Dir. Vadim Perelman, US, 2007, 90 mins
Cast: Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood
Review by Carol Allen Perelman showed with his debut movie (House of Sand) his preference for an off beat story. Based on a novel by Laura Kasischke, this film provides strong female roles, has a compelling storyline and an intriguing twist.
Thurman plays Diana, who has an apparently perfect life in the sleepy Connecticut suburb, where she was brought up. Loving husband, pretty young daughter, beautiful house. Fifteen years earlier though, when Diana was in high school, she was at the centre of a tragedy, when one of her fellow students went berserk with a machine gun, killing fifteen fellow students and teachers, including her best friend Maureen (Eva Amurri), whom he murdered in front of Diana's eyes. As the anniversary of the massacre approaches, Diana is haunted by visions of the past and guilt about whether she could have done anything to save her friend's life.
The film opens with the massacre, which is disturbingly realistic, as the girls chattering merrily in the toilets hear the distant sounds of gunfire and screams and then the gunman bursts in on them. The film cuts back and forth between Diana in the present and her past self. The intense teenage friendship between the rebellious young Diana (Wood) and the rather staid and religious Maureen is convincing, while Thurman effectively handles the gradual disintegration of Diana's present life.
Perelman introduces an increasingly uneasy atmosphere into her world, as things that happen in her present eerily reproduce incidents from the days leading up to the massacre, with the past bleeding into the present. Pawel Edelman's stylish cinematography effectively adds to this feeling, as he pans his camera over the perfection of Diana's kitchen, with its fresh fruit and flowers, then returning to the same shot with the flowers drooping and the food rotting. As the film progresses niggling questions start to arise in your mind. Why, for example, is Diana still living in that same town, when her youthful self, who had a difficult relationship with her divorced mother, couldn't wait to grow up and get away? A lot of things don't appear to add up. The answer, when it comes in the dénouement, is an unusual and thought provoking one.
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