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QUID PRO QUO
Written & Directed by Carlos Brooks
Produced by Sarah Pillsbury & Midge Sanford
Edited by Lauren Zuckerman & Charles Ireland
Director of Photography, Michael McDonough
Music by Mark Mothersbaugh
Released by Magnolia Pictures
USA. 82 min. Rated R
With Nick Stahl, Vera Farmiga, Rachel Black & Aimee Mullins

Quid Pro Quo tries and succeeds in at least presenting an interesting idea. Isaac (Nick Stahl) tells stories on New York public radio. He’s been wheelchair bound and unable to walk since the age of eight when he was in a car crash that also killed his parents. Through email messages from someone named “Ancient Chinese Girl,” Isaac learns about an underground subculture of “wannabes,” people who want to become paralyzed. They meet in hidden places in their wheelchairs and occasionally go to hospitals to bribe doctors to paralyze them.

Already this sounds promising, like a riff on the David Cronenberg adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s Crash, which dealt with the lure of sexual ecstasy in car crashes. Brooks’s film isn’t so much concerned with fetishistic impulses like in Ballard’s work, but more with the wannabes’ psychology – the self-identification in wanting and/or needing to appear to be crippled in public. What comes to mind with this premise is, simply, do these people really exist? Are there “Chair Clubs,” so to speak?

According to Fiona (Vera Farmiga), the woman who reveals herself to Isaac as the “Ancient Chinese Girl,” they’re in the thousands. But she also tells him that there are more than just wannabes – devotees and pretenders, and there are specific differences. All of this, of course, interests Isaac as he wants to tell their stories for his radio show. A relationship begins between him and the emotionally fragile Fiona. However, there’s a twist midway through: Isaac buys a pair of shoes he’s been eyeing in a shop window, and overnight he suddenly, little by little, can walk again.

This throws a whole other monkey wrench, not simply in Isaac and Fiona’s relationship, but in the film as well. While Stahl and Farmiga give it their all from start to finish as these torn and frayed people, there’s another twist (which I dare not reveal) that feels cheap, if not as much as the Forrest Gump-esque wonderment in a pair of shoes. First-time director Carlos Brooks makes some vibrant color choices in the flashbacks and builds some strong dramatic tension throughout, but by the end too many answers are fed to the audience and a lot to be questioned. The film’s like many a first feature: fabulous ideas executed only so far as the story’s limitations can take them. Jack Gattanella
June 13, 2008