Immigrant Workers, Lonely Women Feature at Cannes (Excerpt)

Reuters - May 10, 2000
By Lee Yanowitch

CANNES, France (Reuters) - ... And Rodrigo Garcia, the son of Nobel prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, unveiled his first try at film-making, "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her," five portraits of women struggling with loneliness and fear.

Garcia's film, which is in the race for the Golden Camera prize for best first film, features Glenn Close as a brilliant middle-aged gynecologist living with her ailing mother, Holly Hunter as a bank director with an unwanted pregnancy and Amy Brenneman as a detective whose blind sister (Cameron Diaz) seems to get all the men.

In other vignettes, Calista Flockhart plays a lesbian caring for her dying lover, and Kathy Baker, the divorced mother of a 15-year-old boy, who becomes attracted to a dwarf.

Their lives intertwine, yet they hardly know one another -- the gynecologist performs the banker's abortion, the lesbian reads the cards of the gynecologist who is obsessed with a man who has lost interest in her, the detective questions the dwarf as part of her investigation into a suicide, and so on.

The film could have been complicated and flat, packed with the cliches of lonely women seeking love and companionship.

Yet, "Things..." is just the opposite: clear, subtle and deeply moving.


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