| Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Rodrigo Garcia |
| Produced by | Jon Avnet Lisa Lindstrom Marsha Oglesby |
| Written by | Rodrigo García |
| Starring | Glenn Close Cameron Diaz Calista Flockhart Kathy Baker Amy Brenneman Valeria Golino Holly Hunter Matt Craven Gregory Hines Miguel Sandoval |
| Music by | Edward Shearmur |
| Cinematography | Emmanuel Lubezki |
| Editing by | Amy E. Duddleston |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
| Release date(s) | January 22, 2000 (first screened at Sundance Film Festival) March 11, 2001 (publicly released on Showtime) |
| Running time | 109 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her is a film written and directed by Rodrigo García starring an ensemble cast. Garcías debut film was shown at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival and won the Un Certain Regard Award.[1] Holly Hunter was nominated for the 2001 Emmy in the supporting actress category.
Contents |
Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her consists of five stories or vignettes, tied together loosely to envision the complexity of incomplete communications about life, family, and love. We glimpse the lives of five women, each facing problems such as loneliness, dissatisfaction, longing, and or desire. Rodrigo Garcia, in his first-time directing, assembled this film with a loaded cast of actresses who can tell you everything you need to know just by their body language and facial expressions. Their individual stories show us what “things you can tell just by looking at her”.
In the film's prologue, Kathy (Amy Brenneman) --a police detective--and her partner are investigating the apparent suicide of an unknown woman. Dr. Keener (Glenn Close), a middle-aged doctor, attempts to care for her aging mother while coping with her own loneliness. She avoids intimacy, but also longs for it; we see both frustration and anticipation as she waits for phone calls from male colleagues. Dr. Keener decides to seek comfort or escape in Christine (Calista Flockhart) who reads tarot cards. Christine’s partner Lilly (Valeria Golino) is critically ill with an unnamed disease, possibly cancer.
Rebecca (Holly Hunter) is a successful bank manager who's "not big on regrets". After a three-year involvement with Robert (Gregory Hines)--who keeps her secret from his wife--she becomes pregnant. Before Rebecca visits Dr. Keener to get an abortion, she has a fling with Walter, (Matt Craven), a co-worker. Rose (Kathy Baker) is a single mother who is writing children’s books, and develops a sweet crush on a new dwarf neighbor (Danny Woodburn), who catches Rose spying on him. Rose later experiences the shock of learning about her son's extensive sexual activity.
Kathy's sister Carol Faber (Cameron Diaz) is a lovely blind woman who has an active social life. Kathy is attracted to the medical examiner in the suicide case, and her story ends with him taking her out on a date. In an epilogue, Dr. Keener drops in to a bar, where she meets the male character, Walter, from previous stories (possibly the younger male alluded to in Christine's tarot card reading).
Carmen has a non-speaking role, a woman who appears in four scenes in four different stories, once walking beside Rebecca (Holly Hunter), and once in the grocery store while Rose (Kathy Baker) is shopping, and once under Christine's balcony (Calista Flockhart), and the fourth a postmortem examination by detective Kathy (Amy Brenneman) alongside Kathy's BF, Dr Sam (Miguel Sandoval). Presumably, Carmen is also Robert's (Gregory Hines) wife who was visited by him in San Francisco, as understood from Carol's (Cameron Diaz) imaginative story towards the end of the film. Carol has a good detective and storytelling imagination that could qualify her to be a good writer, according to her sister, Kathy.
Another conclusion involves that Robert (Gregory Hines) has taken a detective job from Carol (Cameron Diaz), according to one of Carol's lines. This is a very loose conclusion based on the film's whole plot and hyperlink cinema.
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