USA,
1997, 112 min
Shown in 1998
CREDITS
- dir
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Susan Skoog
- prod
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Ellin Baumel, Michelle Yahn, Kevin Segalla
- scr
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Susan Skoog
- cam
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Michael Mayers, Michael Barrow
- editor
-
Sandi Guthrie
- cast
-
Liza Weil, Chad Morgan, Frederic Forrest
- source
-
Sony Pictures Classics, 550 Madison Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 1 0022. FAX: 212-833-7911
-
COMMENTS
Susan Skoog, Liza Weil, Chad Morgan in person.
OTHER
Citing Susan Sontag’s contention that high school is the most important time of life, Susan Skoog depicts a New Jersey high school senior’s troubled life with a sensitive eye and finely tuned ear for teen angst. It’s the early 1980s, and despite Anna’s outwardly blasé attitude, inside she’s freaked. Her mother’s too busy chasing an older married man to make dinner, her best friend drinks herself into oblivion on a nightly basis and sleeps with any guy who asks, and her English teacher is determined to prevent her from graduating. All Anna wants is to get into Cooper Union, the prestigious New York City art school where she can pursue painting and reinvent herself as a woman of the world. Deftly capturing the apathy and inertia of late adolescence, Skoog presents a heroine who is at once instantly recognizable, and at the same time unforgettable. Though the forces conspiring against her range from sadistic school administrators to callow paramours, Anna never lets herself become a victim, and at the film’s bittersweet finale she faces her future with her eyes wide open and her head held high. The tenderness and care with which Skoog treats her characters give the film an intimate, autobiographic feel, and Liza Weil’s portrayal of Anna is finely shaded with subtlety and grace.
—Jennie Yabroff
FACTOID #147
The Coppola clan (Francis, Eleanor, Sofia and Roman) is the family with the most filmmakers represented at the Festival. Films screened include Apocalypse Now (1990); One from the Heart (1990); Lick the Star (1998); The Virgin Suicides (2000); CQ (2002); and On the Set of CQ (2002). (And that’s not even counting onscreen appearances by cousins Nic Cage and Jason Schwartzman.)
