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Movie queen Francesca (Julia Roberts) and TV star Calvin (Blair Underwood) double as actors
appearing in Rendezvous, a movie about the movie industry that pretends to be a movie within the larger DV reality. When they are not on the set, Francesca and
Calvin separately cross paths with colleagues including an unhappy executive, Lee (Catherine Keener) and her journalist-screenwriter husband, Carl (David Hyde Pierce), and her
massage-therapist sister, Linda (Mary McCormack), who is having a cyber-relationship with stage director, Ed (Enrico Colantoni) about to open a stage play called The Sound
and the Fuhrer, and Linda's client, Gus (David Duchovny), the movie's big-time producer whose 40th birthday party gathers everyone together in Los Angeles hotel.
Lee starts to find Carl as uninteresting and just as when she plans to leave him, the emptiness of her life (a flat marriage, an unfulfilling job, a lack of meaningful friends) begins to eat away at her. All their different stories interplay within this movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie experimental feature cum pseudo-documentary.
Acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh of Erin Brockovich and Traffic
fame does an experiment in this apparently low-budget movie. Full Frontal
attempts to move-away from the conventions of Hollywood feature films. In fact, the film even tries to critique its own industry by presenting a glossy film vis-à-vis reality. Soderbergh tries to avoid structure as far as possible as he gives his actors lots of room for improvisation. The result is an incomprehensible, tedious and pretentious experimental film that seems to go nowhere and tells nothing clear besides challenging the audience's perception of what is real and what isn't. The shots are oftentimes grainy, editing is harsh and the characters, although quite interesting to some degree, end up merely as such, no development whatsoever. The acting of the principal characters may be the saving grace of the movie although Julia Robert's star value is actually wasted in this dominantly crude feature.
Full Frontal is a peek into the "off the record" lifestyles of movie stars and other powerful people in the film industry. Although it gives stress to the fact that rich and famous and powerful people also do need to be cared for and they are just as troubled as everybody else, the film focuses merely on the sex-related concerns of these people as if its all that matters behind the screen. The needs of people to be needed and connected are not given enough depth because the emphasis was simply physical connectedness. The overly depressing feelings of the characters that suggest loneliness, hopelessness and frustration do not lift one's spirits high; rather one ends up going out of the cinema with a heavy feeling. The movie is disgusting in its entirety notwithstanding some disturbing vulgar use of language. The theme and visual treatment may require a mature audience who has the capacity to comprehend the complexities of filmmaking and life in general.
(Date reviewed: December 12, 2002)
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