Magdalen

This witty , honest, layered conversational film captures that quintessential intimacy and sense of possibility that were hallmarks of the best of the furtive American Independent cinema in the 90's.

Alix makes you hang on every word of every story she sells. Yet somehow says even more when she isn't talking.

I love the look and feel of this film.

Name me another 17-year old boy whose first film has neither a gun, nor a crime in it. But oh boy! does have a bunch of cuss words! What ever happened to Alix D. Smith? She should have been a big star!

Life is a story made up of other peoples stories and the stories we tell each other about the story we tell ourselves. This film peels back the layers of reality. Weaving its late night magic. This film is a startling revelation from a 17 year old! How sensitive to the human condition. How brave to share so much of himself. You wont regret spending time with this cast of characters and the strange little world Andrew Repasky builds for them.

ARM constructs a character who is intrepid and unambiguously kindhearted in the surly story selling protagonist played by Alix D. Smith . This film is an intimate artful crafting of hidden lives and shared narrative meanings parsed through humans connecting. The urban photography is so thoughtfully edited and deployed that the city becomes another character. The character Andrew is a fascinating vessel for self revelation. What a wonderful film.

Magdalen is a curious mixture of film noir and cinema verity, an effort which will probably be of interest to scholars, in the event that Andrew Repasky McElhinney becomes a cinematic force majeure. The problem with the film is that it never truly focuses on its profoundly intuitive theme--that life is largely illusory, a story made up out of whole cloth. The theme is best expostulated in the dialogue between Magdalen and Andrew, a dream encounter between the filmmaker (as God), and Magdalen (as His creature), in which God hands Magdalen the essence of Himself, to be altered, edited, adapted, or discarded as she sees fit. Beautifully shot in places, with a low bow in the direction of French existentialism and Eugene O'Neill, the film nevertheless lacks the skillful interweaving and truncation of thematic materials in A Chronicle of Corpses. Still, as the chanteuse says, "no regrets".