A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (B-minus) - Rachel Elizabeth Seed goes in search of her mother, a noted photographer and journalist who died at 42 when Rachel was 18 months old, in this ruminative documentary of personal discovery.
Seed, a producer on "I Am Greta," threads the film with 1970s interviews conducted by her mother, Sheila Turner-Seed, with famous photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson (whose quote about capturing moments -- "Life is once, forever" -- is featured twice in the film). As a visual gimmick, Seed stages coy black-and-white re-creations, with obscured faces and obtuse angles. (It turns out she plays her mother in these and other scenes.)
This is textbook filmmaking as psychotherapy, and the daughter's yearning spills out on the screen like a dull primal wail. You ache for her, as she never got to know her mother, but Seed fails to elevate the subject here to anything beyond glum scrapbooking. Interviews with her father, a onetime stock photographer based in Chicago, feel rather antiseptic.
The movie feels much longer than 87 minutes as Seed grasps for insight that eludes her. The images and clips get repetitive as she fumbles among several false endings. It's all rather touching but oddly unsatisfying in the end. I hope it helped her fill that hole inside.
HORSE GIRL (2020) (B) - The penultimate film from on of our favorites, Jeff Baena, finds Allison Brie as a lost soul gradually having a mental breakdown. What could have been cringe scans more like bittersweet heartbreak.
She plays shy, awkward Sarah, prone to nosebleeds, and psychologically damaged, apparently by a horse-riding accident that injured a girl she had been training. Sarah is haunted by a recurring dream, in which she is abducted by aliens, lying prone in a sterile white room along with an older man and younger woman. When she spots the man in real life, she stalks him.
Sarah's increasingly odd behavior aggravates her roommate, Nikki (Debby Ryan), and worries her colleague at the fabric store, Joan (Molly Shannon). When introduced to sweet, awkward Darren (John Reynolds, one of the alums from TV's "Search Party" seen here), her cuteness charms him, but her quirks start to unnerve him. She likes him mainly because he has the same name as the lead character from a fictional TV show she binge watches. (She also is obsessed with an image of her grandmother, who bears a striking likeness to her; to most people that's a common genetic result, but to Sarah it is proof of a nefarious secret cloning experiment.)
Writer-director Baena ("The Little Hours," "Joshy") is at his most somber here. He finds the funny in small situations, and he cleverly mixes serious drama with nervous humor. He has an obvious chemistry with his star, Brie. (He and Brie and Shannon would take things a little lighter, but still moody, in "Spin Me Round" two years later. Brie co-wrote "Horse Girl" and "Spin Me Round.") She is compelling here as the proverbial slow-motion car crash. The film can drag across 103 minutes, but Baena, who died in January, knew how to mine his own troubled soul for the kind of dark comedy that always kept you off balance.
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