Anna Margarita Albelo 2013 USA
Starring: Anna Margarita Albelo, Agnès Olech, Janina Gavankar, Guinevere Turner, Carrie Preston, Celeste Pechous
As a committed cinephile I've never really been blind to filmic faults and, like many others, I have my annoyances with the industry. The recent glut of unnecessary remakes, The Last Exorcism having a sequel (surely it should have been renamed The Penultimate Exorcism) and Liam Neeson all rate highly but right up there with them is the harmful misrepresentation of films in reviews and blurbs. Case in point, I recently saw and mostly enjoyed Xavier Dolan's Tom At The Farm, an intriguing psychodrama that Amazon nonetheless listed as a "gay-themed mystery". The problem being that it isn't. In fact the sole mystery was why Dolan couldn't come up with a proper ending. The lead character and his deceased partner both happen to be gay but their sexuality figures only very slightly in the narrative and then far less than grief, obligation, family, masochism, anger, existential ennui and modern disenchantment with technology. Even worse is the possibility that potential viewers unfamiliar with impressive director Dolan would see Amazon's description and simply write his work off as homoerotic softcore instead of the complex, intense drama that it actually is. Sadly the same fate has befallen Anna Margarita Albelo's Who's Afraid Of Vagina Wolf, referred to in one review as "a lesbian drama" even though the only word of the three that truly applies to it is 'a'. Again the protagonist played by Albelo herself is a lesbian but that's hardly the crux of the plot. In one way Albelo's fitting but not exactly subtle pun title doesn't help matters, risking making the film to be a gimmicky sex movie when in reality it's closer to the obsessive, self-examining romantic comedies of Woody Allen or even the hipster tales of a less self-attacking Lena Dunham. To dispel a couple of other myths, the film also isn't anything like the work that it borrows from, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, nor is it about a 'vagina wolf', whatever one of those is (the equivalent of a liger or a pussy hound maybe). Here Albelo plays Anna, presumably a version of herself and a director in crisis. Just turned forty she's single, unemployed, lives in her friend's garage and spends her evenings dancing in a vagina costume in an attempt to gain professional attention. Life seems bleak until she meets Katia Amour, a post-feminist intellectual, and falls hopelessly in love. Perhaps taking her cue from Allen she resolves to win her paramour via any spectacular lie she can come up with, in this case that she's in the process of embarking upon an all-female adaptation of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. She's not of course but she soon has to make a start. It's a witty premise full of sparky experimentation and interesting characters like the lovelorn cinematographer who hates being filmed (the compelling Agnès Olech carrying as much of the emotional weight as Albelo) and who initially mistakes the project for porn - a pleasingly knowing in-joke. Aside from a couple of instances of poor scripting and exaggeration everyone does well, the only failure being Janina Gavankar (so wooden she's practically a fire risk). She may be gorgeous enough to make Anna's instant desire for her completely understandable but her personality is only notable by its utter absence. The closing scenes could have been stronger and perhaps more passionate but for a debut indie feature it's a promising starting point and considerably more likeable than Dunham's excoriating cool.