Women on the edge

At first it is a little strange to find a film narrated by a male voice-over that concentrates so internally on three women. But Rebecca Miller wrote the three "portraits", only tenuously linked, as short stories; perhaps a male narrator helped her with detachment in directing them.

Anyhow, it is a luxury these days, when literacy is scarcely in demand by Hollywood, to have a film "read" to one, even if the prose ("The toxic blend of anxiety and elation was building up in Greta's skull") sometimes

congeals. The players are also reasonably unfamiliar, thus refreshing. Each 25 to 30-minute segment has the strengths and weaknesses of The New Yorker style: cold, dagger-thrust ending, or simply no clear ending at all.

In Delia, Kyra Sedgwick is a trampish woman who escapes the destructive cycle of wife-bashing, only to find that her successful attempt to assert her own gender autonomy with a teenager leaves her longing for the old argy-bargy.

In Greta, Parker Posey is a svelte New York book editor hired to give a lean look to a hot new writer's overblown prose, who then decides to trim her own life of marital fat. And in Paula, the most problematic of the triptych, a disturbed and unwilling young mother-to-be, played by Fairuza Balk, picks up a boy hitch-hiker and discovers that strangers don't always return a kindness.

Miller's direction of her own gender has a moment-to-moment immediacy that induces a surprising tension; and she expands the narrow time limit of each segment by confidently flashing back and forth to earlier moments in her heroines' lives, or even those of secondary characters.

The result: a much fuller experience than you expect, even if the emphasis on the angsts and terrors of being a woman results in emotional overload. Better that than being sold short-weight. A very promising debut.

Personal Velocity
Cert: cert15