Features:
Description:
Like her mentor, Ross McElwee (Sherman's March), filmmaker Nina Davenport turns the camera on herself for this award-winning documentary about marriage and relationships. In a film more honest and insightful than any of the graphic sex talk on Sex and the City, Nina, 30, wonders if she is destined for a life of spinsterhood as one by one, her friends marry. "Ever since I was a little girl, I've been afraid of being alone," she confesses. Her job--as a wedding videographer, of all things--helps compound her anxiety, as does Nick, her ambivalent boyfriend who is five years younger and "in no hurry" to pop the question. "It's not easy to photograph love," Nina says. But in conversations both funny and touching, she talks about it with, among others, anxious brides, former boyfriends, aborted wedding pick-ups, and (much to his initial discomfort) Nick. Some senior citizens Nina has befriended provide the reality check. "There's more to life than getting married," one tells her. At one point, Nina reflects on the on-the-job stress of missing "the perfect moment." There are several in this film, among them, "a bestial scene of apocalyptic proportions," otherwise known as Filene's Basement's wedding dress sale, a bachelorette weekend coffee klatch ("You're needy," a friend tells Nina), and a climactic rowboat conversation between Nina and Nick that suggests their relationship may withstand rough waters ahead. This would be Henry Jaglom's idea of a date movie. Watch it with someone afraid to commit. --Donald Liebenson
|
