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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
A pretty portrait of alienation, if you like that kind of thing
Supplied photo Filmmaker Ingrid Veninger cheaps out on her Halloween costume.
A HIP Toronto filmmaker and her daughter make a film about a hip Toronto filmmaker and her daughter.
That description alone will likely turn off anyone who has ever taken a chance on a film festival offering and found themselves immersed in the navel-gazing meditations of an angst-ridden artiste trapped in his or her own head.
Toronto-based writer-director-star Ingrid Veninger deserves a little more consideration. Her film Only was a similarly zero-budget, shot-off-the-cuff drama that succeeded in revealing the inner lives of children experiencing those scary-liberating feelings of alienation from their parents.
Veninger shot this film mostly in Europe while she was attending various film festivals in support of her last film, Modra. With minimal crew and mostly family members for support, she manages to spin a pretty, Euro-bleak portrait of alienation.
Ruby White (played by Veninger herself) is a neurotic urbanite filmmaker with a penchant for TMI. Indeed, the film actually plunges into an uncomfortable too-much-information intimacy in its first minute, with Ruby on the toilet readying herself for a one-way sexual encounter with the hubby before she and her daughter Sara (Veninger's daughter Hallie Switzer) fly to Europe to promote Ruby's newest art film, Head Shots. (It's about a photographer of penises. Evidently, if Ruby isn't getting satisfaction at home, she's enjoying the benefits of her artistic freedom.)
But in Britain, Ruby's attempts at bonding with her distant daughter are exposed as minimal. Ruby, the wild mom, wants to party. Sara, the responsible daughter, wants to go to the hotel.
They split up, with Sara heading to Paris and visiting a cousin and Ruby heading to Berlin, where she tries to flog her movie while experiencing a dawning realization about her life and work.
One hopes this isn't autobiographical: Ruby is not likable, wrapped up in how she projects to the world (wearing fake eyeglasses to look smarter) while missing the fact that her daughter (soulfully played by Switzer) is experiencing a crisis of her own.
With its nicely shot European locales and its aching mother-daughter tensions, this is a compelling short film trapped in a feature film's running time.
Movie review
I Am a Good Person/I Am a Bad Person
Starring Ingrid Veninger and Hallie Switzer
Cinematheque
Subject to classification
72 minutes
21Ñ2 stars out of five
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 5, 2012 D4
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