Nine Lives

In this low-budget production, director Rodrigo Garcia uses nine continuous takes to tell about a moment in the lives of nine female characters from the L.A. area. By filming in real time, what Garcia does, of course, is to reinforce a sense of reality and immediacy. And to help him do that, he’s assembled an all-star cast who relish the chance to work with a single take, rather than being afraid of the demand for 10 to 14 minutes of perfection. Those are the film’s great strengths—the concept, the camerawork, and the acting.

First up is Elpida Carrillo, who plays Sandra, a young mother serving time in LA County Jail for a crime that’s never revealed, only later vaguely implied. None of these segments is rich with information or backstory. It’s all there in the present—moments of personal crisis that only suggest the lives that these women lead. Unlike Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, which wove together a handful of Ray Carver short stories and created overlapping situations and character encounters, this script pretty much offers nine separate case studies—one right after the other with no transitions—that DO have some overlapping late in the film, but not enough for it to be thematically or narratively significant. In other words, it’s even more minimalist than Short Cuts.

In all of the segments, the emphasis is on moments of painful truth: Robin Wright plays Diana, a pregnant woman who meets a former lover (also married) in the supermarket and contemplates an affair; Lisa Gay Hamilton is Holly, an apparently abused woman who returns to the scene of the crime; Holly Hunter is Sonia, who comes to realize at a dinner party that her relationship is over; Amanda Seyfried is Samantha, a teenager who has to cope with the strained relationship of her parents; Amy Brenneman is Lorna, who runs into an ex- at the funeral of his wife; Sissy Spacek is Ruth, who can’t bear her husband’s disability any longer and ends up with another man; Kathy Baker is Camille, who faces cancer surgery; and Glenn Close is Maggie, who tries to cope with her own loss by having a picnic with a little girl. —Moviemet.com