Thursday, June 26, 2008

Finn’s Girl


The first feature film by documentary directors Dominique Cardona and Laurie Colbert could be commended for the intentions in trying to do something different in a genre where “good” movies tend to be high in romance and drama and low in everything else. But while intentions seems good, the final product seems messy as tries to tell a drama with some thrills to finally become a total fantasy. Well at least as far as I know, I’ll explain later.

Tells about recent widowed Finn, a brilliant fertility scientist that left her research to take care of her activist and abortionist wife, Nancy, clinic after she passed away. They had a daughter that’s now is 11-years-old, a bratty teenager that Finn cannot control as she’s busy at the clinic and all the death treats she gets. Basically the story is about how a lesbian widow with a teenager daughter that believes that she’s not her mother-the biological mother was the one that died- can handle her professional life and be a mother to her wife’s daughter.

The story has all the possible situations like a child grieving her biological mother, loves her other mother but does not show it to her, perhaps because after one year after her mother death, Finn has another lover (her partner at the clinic) or perhaps is just angered because Finn forgets to take care of her. Then Finn is busy with work, continues her love life, deals with being seen by what it looks like 24/7 surveillance, and falls for the policewoman that is making sure that no one kills her.

While watching the movie I started to get upset as I was getting the impression that a professional woman cannot be a caring mother and on top of that she’s lesbian… then I tried to understand that she was scientist, that the cliché says that all scientist are cold and distracted. But it didn’t worked, especially with the end, this is another time I’m telling it, when we find that Finn did some fertility experiments and created the daughter out of two eggs, one from Nancy and one from her, with no male anything involved! Since I do not know everything about fertility and genetics I believe that's a good dream but, that’s exactly the fantasy part when the movie totally lost me and all the pieces that I was trying to connect, just felt apart.

Messy, messy story that definitively could have been better without the thrilling effect of the death threats and the fertility experiments. If only stayed in the mother-daughter relationship the film could have been more interesting and perhaps an excellent drama about a theme that hasn’t been explored yet in the genre.

As a movie it looks and feels exactly like a Lifetime channel movie. Performances are average and cinematography below average.

But I think that this movie opens the door to tell stories that are not told yet about the children of gay/lesbian legally married couples and especially when one passes away and leaves the child/children with the non-biological parent. Not that I’m looking forward to see them, but I bet you it will happen eventually.

No, I didn’t enjoy the movie and I cannot recommend it.

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