Unlike most of the major film festivals you’ve probably heard of, AFI Dallas’s audience isn’t primarily composed of filmmakers, journalists, dedicated cinephiles, and industry professionals lining up looking for the next big thing. Relatively few people in the audience at any given screening even have passes, most of the seat fillers who show up to see these films are simply random moviegoers, who happened to be wandering by the marquee and bought a movie ticket.
For a movie like Disfigured that’s a bad thing, since their worldwide premiere was scheduled for late night on a Sunday, when the random passerbys who bought tickets for other screenings earlier in the weekend were all at home in bed. That meant even though the movie’s cast was in attendance, the theater was relatively empty. Blame the AFI Dallas’s scheduling department, not the movie, because even though it’s plagued by the awkwardness of a low-budget, very indie feature, Disfigured tackles a pretty heavy issue with intelligence and maturity.
Disfigured is a movie about America’s weight problem, and by weight problem I don’t mean all the cellulite you see struggling to break free of the average Wal-Mart shopper’s stretch pants. This isn’t a movie about how fat we are, but about how badly we’ve all been screwed in the head when it comes to our personal appearance. What it doesn’t do is try to find someplace to lay blame for the average person’s inability to think of him or herself as beautiful, instead the movie simply engages in frank discussion which results when fat woman tries to catch her friend’s anorexia.
It all starts when anorexic Darcy (Staci Lawrence) tries to join overweight but effervescent Lydia’s Fat Acceptance Group, because even though she’s a skeleton, when she looks in the mirror she says she sees herself as hot air balloon. The group collectively throws Darcy out on her ass, but Lydia defends and soon befriends her. The film draws a definite line between the bitter, blame-game playing women in Lydia’s fat group, and Lydia herself. While they sit around whining Lydia is actually looking to better herself, and it’s not long before she starts to see her overeating as the solution to Darcy’s problems and Darcy’s undereating as the solution to hers. Though Darcy protests it’s a disease and not something she can teach someone, they give it a shot anyway. Well Lydia does, Darcy still refuses to eat anything. As a MacGuffin, it’s honestly not a very good one, and Lydia’s attempt to become anorexic soon morphs into little more than just a standard crash diet. The movie works though when Lydia and Darcy are simply talking about the issues they have with their appearance, and the impact that’s had on them.
I loved the openness and honesty with which writer/director Glenn Gars script approaches this subject. Though he’s a man, he seems to get the way women secretly feel about these things, and the mostly female audience’s shocked reaction to the revelation that the film was written by a male confirms it. If only he’d had a better way to launch his characters into these conversations. Anorexia is a spectacularly inadequate device for what happens in the film, and indeed Gars never quite seems to know what to do with Darcy’s problem. Lydia’s issues with being overweight are explored thoroughly, but Darcy’s protruding ribs are blamed on loneliness, which seems a poor explanation indeed.
Instead of a disturbingly thin anorexic, the film might have been better served by turning Darcy simply into a beautiful, fit, and trim character who befriends an overweight woman and tries to stick her with an exercise regimen. Though I guess in a film as brutally honest as this, the idea of someone pretty hanging out with someone fat is probably too much of a fantasy. Goddamn we are all so fucked in the head.
Shortly after it’s premiere at AFI Dallas, Disfigured was snapped up for worldwide distribution by Cinema Libre Studio. Keep an eye out for it soon in a theater (or more likely on a DVD shelf) near you.
