There’s a scene in the middle of Hal Hartley’s 1992 indie “Simple Men” where a cryptic brunette played by gamin actress Elina Löwensohn — ice-pale, with blunt black bangs — interrupts the plot with a choreographed dance number to a fuzzy track by Sonic Youth. Hartley wanted to break the fourth wall, and here comes filmmaker Chiara Malta (who co-wrote the script with Sébastien Laudenbach and Marco Pettenello) to smash his rubble into dust with her playful narrative debut.
“Simple Women” spins that musical moment into a dizzying story about ambition and artistic competition in which Löwensohn plays herself as the object of obsession for an aspiring Italian director named Federica (Jasmine Trinca), who’s been fixated on Löwensohn’s “Simple Men” character since the ’90s for making epilepsy look glamorous. That Federica wears owl-eyed glasses that make her the mirror image of Malta is no coincidence in a movie that...
“Simple Women” spins that musical moment into a dizzying story about ambition and artistic competition in which Löwensohn plays herself as the object of obsession for an aspiring Italian director named Federica (Jasmine Trinca), who’s been fixated on Löwensohn’s “Simple Men” character since the ’90s for making epilepsy look glamorous. That Federica wears owl-eyed glasses that make her the mirror image of Malta is no coincidence in a movie that...
- 9/13/2019
- by Amy Nicholson
- Variety Film + TV
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