SUE (56)

Directed by: Amos Kollek

Starring: Anna Thomson, Matthew Powers, Tahnee Welch

The Pitch: A lonely, unemployed young woman leads a difficult life in New York City.

Theo Sez: Unusual character study that turns strident and overdone just when it starts to look fascinating. Basically a standard urban blues - all-alone-in-the-big-city, ain't life a drag? - except that its alienated heroine is at least partly to blame for her miserable existence, seeking friends (or lovers) but, she admits, unable to communicate except through sex, getting increasingly desperate yet perversely refusing help when it's offered ("some people just refuse to be happy," pronounced a girl in the audience as we were filing out). Thomson, looking rather like a pale and haggard Julianne Moore, limns one of the year's most intriguing women - unable to trust, hard when she should be soft and vice versa - but the film needed a much sharper controlling intelligence, a sense of geometric precision to offset Sue's confusion, should for instance have ended when it comes full circle with her eviction from the apartment, mirroring the opening scene (instead it limps on for a repetitive and unnecessary final section). "Your life's as interesting as anybody else's," reassures the hero, but in fact it's only interesting when it's not like anybody else's ; the familiar big-city vignettes - young mothers in the park, harried waitresses in greasy diners, bumping into angry people on the street ("Watch me walking, you piece of shit!") - feel a little forced.