This Irish film was kind of the opposite of, but also kind of like, the documentary I saw a couple of weeks before it, Babies. Babies was a primarily visual movie set in four cultures about the pre-linguistic phase of human life. His & Hers is a primarily aural movie, set particularly among the Irish middle class, about all of the other phases of life. Despite the title, everyone in the movie is a girl or woman. Beginning with the youngest and finishing with the very elderly, it presents a succession of brief interview segments in which the women, dozens of them, ruminate upon, primarily, the men in their lives. For the youngest, the man is “Daddy.” Then come boyfriends, husbands, sons, husbands again, and grown children.
The way it’s like Babies is that there’s no strong point of view. But at least Babies showed, and this just tells. So rather than looking at someone’s well-edited home movie, this is more like chatting with a succession of strangers at a cocktail party, and is less than compelling. Teenage pregnancy, poverty, divorce, and even careers are all absent from these vignettes, in which the women appear either talking to the camera or doing housework. The last few segments, though, are poignant, as finally we get to illness, loss, and a kind of contentment that is hard won. Whereas the young ladies’ tales of driving lessons and white dresses seem obvious and insubstantial, the widows’ stories of going to bed alone, of enacting once-shared rituals without the husband, seem somehow substantive enough to stand alone without having to know more about these women.
IMDB link
viewed at World Café Live [screening] and reviewed 5/10/2010 [no regular theatrical release in Philadelphia]
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