Venue: South by Southwest Film Festival (Narrative Feature Competition, World Premiere)ĭirectors: Zachary Cotler, Magdalena Zyzak They are now, as they always have been, too good to waste. Better yet, just give these ladies an original vehicle worthy of their talents. The few moody, off-kilter scenes between these two inimitable talents conjure some better movies that might have been, perhaps a West Coast redux of Robert Altman’s 3 Women or a Thelma and Louise in which the heroines quote Susan Sontag (and boast, as Maya does here, of sleeping with her) in-between their gun-toting feminist escapades.
Thank heavens for Rosanna Arquette as Maya’s kooky, gun-toting neighbor Leonora. So most scenes feel unbalanced, with Olin’s raw emoting adding up to little more than unfocused hysteria, while Cotler and Zyzak’s pretentiously hazy aesthetic, striving for Persona-era Ingmar Bergman (who was one of Olin’s early mentors), comes off more late Zalman King.
She’s often extraordinary in individual moments, as in a scene in which she denies Paul’s advances, then reacts with an astonishing range of emotions (murderous rage, passion, fear, flashes of love) as he rapes her.īut her male costars are nowhere near her league the irritatingly fey and feeble Keyes, for one, is clearly better suited to his other 2017 acting credit - pop star Justin Timberlake in Lifetime’s Britney Ever After. Despite the patently ridiculous material (true artists are a … wait for it … critically endangered species, and so those chosen few like Maya must rage, rage against the dying of the light, or something), Olin never wavers in her commitment. The control she exerts over her leonine features and that mesmerizing rasp of a voice is nothing less than masterful.īut those wishing for another Unbearable Lightness of Being or Enemies: A Love Story will have their hopes dashed once the film settles into its main plotline, a lethargic battle between two suitors-flighty, introverted, probably gay Ansel (Nathan Keyes) and N+1-reading testosterone factory Paul (Alexander Koch)-for Maya’s estate and affections. (“You’re surprisingly not bad at that,” she says by way of critique as he lifts his face from between her legs.) It’s a lengthy interaction, and Olin plays this early scene with a thinly-veiled contempt and ferocity that is staggering. He’s bearing a CV that includes a goofily inept poem entitled “Holy Shit!,” but what Maya really wants is for him to prove how much of an, ahem, cunning linguist he is. You can probably see where this is going, and all salacious suspicions are proven after the first hipster-wardrobed applicant (Chris Voss) arrives.
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