Dir.
Todd Solondz, 2004, US, 100 mins
Cast:
Ellen Barkin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Debra Monk, Sharon Wilkins
Todd Solondz, the chief provocateur of American independent cinema, returns with this typically queasy tragicomedy of taboos.
Aviva is a troubled young girl who, after an enforced abortion, runs away from her liberal home determined to get pregnant again. During her journey, she encounters a paedophile trucker, a kindly nerd and a brood of adopted orphans cared for by a kindly Christian couple who, when not teaching the kids Christian rap routines, plot to assassinate abortionists.
Undoubtedly controversial, Palindromes is a grim fairy tale and picaresque fable of innocence, which skewers such sacred cows as abortion, paedophilia and Christian fundamentalism, yet still manages to squeeze out an uneasy satire of deadpan humour.
Yet like the palindrome of the title, there is a feeling that we have been here before - back among the misfits and mis-shapes, the awkward and excruciating comedy of embarrassment that Solondz is so good at. Only this time, the director has indulged in a daring formal experiment. Throughout her boomerang journey across middle America and back again, the character of Aviva is played by eight actors: two women, five girls and one 12 year old boy, of various shapes, sizes and ethnicities. Solondz isn't the first director to try this trick (Luis Bunuel famously cast two women to play That Obscure Object of Desire ) and how willing an audience is to go with this bold deceit will decide its success. Many will undoubtedly find it a pointless indulgence, yet this would disregard how rich and strange its cumulative effect becomes.
The film is broken up into segments, each with its own subtitle and 'different' Aviva. The child actors who share the role are all excellent, but it is the adult Sharon Wilkins, the overweight black actress who appears at the film's mid-point, that lingers most in the mind. It is in this incarnation that Aviva is taken in by Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk), who cares for a gaggle of incredibly perky disabled children, feeding them Jesus Tears cookies and Freedom Toast. The scene in which we are introduced to all the Sunshine kids around the breakfast table, with their various disabilities, invites us to imagine Aviva's aborted baby as any one of them. Yet just as Aviva's liberal, secular family had encouraged her abortion, this conservative Christian family, in its pro-life militancy, also finds justification to kill.
Inevitably, the film ends where it begins, with Aviva back at home, played by the same 6-year-old, still desperate for a baby, impossibly changed by her experiences, yet unchanged. For all her physical transformation, Aviva is no different, and this theme of arrested development runs throughout. In one of many priceless pieces of dialogue, a devout but distraught paedophile pleads "How many times can I be born again?" Solondz seems to be suggesting that his characters are all palindromic in nature, in a constant state of stasis, forever unable to get any better or worse.
Gus Alvarez
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