| More a conglomeration of three shorts than a unified narrative, Personal Velocity: Three Portraits is an examination of the turning point where three different, almost completely unrelated women make a major change in their lives. At what point this happens, according to one woman’s adulterous father, all depends on the individual’s "personal velocity."
Delia Shunt (a cold and angry Kyra Sedgwick) is a housewife who works up the nerve to leave her husband when his abuse gets too severe. She’s ill-suited to life outside her relationship, but, for the sake of her children, she flees during the night. Hers is a story of a morally justified escape – her main challenge is finding a niche once she’s out from under his thumb.
Less justified is the escape of Greta Horskovitz (Parker Posey). She’s "cursed" with a handsome and successful but somewhat uninteresting husband. When she becomes successful in her publishing firm, she realizes that, although he’s good and loving, her husband can’t satisfy her emotional needs, and that she wants more. She leaves him for nobody in particular.
The situation of the third woman, Paula (Fairuza Balk), is a little confusing. She looks for signs in everyday life to help her make decisions, but gets slammed by too many at once. She meets a Swedish beefcake in a bar, trades sides with him on the sidewalk after she’s splashed with water, and then watches him get run down by a car exactly where she was standing seconds earlier. Then she finds she’s pregnant, flees aimlessly from her boyfriend in his car, picks up a hitchhiker and ends up at her mother’s house, where further wackiness ensues. After her car is stolen, she skips away happily, and the vignette ends. What exactly were these signs supposed to signify?
Personal Velocity is a visually appealing film, with colour and lighting setting the mood for most of the scenes. The film as a whole has a very clean and natural look, which is probably why it won the award for best cinematography at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.
My biggest frustration with this film stems from the open-ended nature of each vignette. Perhaps North American audiences rely too much on hand-holding, blunt plots and simplicity in films to lead them from beginning to end, but in the case of Personal Velocity, a little more hand-holding and direction would make the film easier to follow. We know where each of these women comes from due to the incredibly monotone exposition of narrator John Ventimiglia, but it’s really hard to prepare for the next woman’s story when you’re not sure the one before it has ended.
It’s irritating that such an absorbing set of strongly developed characters is left hanging so precipitously. None of the actresses can take the blame for the film’s flaws, since they all play their roles as though they were living their own lives. But Personal Velocity never comes back to centre, or ties the three women together solidly, and you’re left wondering what the big picture is. |
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