Magdalen

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.

Magdalen McElhinney hangs out in bars and makes her living telling stories to her fellow patrons for a fee. In the end, the stories all seem to find their source in a filmmaker named Andrew, who is probably her father. Before I go any further, I want to say I have never met writer/director Andrew Repasky McElhinney. I do not know anyone who has met him. I believe he is a Philadelphia filmmaker, and I have been to Philadelphia. That's about the only connection I can think of between us. I point this out because I want you to know I harbor no personal animosity toward him. I hope one day he will be a very successful lawyer or doctor or waiter or cab driver, anything, mind you, except a filmmaker. A law should be enacted to keep him at least fifty yards away from motion picture equipment. This film has to be seen to be believed. Technically speaking, Magdalen isn't bad as a first effort. Alix D. Smith, who plays Magdalen, isn't bad either. Neither is the story itself. I'm sure John Sayles could fashion a terrific, insightful story around the heroine. Wait a second. Scratch insightful. That's the problem with this film. It offers way too much insight into Mr. Andrew Repasky McElhinney. Way too much! In retrospect, it is easy to see why he gave his lead character his own name. This film is about him. And him only. In fact, he even plays Andrew, the famous filmmaker, who is probably the father of the lead actress. This is particularly interesting because Alix Smith is at least twice as old as Mr. McElhinney, who looks like a slightly chubby twelve-year-old boy. (McElhinney tries to justify this conceit by staging this meeting in a dream sequence.) Mr. McElhinney's long monologue is jaw-droppingly hilarious. Alix Smith deserves an Oscar for keeping a straight face during it. What ego! What misguided self-importance! What stupidity! What pretentiousness! Ten years from now Mr. McElhinney will look back on that scene and cringe in embarrassment -- if he isn't cringing already. This film, built around the theme that an artist, no matter how unsuccessful, must be respected because he/she has god-like power over the world they create, is one of the most pretentious pieces of cinematic masturbation I have ever experienced. Oh the humanity!

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".

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.