Jennifer Fox has no shortage of chutzpah. To offer a six-hour documentary about your love life requires a level of ambition — or self-infatuation — most filmmakers would blanch at.
But here is “Flying … Confessions of a Free Woman,” a kind of real-life miniseries, for which Fox turned her camera on herself. Actually, the movie’s most interesting when the camera is pointed at other people, for Fox turns out to be a rather dippy interpreter of her own life’s meaning.
The movie covers roughly three years in Fox’s early 40s, and for most of the running time she is torn between two lovers. Actually, “torn” isn’t quite right — she seems to enjoy having a boyfriend in Switzerland and a married lover in South Africa.
She lives in New York, by the way, in the kind of fabulous apartment usually reserved for people in sitcoms. Fox is constantly jetting off to far-flung places, either to give documentary seminars or simply soothe her stressed-out mind. (One of the important lessons of this movie is that when things get tough, a two-week trip to Germany or India is called for.)
Speaking of which, there’s never an explanation of how Fox affords the apartment and the constant traveling. The lush life of a documentary filmmaker? Good grant-writing skills? Family money? Whatever the answer, she never comments on how fortunate she is to enjoy this luxury, and never displays any humor about it.
Fox muses on her upbringing, when she felt closer to her father than to her mother. She craves the freedom of flying, and she pursues that in her life, never allowing a man to dictate her decisions. Or so she says.
As she interviews other women all over the world, Fox’s talent for navel-gazing is tested by some of the very serious problems she meets outside herself. Prostitution in Cambodia, female genital mutilation in Africa, the cancer battles waged by friends — these are challenges to her nutty focus on herself.
You keep hoping that somebody will come along and tell Fox to snap out of it, already. For a bright, well-educated person, she’s pretty obtuse about the simpler kinds of life lessons (it never occurs to her that she might be so besotted with her married lover in South Africa because he’s … married and in South Africa, and thus unavailable in any real sense).
As annoying as Fox is, “Flying” certainly offers the fascination of a good reality show, and as it goes on (and on), you really become curious about how the whole thing is going to turn out. Serious issues deepen the final couple of episodes, and by the time it was finished, I was glad I watched it, sort of. “Flying” is divided into one-hour chunks, which SIFF Cinema (Seattle International Film Festival) is bundling into three-hour packages. You’ve been warned.
“Flying … Confessions of a Free Woman”
No fear: Documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox focuses on her love life (and by extension the problems of women in the 21st century) in this six-hour opus, a kind of reality-TV miniseries. Fox is constantly jetting around the world to meet her lovers and dish with girlfriends, but despite her self-absorption, the movie eventually gains a certain amount of suspense.
Rated: Not rated. Probably R for language, nudity.
Now showing: Now through April 10, SIFF Cinema, 321 Mercer St., Seattle, 206-324-9996.
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