Rating: C+
Dir: Freddy Macdonald
Star: Eve Connolly, Calum Worthy, John Lynch, Caroline Goodall
I wanted to like this a bit more than I ended up doing. It has a very cool idea, and the comparisons to one of my all-time favourites Run Lola Run write themselves. However, the differences do not work to the benefit of this. Barbara Duggen (Connolly) is a failed seamstress in a small Swiss town. Her business, inherited from her late mother, is about to go under. However, when returning from a particularly obnoxious client (Goodall), she stumbles across the aftermath of an incident on a remote highway. Two men, critically injured, lie on the road, with a suitcase, previously handcuffed to the wrist of one, lying nearby. What should the meek to a fault Barbara do?
Her choices are three: call the police, drive away, or use her sewing skills to commit the perfect crime. And if you’re going “Wait, what?” to the last option, you’re not the only one. It’s the first we see unfold and is where the film’s transition from a six-minute short to feature length loses most, because you will find yourself thinking “That’s needlessly complicated” on a number of occasions. For instance, she uses thread and needles to pull guns within reach of the accident victims to they can finish off each other… then picks the guns up. Why not do so to begin with? While kinda cute, I’d say the embroidery-fu was perhaps the least interesting thing here, despite the obvious parallel to the Greek fates.
This worked better for me, when it was simply laying out the consequences of her choice. The film, like Lola, unfolds in three separate chapter, each beginning as she sits at the crime scene, figuring out what to do. Though there’s no sense of data being carried forward, as Lola had. Regardless of her choice, it brings her into conflict with the owner of the suitcase, the highly menacing Hudson Armitage (Lynch). He sent his son (Worthy) out on what should have been a routing business transaction, only he is now forced to clean up the resulting mess. Things don’t go well for Barbara: as Armitage says on more than one occasion, “The mobile seamstress – suddenly not so mobile.”
Connolly makes for a plucky heroine, forced to think outside the (sewing) box in order to try and escape her predicament, albeit with mixed results. I was amused how she often became a mistress of puppets, pulling the strings of others, or at least, putting them in the position to pull their own. But there were too many “I’m so sure…” moments in this. The plot only works because, as depicted here, Swiss people are completely oblivious, in a way that puts us Brits, who merely keep calm and carry on, to shame. In the end, it’s almost a Kobayashi Maru scenario, where the only move is… not to be a bit of a bitch to begin with. A trifle, mostly reminding me of how good Run Lola Run is.