Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her by Rodrigo Garcia

What a great title, hey? Enough to make me snatch this off of the video shelf despite Calista Flockhart being kinda passé these days. It promises six stories of six different women played by hip and cool actresses. So all the elements I like, interlocking narratives, grrls. The first scene is the best, with Glenn Close being her usual amazing self with a face that says it all. Ally MacBeal/CF shows up as a kind of hippie dippie psychic and does her tarot cards. Now, just between you and me, the reading she does is entirely for the purposes of script because there is no way cards say the kinds of things she does eg. you are divorced, your friends were mainly your husband's friends and now you don't have any. I mean, the Tower, for example, doesn't give those kind of details. But tarot niggling aside, it really fits the title and you can just look at Glenn Close really close (ha) and see that all of this is true. After that the pace gently starts to grind to a halt. Suddenly we have lots of pretty young women kissing one another or pretending to be blind and looking sad all the time. And the always unsuccessful character of a wise bag lady. There is a wee little aha at the end when you see how the stories link and suspect suddenly that one minor character may have been the writer/director. And he's a boy, so that explains how the plot veered off into concerns that don't really strike a deep chord. Title should in fact be: some women I have slept with. Uh oh, now I am insulting the son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Ah, latin men. Never made it to the cinemas, which is strange considering all the star power here. [JL]

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