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copyright ©1999-2003
DigsMagazine.com.
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Plot synopsis
Personality
Velocity
is really three short films strung together to make one long feature,
each story centered on a brief time in the life of a different woman,
linked only by a common theme: those tiny little moments in a person’s
life that might look like nothing from the outside, but mark a deep and
determined shift in the course of that one small life that’s been
stagnant for too long. Delia, formerly the town slut in her wild teen
years, is now a battered wife and the mother of three young kids. After
one violent outburst too many, Delia gets the courage to gather her
children and leave her husband, her own anger, fear and just plain
common sense finally overcoming the unfortunate fact that she really
does love the abusive jerk. She flees to upstate New York where an old
high school acquaintance gives Delia and the kids a place to stay, and
Delia tries to forge a new life. Greta is the Ivy-league educated
daughter of a famous lawyer, who’s beginning to feel like every bit
the failure she knows her high-powered dad thinks her to be. She’s
married to a kind, adoring, but completely unambitious graduate student,
and languishing in an unchallenging job as an editor of cookbooks for a
New York publishing house – until from completely out-of-the-blue one
day, her boss tells her that a hot young author, latest darling of the
literary world, has specifically requested that Greta edit his
eagerly-anticipated next novel. Paula’s a scrappy young woman, barely
out-of-her-teens, who’s just discovered that she’s pregnant. She’s
having problems with her boyfriend, which is how she comes to find
herself at a club one evening, hooking up with a stranger. The two of
them are walking down the street afterwards when a car comes barreling
towards them, hitting and killing him, and leaving her in shock. Paula
flees the scene, jumps into her car, and takes off, without a clue as to
where she’s heading, except that she has to get away. En route to who
knows where, she picks up a young, silent, teenage boy who’s also
running away.
Review
Some
people need their stories to have resolution: a lesson, a neat
conclusion, a clear explanation that arrives by the time the closing
credits roll, something to make them feel like they know what they’re
supposed to think. I like those stories too, sometimes. But I also like
the stories that skip the beginning and end, jump straight into the
middle of a character’s life with some single, salient event -- give
me a tiny little sliver of a person’s life, a tantalizing glimpse, a
pointed peek -- then end without telling me what happens to these
characters after, leaving me to imagine the what ifs for myself. This is
what shorts do well, distill lives into concise key moments, cut out the
fat, leave in only what’s important – the danger, of course, being
that the details that are deemed crucial enough to reveal in the short
story or film can sometimes border on the precious. Rebecca Miller’s Personal
Velocity does occasionally fall into this trap – mostly due to the
overuse of voice-over, as the narrator (curiously enough male) wryly and
rather dispassionately reveals little tidbits from the characters’
pasts. But the three beautifully-realized, terrifically specific women
at the center of the film are such a refreshing change from the usual
generic females we see in more mainstream movies that Personal
Velocity sometimes feels like a revelation, despite its flaws. Both
Fairuza Balk and Kyra Sedgwick are superb in their performances, but
it’s Parker Posey’s segment as Greta that’s the standout, with
every detail – from the way Greta’s dressed, in that awful headband,
to her weird, stiff posture, to the different facades she puts up to
interact with her family, friends and husband – crystalline-clear,
weirdly funny and achingly revealing.
Personal Velocity manages
to avoid becoming an artsy-fartsy version of a Lifetime movie thanks to
its lovely, quirky look at three quirky women.
—reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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