LAST STOP LARRIMAH (B) - There is something a little too slick about this deep dive into the mysterious disappearance of a resident of a tiny town in the outback of Australia. The inhabitants of Larrimah seem a little too camera-ready, and the narrative devices feel manipulative.
Newcomer Thomas Tancred has a great story to tell: One of the eccentrics the town is known for, Paddy Moriarty, has disappeared (as has his dog), and his neighbors are not exactly sad to see him go. Paddy had been feuding with his neighbor and her handyman. He had been an annoying presence at the town's bar. And did he piss off the owner of a crocodile one too many times? Everyone is quirky and entertaining. They all pretty much dislike each other.
It all plays like a brightly lit film noir, but don't hold your breath waiting for the mystery to unravel and the puzzle pieces to come together. Tancred spreads this out across two hours, dropping a new tease every quarter hour or so. The misdirection becomes the point, eventually, and while each chapter can be enjoyable, the slickly edited film can be unsatisfying as a whole. It's a clever exercise, but you might feel cheated in the end.
SMOKE SAUNA SISTERHOOD (B+) - Women gather in the woods of Estonia to cleanse bodies and souls in this arty documentary about female bonding. Most of it is shot in the cramped quarters of a sauna while the various permutations of the group of women bare their bodies and their emotions to each other.
The intimate conversations can be brutal to watch. We start out with some standard body-image conversations. But then things grow darker. The women discuss abortions, a particularly difficult miscarriage, and then a harrowing sexual assault. I felt like a voyeur at times; not sure if that was wrong of me or whether that was the intended reaction provoked by debut director Anna Hints.
Hints' camera doesn't shy away from the nudity displayed by women with a range of rather ordinary bodies. But the camera does have a habit of keeping faces and private parts out of frame. The story of the miscarriage is told while we look at the woman's bare feet the whole time. Interesting choice, but a distraction. The combination of claustrophobia and intimacy can be captivating at times, and you applaud the women for opening up (especially the few who show their faces).
But at times this feels manipulative and even choreographed. Did Hints help shape these women's narratives, or did the narratives spill out totally naturally? Were they coached and goaded at all, as if this were a very special episode of "The Real Housewives of Estonia"? The women are mostly middle-aged, and so there is a blanket of history -- in particular the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years ago -- that smothers the proceedings. It's as if an entire nation of women is exfoliating and expiating all of their hopes and sins.
EVERY BODY (B) - You don't get more body-positive than this polite polemic about intersex individuals -- that is, the fraction of 1 percent of humans who are born with contradictory sex signifiers. Here we meet Saifa (born with mostly male parts), River (also born with male parts but identifying as "they"), and Alicia, who is living life as a woman but who had been born with XY chromosomes and with testes (removed during childhood) instead of a womb.
All three are smart and engaging as subjects, and the film does not exploit or play up their unique traits, but rather takes a practical approach to what each went through as a child and how they navigated their unique issues. Alicia, in particular, is quite articulate as she leads a movement on behalf of intersex people and fighting the horrors of surgeries forced on children, often during infancy. We see footage from 60 years ago of one of the main proponents of early assignment surgery and gender-affirming parenting, John Money, and he becomes the overall bad guy whose outdated theories and studies have led to mutilation over the decades.
A fourth person, David, is featured prominently during the movie's middle third, and it feels like a bit of a cheat, given that David's story (his penis destroyed during circumcision, his parents were urged to raise him as a girl) is lifted liberally from reporting done by NBC's "Dateline." There was so much archival TV footage from David's tragic tale that I wondered whether I shouldn't just go watch that instead of this movie.
But that should not overshadow the benefits of this insightful and educational documentary that proves how ludicrous it is to insist on a strict binary interpretation of sex and gender. Julia Cohen (the biodocs "RBG" and "Julia") balances an upbeat attitude with a properly sober understanding of the challenges faced by the three main protagonists and the workmanlike ways in which they forge their paths in life. She sets the right tone with an opening montage of wacky gender-reveal stunts. But we have to take at least a half-grade off for the execrably bland cover versions of songs like "Born to Run" and "Our Lips Are Sealed," which create a distraction. And the latter one really clangs when you consider the unintentional double entendre it elicits.
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