I thought it was too linear, too much cliché, not enough development. And the actors, especially the lead (Anna Thomson / Levine) were far too good - looking to be believable -- I started to daydream about her and stopped caring about how the story unfolded.

I saw this movie at the Viennale - a film festival in Vienna. For me it was really a very impressing, but at the same way very depressing movie. It shows the needs and the incapability of people to handle human relations especially in big cities as New York. In this city that never sleeps and no one ever is alone so many people are lonely. The search for human nearness is such a central point in life but if it is getting real we often do not know what to do. That's why we often reject people who are starting to be close to us.

The movie is about a desperate woman, who has no job, no friends, and a big scare in her heart to be with out one. That's why she tries to hold on every man she meets, but not able to open herself - knowing her problems, but not actually wanting or being capable to make a change.

For me it was a very realistic movie, because I had vistited NY this very summer before, and I know the scenery in which the movie took place. The "Madison Square Park" in which finally everything ends. And exactly in this park I saw this summer a person also totally desperate and close to the end. I did not do anything. What should I? However, that's why I think it is not only a movie, or a story, but also an image of the real life.

After the movie I had the luck to ask Mr. Kollek himself about his own point of view according to some special scenes. For me it was a kind of pessimistic situation which was described by him, but he said, that he does not think that it is pessimistic, but only realistic. It is up to everyone himself to change his situation. But to be honest I have got to admit, that I did not really understand his attitude versus this point, because I think in a live there are some many dependencies that sometimes your are not able to make such a big change on your own (alone or lonely) But this might be a result of mutual mistunderstanding. And so what I wrote Mr. Kollek said have not been his words but only how I understood him. I don't want to quote him the wrong way.

After all it was a real great movie. And perhaps everybody else will see other things in it. But isn't it that, what great cinema is made of. Interpretations are always part of a movie.

Sue is in her mid-thirties, unemployed yet seeking work, and having trouble paying the rent on her New York apartment. She lives alone and appears to have neither friends nor family other than a mother with Alzheimer's in a home far away in Oregon. She spends her days seeking solace in cafes or on park benches, chain smoking and ineffectually attempting to engage in conversation with complete strangers. These early scenes effectively and succinctly introduce Sue's character, capturing the alienation and desperation that some people face in a late 20th century urban environment. Subsidiary characters are either too busy or self-absorbed to offer her the time of the day, and all transactions are limited strictly to the materialistic: Endless refills of coffee are poured out by cold, unsmiling faces in the diners and restaurants that Sue frequents. Elsewhere Sue submits to the request of an old black man to shows her breasts to she meets in the park after he buys her a drink costing 75 cents and talks to her for a while. As the film progresses, she increasingly takes to casual sex with strangers in order to forge some sort of emotional connection, no matter how transitory. Sue just desperately wants to be loved.

Sue's character is wonderfully played by character actress Anna Levine Thompson (who's had bit-parts in numerous films, from 'Warlock' to the 'The Unforgiven'), capturing a range of emotions from nervous despair to whining self-pity. At first we are clearly forced to identify with her, as all ancillary characters are kept clearly on the periphery. This is mirrored in the films visual style, with its narrow depth of focus and its muted grey colour palette. Later on, as we get to see her and how she interacts with other characters, you are more filled with the urge to shake her: With her indulged defeatism she comes across as more self-centred than any of the other characters.

Using low-grade film stock, director Kollek captures New York in all of it's earthiness, stripped of the glitzy veneer of the standard Hollywood portrayal and eschewing the exaggerated grittiness of the likes of Martin Scorsese or Abel Ferrara. My main complaint is that the film is a little too narrow in focus. The basics of the character are so well handled in the first half hour that there is little gained in travelling much further along the same path, and in its own right, the basic premise barely warrants the length of a full feature. Subsequent scenes are merely an accumulation of detail, and there is not much in the way of character development past this. Even after she embarks on her relationship with Ben (Matthew Powers), she shows no real of changing, and the film continues along the same vein before coming to an abrupt halt as the credits role. At other times, Kollek's script resorts to a melodrama at odds with the verisimilitudinous tone of the rest of the film, such as when her friend Lola holds up a bar with a gun (before they even finish their drinks!), or Sue has an erotic encounter in a cinema. Important details are sketched over (why does she lose her job, for example?), and at times plot climaxes seem imposed artificially.

Despite these reservations, it's a well made and strong film, suggesting that we make our own luck, and that some people are born to be victims, and wouldn't have it any other way. Kollek and Levine have recently completely another film ('Fiona'), which I would certainly forward to seeing. UK distributors, where are you?

I was very surprised by this film. It was sort of a low budget Taxi Driver. Anna Thomson's portrayal of a mentally ill women decompensating and becoming increasingly dysfunctional was the truest depiction of mental illness I have ever seen on film. I'm not going to guess at a diagnosis, whether she is a borderline personality disorder, schizophrenic, or schizoaffective disorder, but Anna Thompson nailed it. They key to her performance was her ambivalent affect. So many portrayals of the mentally get it so wrong. As a retired nurse of forty two years I remember my instructor telling me that ambivalence was the number one symptom of mental illness. This is a cheap, sort of sleazy sad movie, but the lead actresses performance redeems it.