Art of the Real previews; Jarmusch retrospective, FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

ROBERT GREENE: ACTRESS (2014)


BRANDY BURRE IN ACTRESS

An former actress dramatizes her own life as a housewife

"This thoroughly compelling and at times thoroughly unnerving new film by Robert Greene (Fake It So Real) is a documentary that feels like intimate melodrama. Brandy Burre had a recurring role on HBO’s The Wire when she gave up her career to start a family. After a few years of life in the country, she decides to return to acting, and sets the denouement of her relationship in motion. As she comes apart on camera in varying shades of drama, it's never clear at what level this film may simply be the next role." So reads the Art of the Real FSLC blurb. But this film is more suitable for a PBS series than a festival, and it is hardly new in any way technically. It very much resembles the famous and pioneering pre-reality show 12-hour 1973 PBS series "An American Family," in which also the parents in question of the Loud family, whose eldest son Lance is openly gay, find their marriage falling apart. Here, Burre's husband, who is poorly depicted in the film, a restauranteur, apparently distant as a husband, if a diligent father to the two small children rarely utters a line on camera. While he and the kids are on a trip visiting his parents, Brandy enjoys her freedom by having a date with an unidentified man in New York City, away from her and her husband's Beacon, New York residence. It is when Brandy's husband discovers this relationship that he decides the marriage is on the rocks and it's time to move out to his own apartment, and there are hints in Brandy's earlier monologues to the camera that love had gone out of the marriage well before this. Descriptions of the film that imply it's Brandy's decision to go back into acting that causes the marriage to disintegrate go against the facts as shown in the film itself.

There is too much pointless use of slow motion in this film, which moves too slowly as it is. The 88 minutes feel like much more. Filming of Brandy's expressed thoughts about getting acting roles and preparations for auditions is needlessly drawn out, and when we expect something to happen, instead, everything stops because Brandy has fallen out of her car and suffered contusions to her eye. Fake It So Real being the director's previous film, about pro wrestlers, the obvious high concept of the film is that Brandy will be self-dramatizing in her "playing" of herself even when engaged in mundane tasks like feeding the children. But it's hard to see anything new in this Whether or not Brandy's tears are exaggerated or not when she recounts moments when her partner first showed he cared more about his restaurant than about her, the sentiments are such as any disappointed woman would express. Obviously the Loud family in "An American Family" in 1973 became "actors" too because cameras were always being trained upon them and their interactions. Actress plays as the closing night film in the Art of the Real 2014 series at Lincoln Center Saturday, April 26 at 8:00pm. Filmmaker Robert Greene and subject Brandy Burre in person for Q&A.