A Perfect Ending

The reviews for this movie seem to come in two flavours: folk gushing over it, calling it beautiful and brilliantly made and artistic and so on, or people dismissing it as a pretentious and hamfisted attempt at an arty movie that falls short of its ambitions.

I just had to come down in the middle. The film is filled with attempts at art-house style directional and cinematic choices that most certainly tread a fine line on taste and quality, and the plot is - I think unapologetically - pure melodrama.

But that said, it does that melodrama really darn well. The music swells, our heroes bite back their tears and tamp down their emotions until the dam bursts, and you're right there with them when it does. Initially neither protagonist is terribly likable, but then, neither woman is who they're supposed to be, and we get to see them open up as the story is told.

Initially I'd perhaps agree that there's a shortage of romantic chemistry between the two female leads, but then one could argue that since their initial encounters are driven by anxiety, how could there be? It just makes the thaw and the bond that does develop (I'm sure that doesn't count as a spoiler in an obviously romantic movie, does it?) all the more satisfying. The layers of their relationship unfurl over time, and that's the way these things happen sometimes.

And as unreasonably beautiful and perfect the 'call girl' character is in this, the fact she shares the same amount of (or less) exposed flesh on camera with a 59 year old woman is not to be dismissed. This matters. Would that more mainstream, less niche movies could be so brave. And good on Barbara Niven for going for it.

Finally, there's not a dud performance in the piece. This is important when what lets so many lesbian movies down is the acting quality and production values. Both are high here, even for the bit players. The weakest actor is probably the inexperienced Jessica Clark as Paris, whose vocal delivery is a tad one note and initially comes across as a little clichéd, but what she lacks in vocal performance she more than makes up in raw charisma, and she gets across the combination of poise and vulnerability the character needs admirably.

Anyway I dunno, I didn't really mean to go on forever here and I don't generally do reviews. I just popped my head round the door here to see what other folk had thought, and seeing the conflicting trends among the reviewers, I felt the need to buck 'em!

There's too much denigration of straight (lol) down the line romantic melodrama, to my mind, particularly for LGBT folks. Our culture at large tends to devalue and dismiss it as frivolous and trashy and while I don't want to get into a rant about patriarchy or toxic masculinity, well... I'm just sayin', if you need this kind of story in your life, THAT IS OKAY, I'm with you, and you might find what you're looking for here.

This is not a "must see" film. It is also not a "piece of crap". Obviously, this film is somewhat polarizing to produce the disparate reviews it has received here. And just as obviously, some of the people who watched this film have an anti-gay bias that makes one wonder "why the hell were they watching this film?"

There are aspects of the film that I liked. And many I did not. I do not want to be too dismissive of "A Perfect Ending" because I feel the writer/director invested a lot of care in this film and tried to produce a beautiful product.

Many of the things I found off-putting were intentional. For example, the editing that was sometimes choppy. The music that, in places, was designed to create an air of the mysterious and sacred. These are artistic choices that sometimes did not work for me. Often, they took me outside the film, especially since the pace was slow. The pace itself could have been brisker in parts.

Also, Jessica Clark (who plays the escort Paris) spoke with such a slow, deliberate pace it was distracting. It reminds me of Nichole Kidman in "Eyes Wide Shut", but Ms. Kidman's character was under the influence when she spoke that way.

Lastly, I found the sexual politics of the film annoying. Often they are inserted where it does not serve the story.

All in all, this is an average film by a filmmaker who could probably produce a much better product.

This is just one of the most irritatingly pretentious movies I've ever seen. If you're an upper-class white person with no real problems and you can only relate to human sexuality, though, maybe this movie will appeal to you.

Barbara Niven plays a rich white woman who is sexually repressed and stuck in an unhappy second marriage with a cartoonishly evil business owner. Her one trait is that she's uptight and her husband's one trait is that he's evil. No one in this movie gets to have more than one trait.

She confesses to her friends - two happily-married women - that she's never had an orgasm. They recommend an all- female brothel for her to contact so that she can finally know what it means to enjoy herself in bed. She ends up with Paris, played by Jessica Park, who is admittedly gorgeous but is once again limited to one trait - in this case, being sexy. For the entirety of the film she speaks slowly and in a low whisper.

Her character is key to some of the film's most desperate attempts to be artsy. We get shots of her in a fetal position on a white void because the movie wants to show that she's damaged and has personal trauma. Rather than letting this come out through Clark's performance it's shoved down the audience's throat with this obnoxious imagery repeatedly, with different degrees of blatant symbolism each time. We also get embarrassing soap opera-like flashbacks to Paris' memories of her old lover, done with soft-focused and slowed footage to make them extra-hard to watch. We don't get a sense of their relationship, really; we're just being told that it was good because look, they're smiling! They're laughing! Everything's fuzzy and slow-motion so it's gotta be nice, right?

