The Headhunter's Sister . Newcity Chicago . 11-23-98

The Headhunter's Sister

DIRECTED BY: Scott Saunders

REVIEWED: 11-23-98

Scott Saunders' "The Headhunter's Sister" is the kind of discovery that film festivals were once known for. Like a comedic, latter-day version of "Low Life," Luc Sante's classic portrait of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, Saunders' satisfyingly dense plot is filled with wild digressions. The story, built on an odd community of people living on Manhattan's eminently multicultural Lower East Side, lunges from love to heroin, from corporate head-hunting to lounging in Central Park, from green cards to gay flirtation, from a day at the beach to the routine of a Spanish-language telephone sex operation. Shooting over two weeks in old tenement buildings during an August heat wave, Saunders and company filled their dense narrative with fresh verbal wit and jolting narrative turns. The result is a wholly convincing, non-slacker portrait of how communities evolve and clash and blend, and there's an intense, tactile sense of how these characters have changed each others' lives. There's also something piercing in its lovingly detailed portrait of how, as Saunders' emphatic co-writer-producer-lead actor, Bob McGrath puts it, "Our generation has managed to take the idea of youthfulness way beyond any attractiveness." (At first, the film's life-worn characters give the impression of being vagrants with apartments.) "Headhunter's Sister" is low-low budget, a good-looking blow-up directly from Betacam video to 35mm. The gift of video for this film is the how collaborators who have known each other for years--Saunders, McGrath, production designer Laurie Olinder, actors Elizabeth Scholfield and Michael Harris--were able to take their friendships and theater-trained chops and somehow concoct an intimacy in the movie that results in that intangible quality called charm. "The Headhunter's Sister" feels like a breakthrough for features originated on video, but it's also utterly accessible, a sexy, loping comedy that ultimately rejects moodiness and despair and embraces the absurd plausibility of life and the possibility of all manner of change.

--Ray Pride

Full Length Reviews
The Headhunter's Sister

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