Goodby rebel lifestyle, free love and recreational hot sex, hello conventional midlife crisis.
Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman (2007)
Genre: Education/General Interest
Reviews
It takes tremendous courage to expose one's life to the camera as Fox does here, and while she answers few of the universal (to women, anyway) questions she raises, at least she's asking them.
Over the six hours spent with Fox as she jets around the globe, a picture emerges, not only of a modern woman contemplating herself, but of Western society boasting of its freedom to a world struggling for mere survival.
I'd mark how effective Flying is by the fact that I'm under no obligation to watch the rest of the series, but I'm eager to do so.
There are times when Fox's nervy endeavor to combine art and life obliges one to give way to the other, but her efforts and reflections throughout are riveting.
Seinfeld on estrogen... if Seinfeld had dared to be about something...
Despite [director] Fox's excruciating level of self-involvement, she manages, more than once, to lay bare critical questions that are at once familiar and compelling.
As maddening and sometimes embarrassing as her approach is, it works.
What keeps the film interesting, though, is not Fox's "torn between two lovers" shtick, but her encounters with various other women.
In the end this very personal journey becomes a valuable universal document from which we can all learn about the way women live today.
How would you like to be stuck in a dark room for hour upon hour listening to a neurotic middle-aged woman complain about her love life?
Flying falls short of being an extraordinary film, but remains a dignified and absorbing chronicle.
Fox is breaking new ground in terms of personal documentary, turning a navel-gazing survey of her own midlife crisis into a globalized, collaboratively created exploration of 'this new female life'...
In the end, Flying is a gentle monstrosity, swollen and silly, but shot through with some wonderful stories.
By turns playful, sexy, tragic and contemplative, Flying is an addictive soap about sexuality and sisterhood.
A mosaic of experience and endeavor reconsidered as human (in this case, very much female) experiment.
Curiously, like a compelling cross of Annie Hall and Erica Jong, it is the globetrotting Fox who emerges as the most empathetic and elegant figure by film's end, in spite of her warts-and-all confessional style.
The combined view of so many varied lives does make this a worthwhile commitment, since, at its best, we feel as if we've been invited into the homes of unusually interesting strangers.
While it might have taken [director Jennifer Fox] several years to figure out what to do, any intelligent audience could do it in 90 minutes. But even if it were shorter, it wouldn't improve the lazy filmmaking.
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by: marlo.hansom 7/5/07


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