Beyond the Multiplex

"Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman": A globetrotter's journey into the female self
Jennifer Fox's six-hour nonfiction series "Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman" is undoubtedly bound for television, where both its self-absorption and its amazing weave of interconnected characters will be thinned out somewhat. I'm really not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. My reactions to "Flying" are already contradictory, but I think its power depends on surrendering yourself, for better and worse, to Fox's wide-roaming intelligence and neurotic subjectivity.

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," as she constantly and irritatingly calls it. (What she means, as she does realize, is the life of individual autonomy that has been made possible, largely in the industrialized West, by material wealth and cultural privilege.) About five years ago, Fox began traveling around the world, "passing the camera" to friends, friends of friends, and other women she meets along the way, allowing them to film each other, themselves and her. The result is an extraordinarily revealing and intimate series of girl-talk conversations, ranging from Berlin to Johannesburg to a remote village in India and an Indian reservation in Wyoming, among many other places. (In one startling sequence, Fox interviews women in India who don't even understand the concept of female masturbation, let alone practice it.)

Throughout all this, Fox keeps circling back to her own life as a filmmaker and teacher in New York, where she lives in a huge Tribeca loft that will incite severe real estate envy from all other Gothamites. Based on her acclaimed 1988 film "Beirut: The Last Home Movie" and the PBS series "An American Love Story," Fox has built a worldwide career teaching filmmaking workshops and producing other directors' work. (The number of women she describes as dear friends is pretty daunting all by itself.) She's aware that her own personal problems are insignificant in themselves, but she offers them to us in perhaps unnecessary detail, as totems of the inner and outer conflicts faced by independent-minded career woman.

Fox has a married lover in South Africa, and although we see his hands and shoulders and hear his (muffled) voice, his presence in the film, as in her life, is more spectral than physical. Thanks to him, she's having trouble committing to Patrick, a pleasant Swiss-German sound engineer whose patience seems inexhaustible. After much angst, she's decided she wants to get pregnant with one or the other of them, but she keeps miscarrying. There's an admirable nakedness to Fox's on-camera mooning over these two guys, and her tormented conversations with girlfriends over the nature and varieties of love, the link between love and sex and child-bearing, the possibility of permanence, the self-delusion of the "other woman," etc., etc.

Fox knows she is risking ridicule with this material, and there were moments over the six-hour stretch of "Flying" when I found her insufferable and whiny. Furthermore, I'm suspicious of her essentialist notion that men and women have fundamentally different modes of communication, and that the extended, talky, personal-meets-political mode of "Flying" is inherently female. (Whereas the 90-minute, three-act movie-movie, I guess, is male.) But yeah, I know, there's an epistemological problem when it comes to my judgment about Fox's ideas, isn't there? And I wouldn't be at all surprised if "Flying" finds a phenomenal following among women, and women-friendly men, all over the world.

At some point, I finally swooned and surrendered before the raw power of Fox's reiterative method. (She has boiled down these six hours from something like 1,600 hours of raw video.) While I still found the director's on-screen persona irritating, she had become an irritating person I cared about, just as I cared about her two old friends who are fighting cancer, and her naive young pregnant friend, her friend locked in an endless court battle with her ex-husband, her friend the human-rights lawyer in India and so on. I don't know how male or female that is; it feels more like reading an enormous multi-character novel by Thackeray or Tolstoy, or getting swept up in a much slower and more intelligent version of "Sex and the City," than like an entirely new mode of communication.

"Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman" is now playing at Film Forum in New York. Other engagements should follow.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)