Personal Velocity: Three Portraits

There's a point about an hour and twenty-five minutes into this film where the credits begin to roll. At this moment the viewer realizes "Personal Velocity" has come to a close. There's no plot to this film and, therefore, no ending. "PV" is a trio of vignettes, each about a young woman with some sort of sex/relationship crisis. Delia is the high school tramp turned battered housewife. Greta is a Jewish-American princess bored with her WASP husband. And Paula is a pregnant punker chick trying to mother a teen boy runaway who sucks his thumb. Yes, this is an arthouse project. It screams "We're an indie production! We can't afford light kits and tripods! We're all working for scale or for free! We made this film because we LOVE it!" In defense of Rebecca Miller: she wrote a book, adapted it for the screen, and cobbled together the funding and talent to turn it into a movie. Of course she has A-list family connections, but this is her own work. And it's a lot more than most of us could ever do. You go, girl! But unfortunately, it is a boring piece of work. The three lead characters are just plain dull and unsympathetic. It's hard to like them, and harder to identify with any of them. They've all made their own poor choices and now spend their screen time plotting an escape.

The male voice narration doesn't work. It's heavy-handed and annoying in a bad documentary way. Why can't the ladies narrate their own stories? What's wrong with Delia telling us in her own words how she spent most of high school entertaining the boys? Story line and characters aside, there's some potent acting here. Ms Miller enlisted top quality players Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey, and Fairuza Balk to perform the leads. Collectively, they are a knock-out. The supporting cast is spot-on. But you can only do so much with a one-note song. I really wanted to like this little movie. But I didn't.

as you probably have heard, this is a movie that consists of three portraits. three very contrived, hard-to-watch portraits.

this movie charges out of the gate with incredible potential, including a great cast, an effective score, and nearly disorienting (yet, rather successful) camera work. additionally, at the start of the first portrait, the narrative freezes, and the narrator urges the viewer to, "wait!" so he can explain something about what's going on. this device is wonderful, and immediately gives the viewer a healthy shot of intrigue. additionally, at this point, you'll probably be really excited at the unorthodox pacing that the film seems to be setting up.

that's all in the first few minutes. and this movie literally screamed in a nosedive downward from there.

while "personal velocity" bucks conventions in many ways, it bucks the concept of storytelling so much that it is simply contrived. want to see development, plot, resolution? not here. this movie tries HARD to dodge all these things, and relentlessly starves the viewer of any of these elements with its spare dialogue.

but in the absence of these elements, what's left is - quite frankly - repetition. the characters simply keep doing what they did in the first moments of their portrait (or at least what the filmmakers set them up to do). and while they rather gratingly repeat their actions, there is no true character development.

to combat this (and surely the problem of converting short stories to film), the movie employs a narrator. this (and the repetition) is the downfall. first of all, who is the narrator? well, it's a male, which is strange since this is mainly a story about three women. ok, but why is he male? and why is he speaking so conversationally at some points? and why does he know of all these women? none of these questions are answered, and the viewer is forced to contend with this narrator who speaks incessantly throughout the entire film.

now this narrator suffers from an additional problem, which plagues the film: heavy-handedness. the narrator says things like, "she could feel the emotion like a vortex pulling her soul inward." that's actually not a direct quote, but it's very close. i am not exaggerating. at one point a character says, "you look you're waiting for something." and the narrator breaks in, "she was, she always has been." this movie can't afford such lead-weighted narration. and it certainly does not fall in line with the narrator's other parts where he's talking about how great kyra sedgewick's ass looks in jeans.

in the end, you've got however many minutes (i don't know 90ish?) of superb acting and inventive cinematography. but anchoring it down without an inch of slack to go anywhere is an overbearing narrator, and three equally overbearing and repetitious movements of what could have probably been a compelling film.

I don't know why there are so many recent attempts at this sort of thing: individual episodes that approach and overlap the same concept. Perhaps it is because it is easier to craft episodes with power rather than worry about an arc of 90 minutes or more.

But we do have them. Some work amazingly well. I found 'Things you can tell' nearly lifealtering because of the crafty way all the actresses picked up each others' mannerisms to merge into the same woman. '!0 Conversations' was a different take, with the action all occurring in the same world. Less effective overall (with a more overt politics) but well structured.

This, however, is a mess. It bludgeons. It repeats. It insists on obviousness. No subtly is allowed: either an effect shouts or is bleached away. And the worst thing, the most damaging thing that can be said: there is no reward, no insight, no enrichment for the rawness we experience.

Wallace Shawn and a talented cinematographer wasted as well. Shame.

The reliable Parker Posey has a line so wonderful, so noticeably superior to all else, I am convinced she made it up: she says she needs to get an underwater camera.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 4: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

The best thing about this film are the three superb performances by the lead actresses in each segment. It's also a chance to explore the potential for short form film narrative by putting three short films together to create a full length feature. If these three films had been produced individually, almost no one would ever see them. The film is exciting too, as an example of the artistic possibilities of low budget digital film making. As others have mentioned the narration almost sinks the movie. I'd love to see a DVD alternative version without it.

A critic I read before seeing this movie (Lynden Barber of the Sydney Morning Herald) opined that it was a book illustrated with film rather than a proper movie. He's right, but that does not make it a complete write-off. There is as much voice-over as in a football match (why use a male?) but the visuals still convey some of the stories, which are not all without interest.

There are three separate stories of women having trouble with men; two from the working class and one an upwardly mobile book editor. They are tenuously connected by a street incident. One has a bashing husband, another, a husband she has outgrown, and the third has problems with her boyfriend, her stepfather and her maternal instinct. All seem to favour running away as the solution; stand and fight is not the female way, at least not in New York State.

The author of the original short stories is Rebecca Miller, who also directed from her own screenplay. This certainly accounts for the literary quality. Rebecca has a famous literary father, the great Arthur Miller, and I suspect he is in the film somewhere as a character or at least a presence. The working class girl stories are too trite to be involving (though very well played by Kyra Sedgwick and Fairuza Balk) but the middle story of the book editor (played coolly by Parker Posey) rings true. The use of digital video suits the subject-matter (Dogma 95 on the Hudson) and the whole thing is competently realised. It is the weakness in the first and third stories that disappoints.