New Star Shines in Audacious Grad School-Style Film Reviewed

Rising star Odessa Young brings just the right amount of spontaneity, youthful exuberance, and charisma to this hyperdimensional little ouroboros of a story about the actual director’s film-making experiences, making it engaging and far from insufferably self-indulgent. Much credit is due to director Zia Anger for her excellent helming and casting instincts. Despite certain aspects feeling like a rogue grad school project, the film ultimately works.

Young plays Vita, a young woman on a mission to create a movie that mirrors her own life, although she constantly emphasizes in her voiceover the differences between her real story and the fiction she fabricates. The “real” Vita has two mothers, a lesbian couple who conceived her with the help of a gay male friend. As an adult, Vita has had two abortions. In the film she’s making, which stars her friend Dina (Devon Ross), the character based on Vita has only had one abortion and has one mother who has gone missing.

Vita and Dina, alongside a tiny, inexperienced, and frequently stoned crew, endure grueling days on set attempting to capture the period in Vita’s life when she got pregnant. The shoot is plagued by mishaps, escalating to a chaotic, drunken night that culminates in a cast member driving off inebriated and crashing his truck into a telegraph pole. As the project teeters on the edge of disaster, the question looms: Will the film ever be completed or will it end up abandoned like Zia Anger’s first film with the same title, “Always All Ways, Anne Marie”?

The film is anything but subtle in drawing parallels between pregnancy and artistic creation, yet it is made artful by its slippery editing and various film stock textures. At one juncture, a reference to the work of Maya Deren lands with a noticeable thud; if you’re going to pay homage to a legendary artist, it’s best to do so boldly and borrow from the best. By the film’s conclusion, when an abortion is “performed” through the magic of mime, one can’t help but admire Anger’s audacity, sly humor, and prowess in film-making.

My First Film is available on Mubi from 6 September.

Source: PR IMAGE