Susan Granger’s review of “GUINEVERE’ (Miramax Films)
What do you do when you’re 20 years old, the youngest in a wealthy San Francisco family of over-achieving attorneys, and you’ve just been accepted at Harvard Law School? If you’re awkward, insecure and confused like Harper Stone, played by Sarah Polley (“The Sweet Hereafter”), you run off with a passionate photographer more than twice your age. Especially if he’s a carefree, charming, ruggedly attractive Irish bohemian like Stephen Rea (“The Crying Game”). But Harper’s not the first naive young girl he’s seduced. No, there are a bevy of “Guineveres,” as he dubs them. But this is not the usual May-September romance in which the worldly guy boosts his sagging ego by recapturing his youth with an inexperienced girl – despite what Harper’s urbane mother (Jean Smart) says in a scathing, devastating, accusatory encounter. Instead, it offers a sensitive insight into what the nubile girl gets out of such a rite-of-passage relationship – things like self-confidence, knowledge, and experience, even if the mentor’s an alcoholic. Writer Audrey Wells (“The Truth about Cats and Dogs”) makes her directing debut with this $2.6 million independent feature that juxtaposes the formal elegance of snobbish Pacific Heights with the impoverished yet exuberant existence of the grungy inner city with its scruffy intellectual and artistic community. While it’s hard to take an aspiring photographer-who-never-takes-a-picture seriously, the conclusion, which contrives to reunite the Guineveres, seems too fanciful and out of context. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Guinevere” is a fresh, vibrant and engaging 8, commanding attention from start to finish.
