Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman

Posted: Monday, December 11, 2006

An Easy Films presentation in association with Zohe Film Prods. Produced by Claus Ladegaard, Jennifer Fox. Co-producers, Kerthy Fix, Amy Foote, Mette Mailand, Elizabeth Mandel. Directed, written by Jennifer Fox.

"What do women want?" asked a frustrated Sigmund Freud, and with "Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman," Jennifer Fox gives him an answer: They're not quite sure. Starting with the specific (herself) and aiming at general truths, Fox takes viewers on a six-hour trip into modern womanhood that is sui generis in format but universal in its themes, and is destined to be controversial as it aspires to bridge gaps between ages, sexes, cultures and religions. With European broadcast already assured, "Flying" will find alternate venues through fests and arthouse marathons while looking for a home on American TV.

Like the ubiquitous literary memoir, the video diary/personal doc is successful only when it transcends its subject. With that in mind, the premise of "Flying" sounds doomed: six hours about a woman trying to figure out sex, work, love and babies while chatting with her girlfriends? Many would rather be dipped in honey, strapped naked to an anthill and forced to watch "The Best of 'The View.' " But the nerve it takes to expose herself -- and her friends, which is another issue -- is matched by Fox's ability to twist the confessional doc into a globe-trotting highbrow soap opera, whose resolutions depend not on bodice-ripping turmoil but worldviews that are well-considered, if not always logical or emotionally reconcilable.

Fox's own womanhood provides the spine of the film, and she is brutally frank about the vagaries of her erotic-romantic relationships. At the outset, there is a married lover in South Africa (he remains anonymous throughout), as well as a Swiss cinematographer named Patrick, whose faithfulness and acceptance of Fox's rococo romantic life arestrangely inspiring.

What Fox ends up asking, straightforwardly, is why woman can't live the way so many men traditionally have. What she asks, obliquely, is why monogamy is so hard. What she celebrates, in a subtler way still, is self-determination. Each episode -- and watching them back-to-back is a good way to do it -- opens in a different part of the world and with an intro updated from the previous chapter. Fox's careers as film teacher and filmmaker (she won the 1987 grand jury and cinematography prizes at Sundance for "Beirut: The Last Home Movie") take her around the world, thus providing a transglobal cast of women: Pat, a blues singer who undergoes surgery for a brain tumor and ends up in chronic pain; Ladawn, who for seven years has been fighting her ex-husband for child support; and Mindy, who decides to marry her musician boyfriend because she wants to have a baby.

Scope widens to include women in India, Russia, South Africa, Pakistan and England (where Fox encounters Somali women fighting their nation's tradition of female genital mutilation). At one point (episode 4), Fox winds up in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, where she interviews women who have been rendered unmarriagable through rape or seduction and have thus turned to prostitution. No other scene better represents the film's perspective: Fox is always conscious that the concerns of a middle-class filmmaker from New York City pale in comparison with the ordeals of Third World women.

She, for instance, can choose whether to marry, work, have sex or have children -- although the last of these choices is taken out of her hands and put in those of in vitro fertilization experts and insemination clinics. Fox's late-inning desire to have a baby becomes an obsessive issue and is another aspect in the knotty, jagged prospect of being a 21st-century woman.

Production values are fine, and the work by celebrated Danish editor Niels Pagh Anderson is miraculous. Fox's technique -- "passing the camera," in which everyone shoots everyone else -- tends to give the production a homemade feel. Or perhaps it could be calleda woman's touch. But only in the most respectful sense.

Camera (color, DV), Fox and cast; editor, Niels Pagh Anderson; music, Jan Tilman Schade; sound, Fox; sound mixer, Peter Shultz; associate producer, Ariel Amsalem. Reviewed at Intl. Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Nov. 30, 2006. Running time: 353 MIN.

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