Nine Lives

Rodrigo Garcia gives nine women nine chapters and shoots each one in a single unbroken take. That was not a stunt but a schedule: two days per sequence, the first to rehearse, the second to shoot. Nothing can be rescued in the edit, so an actor has to carry a scene from door to door, and you can feel that pressure in every frame. The women never meet. One talks to her daughter through a prison visiting room phone, another runs into an old lover in a supermarket aisle, another has a picnic in a cemetery. The film won the Golden Leopard at Locarno, and the best actress prize there went to all nine leads at once, from Glenn Close and Sissy Spacek to Amanda Seyfried and Elpidia Carrillo. The flaw is structural. Some chapters end at the ten minute mark, right where you have started to care, and the film keeps restarting you. Who it is for: viewers who come for long takes and acting. Who it is not for: anyone who wants a story to arrive somewhere.