penniah

I still have a soft spot for this movie, after all these years. The young actors playing the four main characters were so touching, and the music was so haunting I can still hear it in my head. Of course, it was scored by Loreena McKennitt, so it had a very haunting quality that she captures so well. R. H. Thompson was one of my favourite performers, in the role of the grieving widower who is falling for the young woman to whom his late wife convinced him to open their home. I found especially interesting the attention to the society of the time and place. People were moved by charity to help the orphans from overseas, but once closer to home, the gossip and tolerance of cruelty were less than charitable.

I taped this movie from TV years ago - it was on a *Beta* tape, not VHS!! (All you young'uns out there go look up "Beta") so anyhow that tape is long since useless. The NFB in Canada did release it on video, I borrowed it (again, years ago) from the public library in Winnipeg. But unless Masterpiece Theatre decides to market its back catalogue ( which I doubt will happen) we are likely out of luck. Incidentally, I watched it when it aired on MT, and it had been edited for time (it aired in Canada, and likely the UK, before that). The Canadian version was longer, but I can't remember what was cut for the MT version.

I was really impressed with Sandra Oh's performance in this film. Everything else aside, she was brilliant. Her Jasmine is a sensitive poet who has real potential, but she's stuck in the sex trade and, like so many real women in that position, is afraid of trying to get out. The familiar, even when it is terrible, is easier to face than the unknown. (For the same reason, battered women stay with the men who beat them.) She takes some steps, but when her boss cruelly tells her that her job is who she is, she gives up. Any tentative confidence she felt is gone. Later, she dances in front of her new boyfriend, not so much to say "This is who I am" but "How could you possibly love me?" It's like, on some level, she was daring him to still love her. How the audience, and especially her boyfriend, could not see how this was killing her soul, is not amazing, but typical - people see what they want to, and in a strip bar, it's T&A, not despair or no self esteem. Her poetry, beautiful, but so cynical and sad, also show the despair she feels. Having been in a damaging relationship, I can say for a fact that Sandra Oh's performance is right on the mark - from trying to be tough, to pushing away someone who cares (while hoping he'll "save" you by continuing to believe in you), to sharing feelings of despair with someone in the same boat - this is all so completely real.

I was also struck by Daryl Hannah's performance as the airhead, always high, who has hopes that are completely out of reach because her lifestyle is sabotaging her dreams. Without two brain cells to rub together, I wonder what she did with all that money...

Jennifer Tilly's character was good too, and provided some fairly uncomfortable humour - when she ripped into the happy mom at the doctor's office, saying "I'm gonna have this baby, and he's gonna sell your kid drugs in the schoolyard" I laughed, but it had an Oh-my-gawd-she's-completely-off-her-rocker quality to it. Plus her scene as the dominatrix trying to deal with her battered and boozed up stripper friend was priceless.

Yeah, the plot (what plot?) goes nowhere, but watch it as a very realistic few days in the emotional lives of some very sad characters.

I went to this movie hoping for something light and enjoyable, but it didn't do anything for me but make me hate just about everyone connected to its making.

Here's a woman who has it all... so of course she's unhappy. Oh, and she's rather needy and self-absorbed, too. It takes a guy who is 100 years out of his time to make her realize this, and to make her come to the conclusion that she'd be happier in a world where not only is there no rat race, but no rights for women. She just needs a man, darnit! She doesn't need to maybe find the right career for her skills, or maybe choose a slower-paced life in her own time... no, she just has to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge to a time when women didn't even have the vote, in order to be happy.

Right. I can't begin to effectively express my contempt for this movie.