Women in Film Movie Review

Phew! I looked at the title of Women in Film and, figuring this would be some snoozy documentary about Joan Crawford, et al., I almost tossed it into the transom pile of TV compilations and PBS documentaries that we never end up reviewing.

Would that I had. Women in Film is an actual film, a real movie-movie based on Bruce Wagner's novel I'm Losing You. The film follows the verbal memoirs of three women involved with the film trade -- a producer (Beverly D'Angelo), a casting director (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), and a masseuse (Portia de Rossi), talking to the camera and never with another character in the room. The movie flips around among the three, with no rhyme or reason for the switches, and no story having anything to do with the others.

Ultimately, it reveals itself as a truly, truly awful independent experiment like The Laramie Project, a vanity project for everyone involved, obviously done so di Rossi can prove to the world that she can do more than hair care commercials, and so D'Angelo and Jean-Baptiste can prove that they are still living on this planet.

Their dialogue is atrocious and unreal, and the delivery is so stilted it pushes the movie into a Picasso world where nothing is believable. There are no insights on Hollywood here. There are no insights into women, either. "Real real real" vignettes like di Rossi on the toilet or D'Angelo in the bathtub are meant to make you think this is all happening in the real world, but you'd have to be an imbecile to be fooled. Title cards, shock zooms, non-sequitur intercuts, and odd music cues all serve to remind you that this is nothing but a bad, bad, bad movie.

Avoid at all costs. For a far more successful rendition of the same theme, check out Ten Tiny Love Stories.