Bridget

I had seen, heard and read so many things about the movie and its heroine (Anna Thomson) for weeks that I couldn't wait for its being released in France. Indeed, Anna Thomson is just a wonderful woman, so loving and human and frail at the same time; and Amos Kollek stands as a non comformist film maker which is quite rare today and thus valuable. So I was quite enthousiastic about seeing Bridget. And yet, I was very disappointed. Whereas Bridget relates nothing but the tragic and aweful story of an unspeakably unfortunate woman, I was never touched, nor moved, nor even impressed by what I was seeing. You just can't believe anything that happens to her even though Anna Thomson is definitely a great actress. In fact, the whole cast is quite good and I couldn't really account for my eventual negative impression. Still the movie left me intact, clean and not the least ill at ease whereas I expect from that kind of movies to drag me in their dirt, to make me feel those infinite pain and sufferance, to mark me with these virtual scars of a disturbing art. In short it did not trouble me as I intended it should have, and as such, I really resent saying that but, to me, it wasn't a good movie-and so did think the friend who saw it with me.

Amos Kollek clearly had a premise for a movie: an abused woman must find enough money to settle an old debt and buy her estranged son from custody. But he didn't really have a plot to go with it. Bridget lurches from one relationship to another, and Kollek hopes that the idiosyncrasies and perversions of her acquaintances - a closet-lesbian spinster, a psychotic Vietnam veteran, a mentally disabled stalker and his terminally ill father - will patch over the tenuous, if non-existent links between them. No event is too improbable to work its way into the storyline, and Kollek keeps a straight face throughout, as if this is a portentous work demanding intense structural analysis.

The performances are generally sub-standard. Anna Levine, as Bridget, is alone able to communicate something of her character's desperation. That much of the plot depends on Bridget's supposed beauty, though, sits at odds with Levine's gaunt, pallid face and bony frame. Throughout the film Bridget looks unwell and disturbed. David Wike is laughable as the retarded Pete. Lance Reddick is on the wrong side of melodrama as hit-man Black. Julie Hagerty and a sinister Mark Margolis are well cast in their respective roles, but the threadbare narrative jumps beyond their characters before we are able to gain a greater insight into them.

Barely a scene rings true throughout the film, and the consistently hollow dialogue immediately suggests an imperfect grasp of English on the director's part. The delivery and intonation in many conversational scenes is uneven, and none of the characters convincingly relate to one another. Technically, too, the film disappoints. The lighting is off (particularly in external shots) and the sound is tinny - all testament to a meagre budget. The editing is just as careless - a shot near the end of the film shows Bridget's son as an infant, despite that fact that he should be well into adolescence by that point.

Kollek certainly had a couple of interesting if unoriginal ideas for this movie, but at every turn he is undermined by a preposterous story.

To get the custody of her child,Clarence,Bridget would do anything.

The most interesting line of an uneven dialog is this strange lapsus when the woman speaks of her childREN.In her mind she's got two of them:the boy and her husband ,a retarded man she married because his father promised her a lot of dough if she would stay five years with the poor thing.Bridget has a racy past;a past which we know little by little as the flashbacks become more and more numerous.The plot often verges on melodrama and we often think of a Sirk/Stahl heroine lost in the Abel Ferrara world .It's difficult to side with any of the characters of the story,and as the precedent user said,it's very very difficult to like that.But by the same token,it's difficult not to be disturbed ,sometimes overwhelmed by this miserable heroine,these despicable but pitiful men .The trip to Beirut ,in this context,seems so irrelevant that it gains an almost uncanny atmosphere .

Worth a watch but be warned:not for all tastes.