Playwright Susan Charlotte's examination of 9/11's psychic scars, directed by Antony Marsellis, comprises three loosely connected vignettes, each featuring a pair of New Yorkers whose paths intersect at an emotionally volatile moment. .
In the first segment, set on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, a film professor (Judith Light) barges into a Hell's Kitchen cobbler's shop and demands that the owner (Danny Aiello) fix her shoe, even as he protests that he's closed. "You can't be," she says abrasively, pulling off her worn low-heeled pump. "My sole is broken." As they bicker and spar, their damaged hearts are bared: She saw the planes that flew into the towers, and her sense of loss and dislocation is now fused with the film she was going to show that morning, Vittorio De Sica's THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS (1970). He's an Italian Jew who lost his father and grandfather during World War II, is estranged from his only child and has a terrible feeling that the customer he affectionately calls "Teenie Louise" is never coming back for her dressy pumps.
Six weeks later, a stressed-out Realtor (Laila Robins) badgers a paranoid cabbie (Bob Dishy), who enunciates veeeeeeery precisely, into cutting short his lunch break and taking her to an apartment showing. He's agoraphobic and she's frantic; trapped in the car, they, too, bare their inner wounds: Her grandmother, once a renowned baker, lost the will to create after spending two years in a concentration camp and she's afraid of her violent, mentally unbalanced brother, while the cabbie staves off crushing loneliness by attending the funerals of fallen firefighters.
Two months after that, struggling middle-aged actress Nan (Margaret Colin) and dyslexic director Bob (John Shea) negotiate an awkward morning after: They wound up in bed on their first date, but now she wants to get to know him better, while he seems anxious to disappear. Bob's obsession with palindromes sparks a thorny discussion that eventually leads both to reveal their insecurities and mutual desire to find human connection in a cold and uncertain world.
The rhythms of Charlotte's mannered, artificial dialogue are better suited to stage than screen — each segment started life as a one-act play and overall the film works better as a conversation starter than drama. The specter of "discussion to follow" hovers over soul-searching pronouncements like Nan's blunt observation that "you have to live your life, no matter how scary it gets" and symbols like those broken soles/souls. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
