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Title: Eileen is a Spy |
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Release Date: 1999 |
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Nationality and Language: |
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Running time: about 95 minutes |
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Distributor and Production Company: Cantadora |
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Director; Writer: Sayer Frey, John Kremer, music by Barbara Cohen; Director of photography: Moe Flaherty |
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Producer: |
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Cast: |
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Technical: Black and white |
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Relevance to HPPUB site: |
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Review: Cantadora Productions (2205
California St NE Minneapolis Mn 55418 cantadora.prod@usa.net) Written and Directed by Sayer
Frey; Produced by Sayer Frey and John Kremer; Music
by Barbara Cohen No rating given (I suggest PG-13); 75 Minutes; 8.5/10 Caption: “You can take the curiosity out of the
girl … but NOT the spy out of the woman.” This film
is the winning feature for the 1999 Maybery Award
for the Minnesota Film Board. The
winning short was the improvisatory bland-and-white fantasy Chromium Hook.
And
indeed, this is a nice little black-and-white movie (somehow reminds me of
the look of 1955 Sabrina), that makes you feel that you are at
the movies. Its feminist genre has a
rather gentle edge. The film
amounts to a personal account by a young woman who “comes out” to herself in
her ability to love women. She has to get over the psychological conditioning
and (I think) abuse by her father, who could not value women unless they were
“beautiful” (rather than “good” or “intelligent”) in order to indulge the
“needs” of men. In doing so, she
develops a certain “voyeuristic” approach to her world that resembles my own
in my Do Ask, Do Tell book. The script contains a lot of first-person
narration that sounds a bit conventional (unlike the narrative styles of American Beauty and Fight
Club, which are very effective) and that should have been replaced by
more interactive dialogue with the sparse other characters. And the script
could use more organization and structure (so effective, say, in Sleepers)
to give the viewer a sense of place. The BW
photography, though, satiated the eye constantly with on-location
upper-Midwest images. You approach
downtown Minneapolis from the Central Avenue Bridge crossing the Mississippi
(watch out for the speed trap!) and view the skyline, including the Churchill
Apartments in which I type this review. You see a woman lying on a bed from
above, almost that near-death look that reminds one of a similar, but
colorful shot in American Beauty.
Along the streets and roads (to borrow from a famous grade-school
reading text of the 1950’s), you feel yourself riding into a past generation:
tractors designed to look like Thomas locomotives run around a state fair,
and women (Mennonite??) sporting parasols march down a country road. Perhaps she has a bit of Clive Barker’s
dominions in her blood.
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