Full Frontal

Steven Soderbergh's much-maligned digital satire of Hollywood took an unfair savaging at the hands of American critics, who seem to resent the fact that the man has become the single most interesting and consistently exciting film director currently working in America. Designed as a deliberately low-budget, quasi-improvised indie production to counter-balance the big studio production of "Ocean's Eleven", "Full Frontal" was shot according to a Dogme 95-like manifesto (the actors had to drive themselves to work and do their own wardrobe and make-up, all the locations are pre-existing), and is a cross between the confessional nature of "Sex, Lies & Videotape", the multi-story structure of "Magnolia" and the film-within-a-film framework of François Truffaut's "Day for Night". It's the tale of a day in the life of six Los Angelenos connected in some way to the film industry: budding screenwriters Enrico Colantoni and David Hyde Pierce; Pierce's sister-in-law Mary McCormack, a struggling masseuse, and wife Catherine Keener, a human resources VP on the verge of a nervous breakdown; black actor Blair Underwood and film star Julia Roberts. Soderbergh follows the day's events as if he were shooting a documentary, in grainy (post-produced) DV, intercutting it with 35mm photography of a film in production starring Underwood and Roberts, whose plot is supposed to echo the main characters' situations. The Chinese-box structure only really becomes comprehensible about a third of the way in, and what looks at first like a self-indulgent exercise in the mechanics of low-budget filmmaking quickly becomes a cinema masterclass as Soderbergh effortlessly navigates the veritable maze of referential layers between film and life to the point you can no longer distinguish where film ends and reality begins, throwing in a number of celebrity cameos (Brad Pitt, Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, Terence Stamp reprising a scene from "The Limey") that blur the borders even further. You have to be open for it, but if you are you'll be richly rewarded.

`Full Frontal' is maybe my greatest deception this year. Directed by Steven Soderbergh and having such a cast, I would not believe that the film could be such a crap. There are lots of characters, but none of them is well developed. Therefore, the viewer sees many famous actors and actresses on the screen and is not able to understand who they are, what are their motives, where they are. The plot is very confused, and some actors and actresses perform more than one role. The image and photography are horrible, using a kind of fake Dogma '95 style. I do not know how such talented people could be part of such a mess: friendship or big money? Anyway, a huge waste of talented people and of my time and money, in a film that never works. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): `Full Frontal'

I couldn't track the characters and after 20 minutes I didn't want to track them. I just wanted it to end--what was Soderbergh thinking? At first I thought it was supposed to be amateurish since it was a movie within a movie, but, when it went on and on with horrible lighting and terrible hand-held camera work, it was enough to make one want to run out screaming.

Too dreary to work as a satire, too wrapped up in its own cleverness to engage; this is an insubstantial vanity piece that might have been entertaining to make but isn't much fun to watch. I'd have thought that if Soderbergh wanted to show off, he could have come up with something better than this collection of over-scripted (and not particularly original) gimmicks.

It might have worked had we spent more time in the company of the interesting peripheral characters (the theatrical Hitler, Gus the producer) than listening to the self-absorbed droning of the others. Film students will probably love it.

Director Steven Soderbergh calls Full Frontal the unofficial sequel to Sex Lies and Videotape, his groundbreaking 1989 film. Most everyone else has called it a mess, or useless waste of time. One prominent American critic even suggested this might be the worst film ever by a major director. I can't say I agree with the harsh criticism. While I'm not exactly sure what the movie is about, and vast passages of it simply do not work, I do think it is a film with great passion and energy. Soderbergh has left behind the slickness of Ocean's 11 and Erin Brockovich and made an experimental film that bristles with inventiveness. Not everything works, but there are several nice performances, particularly by David Hyde Pierce and Catherine Keener and I enjoyed watching an A-list director stray from the tried and true and explore rockier ground.