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Stolen Moments

1997, Movie, NR, 92 mins

Stolen Moments: Review

STOLEN MOMENTS
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Earnest and respectful, this celebration of lesbian history and lifestyles hopscotches across continents and centuries and includes several frank and moving interviews with women -- some famous, like the late poet Audre Lord, others not -- for whom living openly and comfortably with their sexuality has been a lifelong struggle. Clearly a very personal project for Canadian filmmaker Margaret Wescott -- who also directed the acclaimed 1984 documentary Behind the Veil, about the private lives of nuns - STOLEN MOMENTS nevertheless has the earnest, slightly out-of-it air of the instructional films that have sent generations of high school students to sleep. At its best, Wescott's film, which is solemnly narrated by actress Kate Nelligan, introduces tantalizing fragments of hidden history: The section devoted to cross-dressing women in 17th-century Holland is absolutely fascinating and leaves you wanting to know more. Wescott is on equally interesting if more familiar ground when she tackles Paris in the 1920s, and anyone who's seen PARIS WAS A WOMAN will be delighted to get reacquainted with Berthe Cleyrergue, longtime housekeeper of poet, bon vivante and Paris scene-maker Natalie Barney. But Wescott is too conventional a filmmaker to overcome obstacles like the lack of archival material pertaining to many of the women whose lives she hopes to reclaim. The stranger-than-fiction tale of 19th-century gender outlaw Jeanne Bonnet -- who fled France for San Francisco's Barbary Coast, organized gangs of female thieves and persuaded harlots to abandon their brothels, fell in love with a prostitute and was finally murdered by her lover's jealous pimp - is much more interesting than Nelligan's accompanying monotonous voice-over and the dreary shots of silk pumps and period tchotkes from some historical society's collection. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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