A strangely structured film which ultimately makes for a quite moving meditation on the loneliness of sexual predetermination. The characters reach out in random lurching stabs at love - she impulsively invites the homeless man to be her pimp and later picks out someone in a bar to be the father of her child; when the pimp leaves jail he's instantly met by a woman who's been waiting for a convict to befriend, and so on. The closing note of male contrition could be taken as a pallid attempt to redress the balance of a film that often seems to enjoy the advantages for the male ego of freely offered female desire, and yet the remorse is real and touching. The movie expands the theme to encompass economic and social impotence - particularly in the wrenching scene where the husband can't get work and loses it. The note of proud possession in the title of a film that ultimately finds only loss and compromise is ultimately ironic I think, as much as the overblown Barry White score, grabbing boldly at sweeping gestures and passions which we all know to be generally unattainable. The gleaming visuals, often shot from a composed distance, give it the slightly metallic sheen of science fiction: in some scenes the crowd moves like a mechanical construction, powered by a single desultory consciousness.
My Man
(1996)
Ultimately quite a moving meditation on the loneliness of sexual predetermination
29 September 1999