FLYING: CONFESSIONS OF A FREE WOMAN sss
Known for such PBS documentaries as Beirut: The Last Home Movie (1987) and An American Love Story (1999), a miniseries about the everyday life of an interracial couple, Fox does a fair amount of globe-trotting, and during the time frame of Flying she’s juggling two lovers on separate continents who know about each other. The less serious relationship is with Patrick, a Swiss-German cinematographer she sees more often, mainly in New York (he’s credited as the film’s “technical supervisor”). Kye is a South African poet she sees infrequently in South Africa, where she sometimes teaches. (Kye’s married with kids and keeping his affair a secret; he remains almost completely off-camera.)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The problem is, when you’re doing so many different things at once–struggling with your values, filming your struggle, and trying to make it compelling while remaining honest–something ultimately has to give. No one’s life qualifies as an absorbing soap opera all the time, and clearly special solutions are required for those junctures when it doesn’t. So it’s the moments when the narrative of her life appears to be most artfully arranged and told that Fox’s undertaking starts to seem most questionable. (Her elliptical ways of representing Kye–showing just enough of him, or of a stand-in, to reveal that he’s black, but without making a big deal of the fact that theirs is an interracial romance–create some related ambiguities.)
where Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State
