Alchemy

The plot adopts a three-part structure. In the first segment, "Charity," Louisa Garrison (Rya Kihlstedt) is a sculptor in a sputtering affair with painter Ethan (D.V. De Vincentis), and unable to forget his past infidelity with a girl named Kitty. Ultimately, the doubts and resentment drive Louisa away. Months later, Ethan dies in a car accident, and Louisa encounters the grieving Kitty (Erica Chahoy), who was indeed seeing Ethan up until the end. Somewhat calculatingly, Louisa befriends and comforts Kitty, but questions her own motives: "If you do something good without meaning to--does it count?"

In "Faith" a letter summons Louisa to her older sister Jane (Marian Quinn), who lives in a rural Quaker community not far from the site of the farmhouse where they both grew up. Jane awaits the results of a biopsy, which Louisa darkly expects will show a recurrence of the cancer that killed their mother. In addition to the comfort from her serene circle of Quaker friends, Jane takes folk medicines prepared by a local "alchemist." Her tumor miraculously disappears. The alchemist offers to make a potion to mend Louisa's broken heart.

In "Hope," Louisa had been accepted to "Thalia," a prestigious but pretentious summer artists' colony under a wealthy patron. Although Thalia's guests are supposed to remain isolated while they create, Louisa is visited one night by Duncan (Jeff Webster), a soulful Scot who worked with her in a rare-bookstore while she was involved with Ethan. They become lovers and decide to live together. In the idyllic closing scene, Louisa picnics surrounded by Duncan, Jane, Kitty, and other friends who enrich and define her life.

Throughout all this, the script quotes "The Snow Queen," the densely symbolic fairy tale that Louisa is engaged in translating from the original Russian; it also concerns how friendship and love overcomes obstacles. Writer/director Meyers also imbues each chapter of the triptych with its own color code, the most extreme being "Charity," which is saturated in blues and indigos to an almost surreal degree (Louisa even bathes in water dyed an iridescent blue). The result is a gentle, humane but slightly overschematized magical-realist drama about a mostly solitary person who gradually awakens to the importance--the "alchemy"--of those around her. If metaphors and structure seem a little too emphatic, the performances are not, and Meyers avoids the dual temptation to make Louisa too much of a loner and her epiphanies excessively broad. Meyers shot the film in Pennsylvania and Delaware (utilizing the latter's Centerville Quaker community) for about $300,000. After winning acclaim at film festivals, ALCHEMY became the nucleus around which Meyers formed the Fuel Film Tour, a traveling exhibit of this and three other independent features (AMERICAN JOB, ARRESTING GINA, and THE DELICATE ART OF THE RIFLE) which barnstormed around the country in 1997. The hardworking filmmaker also founded the New York Women's Film Festival that same year. (Adult situations, sexual situations, nudity.) leave a comment