A Perfect Ending

Generally when I go to see films at a festival my expectations are set pretty low. Most are fair to middlin' and many just don't cut the mustard. Occasionally, however, I catch a film that not only captures my mind while I'm watching it but that lives on and continues to unfold in my mind for days after. Such was my experience with A Perfect Ending. For starters, while I first saw the film during the Frameline (LGBT) festival in San Francisco, it became abundantly clear not long into the film that the fact the love story element was between two women was incidental to the bigger picture themes of identity, self-awareness, and the ever-important journey to discover and embrace true passion in life.

At first blush, A Perfect Ending is the story of Rebecca (Barbara Niven) a woman living in a loveless marriage, dissatisfied with her life and holding a deep secret that not even her closest friends know. She reveals this secret and the deep questions that it carries to her friends who then suggest a rather unorthodox path to finding answers - a high priced call girl named Paris (Jessica Clark).

It's a Nicole Conn film, so you know there's a love story. I saw it at an LGBT festival so I knew there was a lesbian angle. What I found with A Perfect Ending was a story that had so much more depth and breadth that I left the theater thinking ... a lot.

Nicole Conn masterfully weaves this complex story, delicately dipping into an array of subplots and parallel story lines. That she weaves a complex story is one thing, that she does so leveraging some unique and rather fascinating storytelling mechanisms makes the film that much more interesting to me.

Beyond the graceful storytelling structure there are the superb performances from a very talented cast.

Several great character turns give wonderful flavor to the story. Cathy DeBuono delivers an amusingly intense performance; Mary Wells' comedic timing and perfectly timed expressions bring laughter at several key moments and then there's the superb Morgan Fairchild whose very appearance on the screen resulted in applause. John Heard delivers a great performance as the detached, boozy husband with a dark secret of his own.

Finally there are the two magnificent lead actresses. Newcomer Jessica Clark, has thus far in her career mostly been a model. You can be sure that this will change - fast. The character of Paris that she delivers has such nuance, such grace, such power and such intensity it's hard to believe that this stunning young woman had never before done a full-length feature film.

Barbara Niven is someone you have, no doubt, seen act before. You have never seen her like this. To watch the evolution of Niven's character of Rebecca is to see a woman become completely dismantled. From her clothing and hairstyle to the way she walks and even holds her facial expressions - at the outset Rebecca is wound so tightly that one might expect she would snap at any time. Instead, we see her soften, unravel and blossom into a magnificent, luminous and powerful woman.

Any woman should see this film and then ask herself - have you found your passion? Are you living a life you feel worth living and if not, why?

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!

I anxiously awaited this movie's release on DVD as those who had seen it at Sundance gave it such good to great reviews. Unfortunately, however, after having seen it for myself now, I do not share the earlier reviewers' glowing opinions. The premise of the movie is really good and I could tell it could have been a very good movie. I felt it took too many "meetings" before the main character stopped running out and the awkwardness to fade. Both main actresses are attractive and are suited to their characters, but the escort seemed to be trying too hard to be mysterious and alluring. First,her lower voice and slow speaking cadence was sexy and intriguing, but then you notice she speaks that way through the entire movie. It rendered the "sexy" a little "unsexy" and kind of annoying after a while. You don't see enough of the two women together to understand the 'relationship' that supposedly develops between them. I was left feeling like too much of the story must have been left on the editing room floor and was replaced by the film-maker's attempt at artsy and meaningful up-close vignettes of inanimate objects or a characters struggles. I am disappointed in this movie. I had such high hopes.

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.