The embarrassing film school stuff is just par for the course in this movie, though. There's jump cuts all throughout the movie and they feel almost random. It's like the director saw one of Jean-Luc Goddard's movies and figured that good, artsy movies MUST have jump cuts because his films had them. They really make parts of this movie hard to watch because it just feels like the editing's a mess.

And of course there's all of the melodrama. Everything important in this movie is underscored with horrible, generic piano and string synths telling you what you're supposed to be feeling. It gets really silly when one character orgasms and there's synth flutes and choir voices hitting high notes to hammer the point home. It's just another part of the movie that feels really forced and cartoonish. It makes the sex scenes embarrassing to watch.

The romantic chemistry between Niven and Clark is non-existent but we're told at one point that they might be falling in love. 90% of their on-screen interactions are purely sexual and yet with nearly zero character development we're supposed to find their relationship meaningful. We don't really get the chance to see these two characters outside of the bedroom and when they talk, it's just endless streams of clichés about how much they enjoy each other. It feels painfully shallow. Clark's character is sexy and she's shown to have artistic talent throughout the film but she doesn't get to have a personality outside of her sexuality. We don't get a sense of what her art means to her - it's just there to make her a more attractive character. Of course, though, the film sees Niven's life changed by her relationship with Clark.

The "manic pixie dream girl" is a trope in films where one bubbly, exciting girl enters a protagonist's life and solves the protagonist's problems by being such a likable, attractive person. "A Perfect Ending" merely takes that cliché and applies it to the life of a rich white woman rather than a man. It says that everything wrong with your life can be solved by a hot, sexually-available woman. But the worst thing about it is that it has the audacity to pretend that it's something more, with all of its terrible film student editing and pretentious imagery.

There's much better films out there about bisexual and lesbian relationships. Blue Is The Warmest Color is a much better portrayal of a woman's sexual awakening with another woman and it's made by someone with a far superior grasp of film making. Watch that instead of this trite soap opera.

This film is a sheer delight! Brilliant in it's capacity to draw you into the journey of the story as it unfolds. It is a film with so many messages any woman ( or man) need to explore and assess if they are being and experiencing all they were made for. Or, are they being who they are expected to be and missing true passion and wholeness. Barbara Niven is at her best as the lead in this film and portrays "Rebecca" in such a multi-dimensional way that you are emotionally right there with her as her life is transforming. The chemistry between her and her co-star, Jessica Clark ("Paris") is rich and moving. Soul Kiss Films has delivered a film worthy of the "big screen" everywhere!

While I cannot completely follow some enthusiastic reviews here, I have to admit that I am intrigued how this little movie seduces its audience, despite a small budget (175k is really very small), and despite a story that may not go very well for everyone, because it is some kind of 'Denver Clan 2012' ;-)

But, intriguing enough, we follow easily the introduction, where a woman in her fifties, called Rebecca, wealthy, with three grown-up children and a husband nobody can love, tells her friends that she never climaxed and has mostly forgotten everything about sex. And her friends, two lesbians (of course ?) persuade her to try a service that provides - a prostitute who can help her to finally climax (of course again ?). Now, this seems a bigger bit far-fetched, but it is delivered believable enough not to stand up and run away.

After that, when it comes to an appointment, everything goes wrong for Rebecca, although or even because the rented hooker is young and extremely beautiful and also skilled in the art of seduction. Rebecca is afraid of her own boldness and declines any interaction. But, we know it, it is the tentative beginning of a love story, and this love story isn't a common one.

Now many things are going on there and we learn that this is not a movie from Francois Truffaut or R.W. Fassbinder. And it isn't a movie about the troubles of homosexuality for an elderly woman. These aspects are completely and thankfully left out.

Instead, it is a movie about overcoming a common fate of women, about how your life has been passed by and you miss something real important for a sudden. This fate is of course not limited only to wealthy women, but the movie is located in a wealthy social class, and therefore it looks soapy in some of it's family-related side stories. But on the other hand, there is a distinct feeling for real emotional struggle.

Here comes the main actor in, Barbara Niven, who has the courage to play a woman on the edge of a wasted life, to show herself naked, together with a 30 years younger beauty (Niven is born 1953). And she never fails, you will be surprised, not only how good she looks, but how authentic she is.

The beautiful hooker in turn, played by Jessica Clark, places an attitude like Maggie Q in 'Nikita', when it comes to dialog, and that is sometimes too overused. She seems always slightly unreal, like being not really from this world, even while she is suffering from things happened in her past. I wonder if Director Nicole Conn intended that. And I wonder how Jessica Clark is in private.

Cinematically, the movie is solid modern upper B-grade with some nice ideas to break the narrative continuity for watchers who need a bit more than the standard menu. It looks always good and bright, and focuses wisely on every Detail of Barbara Niven's artful play.

While a hardcore lesbian will spit on this movie because it's too beautiful and calm, someone who wants to follow a butterfly eventually starting to use it's wings (as implied at the end), will be fully satisfied. 8 stars out of sheer earned sympathy.