Away From Her
March 15th, 2007
Sarah Polley’s first feature, an adaptation of an Alice Munro short story about a couple dealing with Alzheimer’s, is getting a lot of praise on the festival circuit, and she was appropriately celebrated at the premiere for MoMA’s Canadian Front program last night.
Julie Christie plays a woman in her sixties who finds herself putting pans into the freezer, and before you know it, her husband of 44 years (Gordon Pinsent) has to drive her to a home — where she soon forgets all about him and begins a touching/infuriating relationship with another patient instead. It’s well acted, of course, but the dialogue is a tad too “literary” for my taste, and Polley’s direction left me somewhat confused in the end. Still, it’s a story that rarely gets told–when was a last time you saw a tour of a nursing home as act-ending set piece? It’s goes without saying that it’s all terribly sad, even though there are a few flashes of humor. In a way, this is a movie not quite unlike Severance: Away From Her can be just as hard to take, and you really have to be in the mood for it. At the Q&A with Polley and Olympia Dukakis, it was nice to see that Polley can, in fact, smile.
Away from Her. Sarah Polley, 2006. ***
- Official site with trailer
- Wikipedia
- Away from Her on Rotten Tomatoes
- Away from Her on GreenCine: Sundance
- The Reeler has photos and quotes from last night’s screening
- Reverse Shot loved it
- YouTube Bonus:
Don’t Look Now
June 2nd, 2005
Greatness. Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 shocker is still as creepy as I remembered, and the famous sex scene between Julie Christie and Donald Southerland is even better (because I see more clearly how well it serves its dramatic purpose.) The wintery Venice setting is amazingly well used, and the morbid atmosphere couldn’t be any thicker. What amazed me most this time around was how absolutely central the editing is to the film’s effectiveness and even the narrative. In a way, the editing is the point of the film. If you haven’t seen this, don’t read any more and just get hold of a copy.
