Disfigured

Lydia (Deidra Edwards) has always been a big girl; she's not happy about it and attends militant fat-activist Carol's (Elizabeth Sampson) meetings in hopes of making peace with her too-solid flesh. Stick-thin realtor Darci (Staci Lawrence), the high-strung offspring of a self-centered therapist (Cheyenne Wilbur) and his neurotic wife (Laurie O'Brien), tries to join in hopes of finding a sympathetic environment within which to explore her own distorted body issues, but as far as Carol is concerned, Darci is the enemy incarnate. Only Lydia dares to suggest that self-loathing is less about numbers on a scale than demons of the mind but that said, she resists Darcy's first awkward overtures of friendship -- she's been mocked and humiliated often enough to keep her guard up in the presence of skinny girls.

Writer-director Gers doesn't entirely sidestep the pitfalls inherent in his material: The support-group sequences regularly devolve into ham-fisted sloganeering and position statements. But Lydia and Darcy's heart to hearts consistently venture into painfully raw territory, articulating ugly prejudices and laying bare the twisted psychology of eating disorders. Lawrence and Edwards have an astonishing chemistry, abetted by the fact that Edwards is genuinely fat -- not volumptuous or pleasingly plump but clinically obese -- and Lawrence is disturbingly thin; the wordless sequence in which she scrutinizes herself in a bathroom mirror, painstakingly pinching scant inches of loose skin and seeing grotesque rolls of blubber that simply aren't there defines body dysmorphia without hiding behind a label. The notion that fat is a feminist issue has been relegated to history's slag heap alongside Mary Gaitskill's uneven but provocative novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and while Gers has no answers, he dares to shove a discomfiting question back into the limelight and demand that attention be paid. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh