FILM-FORWARD.COMReviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
NINE LIVES
Through his brief microscopic samples of nine contrasting lives, director Rodrigo Garcia weaves an emotive and eclectic tapestry
of female suffering, demonstrating the very relative nature of his concept. For one woman, to suffer is to be imprisoned,
separated from her daughter; for another, it rises from a surreal encounter with an ex-boyfriend. A sexually abused woman
contemplates suicide after revisiting her childhood home, while a teenage girl sacrifices her educational opportunities to patch up
her parents' relationship. Clearly, not each of these situations demonstrates an equal experience of pain, but since the women are
separate and blind to each other's worlds, each creates her own distressing reality. It's as if suffering were an essential component of
life, one that must exist no matter how perfect circumstances appear otherwise, an anguish that must be fabricated if
necessary.
Though each woman is in her individual universe, these nine lives somehow merge - a character in one scene finds herself
playing a supporting role in another. Thus, we are immersed in the all-encompassing message - it's a small world after all. "It's
only small when we want it to be," responds one woman in a sarcastic retort to a remark made by Lorna (Amy Brenneman). Hers
is a peculiar case. Lorna attends the funeral of the wife of her deaf ex-husband, who is still in love with Lorna, who finds herself the subject of much hostility at the service.
Garcia is no stranger to the complex world of women and to the captive nature of the relationships in which they are embedded.
His 2000 film, Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her, dealt similarly with the lives of five women, inserting thin
slivers of each woman's life and her problems into a larger framework. A complaint one might make of Nine Lives is that Garcia
tends to over-dramatize each situation, leaving little room for light or hope. He paints a murky picture, and does not employ
enough substantially piercing material with which to shade his characters. Thus, some women appear as superficial
damsels-in-distress - not the charred silhouettes of agony Garcia likely intended to create. Parisa Vaziri
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