Last
week the fifth and final movie I saw at TIFF, was also my most anticipated of
the entire festival, Kelly Reichardt’s sixth and soon to be most seminal film
yet: Certain Women.
Certain Women is exactly about that, three
mini stories about three different women who work in the same rural counties
and whom lives cross paths with unfortunate acquainted circumstances of crisis.
Laura Dern is the focus of the first movie, then Michele Williams the second
and then Lily Gladstone the third along with Kristen Stewart. Each section is a
character study about a certain version of oppression towards a woman and the
effects it has on their perspective.
Kelly
Reichardt creates her best and most thoughtful piece yet of human observation
with Certain Women, by naturally
presenting the subtlety in the way a woman in a big career position is seen as less
assuring next to a man, how a woman is seen more aggressive when she’s being
assertive and how woman can’t easily be seen as heroic. Kelly Reichardt’s signature
style perfectly encapsulates this, by letting us sit with these characters and absorb
their organic emotional reactions, in a rural setting that reciprocates and
highlights those exact feelings. The best thing about Certain Women is that Reichardt’s doesn’t only show the plight of
these women, but points out these women have allowed their own resentment based
disillusions to remove them from realizing their emotional mistakes.
Laura
Dern does a surrounding job as a broken down lawyer with a troubled client,
Michele Williams does a poignant measured job as a wife and mother who cares
more about her business than her own family, but Lily Gladstone is the break
out performance of the film, as a naïve loner ranch worker who falls for the
maniac yet cavalier Kristen Stewart.
Certain Women is no doubt Kelly Reichardt’s
best film and is a marvel in exposure, and the best way to understand it, is to
see it.
- Maurice Jones
No comments:
Post a Comment