LONG TIME SINCE (director/writer/editor: Jay Anania; cinematographer: Oliver Bokelberg; cast: Jeff Webster (Cyril Troy), Julianne Nicholson (Phoebe), Julian Sands (Michael James), Paulina Porizkova (Diane Thwaite), Pascale Roger (assistant); Runtime: 89; Lucius Films; 1997)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
This is the first film to go from a Super-16 original to HDTV and then to a 35mm negative. It was shown at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival.
Jay Anania's second feature is a very cold, intellectual film that asks the question: Can we have a memory of what we only imagined? This is a mystery puzzler without much emotional impact or much of a payoff. It's imitative in its minimalist style of a Robert Bresson film. It was intent on saying something, but you would have to be a mind reader to know what it wanted to say.
The film opens on New Year's Eve, 1971. Robert Burn's Auld Lang Syne is playing on the car radio and Diane Thwaite (Paulina Porizkova, ex-supermodel) is on a rural road where she suddenly hits something with her car, and before she can be certain of that she faints. She is troubled that she thinks she hears a baby crying. This is something that will haunt her the rest of her life.
It's now 24 years later, and the ice cold, blonde beauty, Diane, is in NYC working as a noted illustrator of plant specimens for technical science books. She has a robotic love relationship with one of her colleagues at the foundation, Cyril Troy (Jeff Webster), who can't tell her what research he's doing in his study of man. He tells her some abstract tale about a man who drowned while reaching for his reflection.
For the first time since the accident she begins to have dreams and when she hears Auld Lang Syne on the radio, thoughts keep coming back to her: as she makes entries of them, does sketches of the faces she sees, leaves phone messages of her dreams on her boyfriend's phone, tells her hypnotherapist about them, requests hypnosis, and forms an impression that something evil happened that fatal night. It is out of the blue that her memory just comes back to her, as she tells her therapist that the evil is not the shooting by a man of a woman but something that she feels is greater than that; it is something deeper that occurred on the side of the road on that fatal New Year's Eve. Though, she still is not certain if what she envisions is a dream or a memory.
Warning: spoiler to follow.
Into the picture enters mystery man, Michael James (Julian Sands), who it turns out is the husband of a woman and baby reported missing around the time of Diane's car crash. When Diane's sleuth work tracks him down as the husband of the missing woman, she meets him in his NYC workplace and the mystery unravels. He tells how his unfaithful wife was shot by another man, who was her lover, and how the baby was taken away in a van. When she travels upstate in New York, she meets a small-town waitress named Phoebe (Julianne Nicholson), who tells her she was adopted at a young age and that she doesn't know who her parents are or where she was born. Diane gets as warm and cuddly as she possibly can get and offers the young lady a NYC job as her assistant. In her diary entry she writes: I met someone today. But I guess she also lost someone, because silent Cyril changed jobs and locations, and leaves her a phone message that he's gone.
To go along with the somber and ridiculously serious tone of the movie, there are moody vocals by Judy Kuhn. The film's cinematic style is eye-catching and seems to be what the film was all about, but the acting and the story itself felt forced.
REVIEWED ON 7/2/2001 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
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