The teenage girl from the row in front of us summed it up best, as we all poured out of the Plaza Frontenac theater Sunday evening. "The synopsis was better than the film!"
She's right. That little paragraph in the St. Louis International Film Festival booklet promised all sorts of fascinating existential drama in Helen, as a young girl with what looks like the perfect life (loving parents, cute boyfriend) goes missing, and a girl from a "care home" (we're in the U.K.) is chosen to play the missing girl's part in a reconstruction of her last known movements.
It didn't bother me that no police force I know would go through weeks of "rehearsals" for a dramatic reconstruction of walking through a park.
It didn't even bother me that the film started at the elegiac pace of a Henry James novel.
In fact, I was charmed by that. Finally, a reprieve from hyperkinetic barrage. A film that trusted us to be still and quiet, to reflect, to be moved by subtlety. I liked that the mother of the missing girl did not throw a keening hysterical fit, but simply buried her face in the daughter's jacket, trying to inhale her smell.
The problem is, a restrained pace requires content: powerful characterizations to absorb, big ideas or compelling tensions on which to reflect.
We meet an interesting cop in the beginning, like him as he argues cheerfully with his wife about pirate costumes for the kids...and never see him again. There's a female cop who does the only compelling acting in the film, and she plays an aupicious role explaining the reconstruction...and then vanishes as effectively as the missing girl. The parents remain predictable.
The only constant, interesting, vulnerable character is Helen, the young woman whose parents abandoned her early in life. Initially, I liked her deer-in-the-headlights portrayal; she had the blunt pathos of a kid who never learned social skills. But she remained so emotionally monotone, it was hard to see anything happening--or care.
At one point--finally!--there looked to be some interesting tension. Helen was getting to know the missing girl's parents and boyfriend, trying diffidently to insert herself into their lives. Surely grieving parents and an articulate boyfriend would have some reaction to this, some complicated response?
Not so much.
OK,I thought, instead, this will all hinge on Helen's mysterious past. The social worker tells her she's 18 now, she can read her file, and Helen refuses. I wait eagerly.
She calls back the next day and says OK, she'd changes her mind.
What she learns is predictable--no need to bother with an alert here, because there is no drama to spoil. After all those long, drawn-out, suggestive sequences, the film ends abruptly.
I suppose it should have felt existential and haunting. Maybe hyperkinetic stimulation has dulled my senses. All I know is, there was more passion in a frustrated conversation between strangers after the film than anywhere in the film itself. "The synopsis sounded so great!" the young woman wailed, and the rest of us agreed.
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
