by MATTHEW HAYS

It seems there couldn’t be a more welcome respite from what passes for chick films than Rebecca Miller’s directorial debut, Personal Velocity. Based on her novel of the same name, the film tells three distinctive, unusual and intricate tales of three different women and the boy-related struggles in their lives.

A Sundance award-winner, the film opens with Kyra Sedgwick, in a segment in which she portrays a battered wife. This scenario has been done so many times before it’s difficult to believe that Miller could breathe some new life into it, but she does just so here. In artful flashback, we’re whisked back to Sedgwick’s childhood, one mercilessly short and torn up by a damaged father. Despite the potential traps, there is no simple victim theme here; instead, Sedgwick sees the need to get away from her brutally abusive husband, and does just that. There’s no simplistic closure here, there are no uplifting final musical numbers, this is not What’s Love Got to Do With It. Miller opts for complexity and careful character development. The result is extremely refreshing, especially so shortly after screening crap like Maid in Manhattan (which, sadly, will probably draw far more viewers into the cinema).

Parker Posey plays a fidelity-challenged literary editor in the second part, probably the strongest portion of the film. It’s refreshing also to see Posey grab hold of a role like this, seeing as she hasn’t had anything substantive to sink her talents into of late. She’s both hilarious and delicate as a hardened editor, blind with ambition in an effort to please an almost-completely-absent estranged dad. Her perfect trophy husband, a sweet, innocuous blond, doesn’t seem enough for Posey, who’s perhaps a bit insatiable. Soon enough, she’s necking passionately with the hot young author whose latest book she’s been hired to work on.

Miller veers into the ambiguous perhaps a bit too much in her final chapter, in which Fairuza Balk plays a young pregnant waif who freaks out after bearing witness to a fatal car accident. Soon after, she’s picking up a young hitchhiker, someone who seems even less able to cope than herself. She visits her mother, too, who’s stuck with a nasty spouse who wants nothing to do with Balk.

Like the unusual book of fiction that spawned them, Personal Velocity is open-ended, clever, intriguing and never condescending to its audience. Miller’s honesty, her strong sense of the written word (the voiceover here works wonders and never feels tacked on), her ability to concoct striking characters, make Personal Velocity into what it is: a noteworthy shot of life in a too-often deadening mess of mediocre cinema. :

Personal Velocity opens Dec. 13

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