Sue

This film was made with sincere intentions, but I feel that characters in similar predicaments have been portrayed more eloquently and more realistically in other films. Sue is obviously influenced by the films of John Cassavettes, but fails to achieve the same poignancy.

The film is a hodgepodge of scenes where the title character, a severely depressed woman, finds herself having quirky interactions with the people she encounters. Sometimes she initiates these interactions, sometimes others are drawn to her and sometimes they just seem contrived to keep things going. The pacing of her decline seems a bit off and just when something develops for the better, the story takes another dip to ensure its procession towards tragedy. We are never clued in on the origin of this woman's condition or given other details of her background, as though it's sufficient to witness her daily trials and shake our heads at how unfortunate things are. I would have liked more profundity in some of her relationships in place of the forgettable scenes with the ditzy so-called writer (from Minnesota, but with a NY accent) and the cliché street-tough girl.

When I met director Amos Kollek last may in Cannes where he was presenting Queenie in love, I told him that Sue was one of my favorite movies ever. It's hard to describe this film, so the easiest way to do it is to say that it's one of the best portraits of a woman ever made on film. You cannot but fall in love with Sue, beautifully incarnated by now cult actress Anna Thomson (at least cult in Europe, especially in France where she's quite famous), who is one of the most touching actresses of today, not to mention her very particular beauty. Sue is a woman in her early 30's who loses her job and little by little, loses her spot in society in pityless New York city. She is swifted away from the "real" world and finds herself alone, resigning herself to a sad destiny that she's incapable to escape, in spite of the help some people are trying to give her... I think anybody who's lived in New York or any other big city and who loves real people and poets will love is film. Because Sue is a poet, only she never wrote or didn't have enough self-confidence to do so.

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.

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.

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.