Alone With Her
Directed by Eric Nicholas
Looking for new ways to stir interest in cinema—that fading art form—video director Eric Nicholas pimps for digital
cinema with a meta-video thriller Alone With Her. It launches a distribution experiment between the IFC theater and both Cablevision and Comcast to premiere the film in all three venues on the same day. Steven Soderbergh and Mark Cuban tried this last year with the nearly unwatchable Bubble. At least Nicholas’ film is in a crowd-pleasing genre.
Alone With Her uses a proven formula: A comely young woman, Amy (Ana Claudia Talancón), is creepily pursued by Doug (Colin Hanks), a man who has unclear yet eerie motives. Doug picks Amy at random then rigs her apartment with surveillance equipment and spies on her private moments. It has something to do with the Patriot Act as implied by the State Department quote that opens the film. But despite the quasi-political, indie art-movie presentation, Alone With Her is as commercial a stalker film as Halloween or Friday the 13th.
Working in that gray area between art and exploitation, Nicholas manipulates indie movie pretense. Alone With Her implicates the audience in Doug’s voyeurism. This is the pseudo-smart tactic naive filmwatchers ascribe to Brian De Palma. But, without De Palma’s horndog hermeneutics, Nicholas goes straight for the T&A. Mexican actress Ana Claudia Talancón is on exhibit throughout. Her flowing hair, vivid smile and amiably accented English amount to an appealing characterization of a California immigrant working girl who is subject to bad fate. But Nicholas cares less about Amy’s vulnerability than her photogenic qualities. Amy showers and masturbates more than any other female character in recent movies. Nicholas’ camera even caresses her haunches in tighty whities. It’s one way to seek indie success.
Another indie-movie convention makes Doug an unrelatable villain. Colin Hanks plays the role with uncanny similarity to Jackie Earle Haley’s overpraised performance in the awful Little Children. Both Hanks and Haley seem to be imitating Martin Short’s super dork Ed Grimley. Do indie directors like Nicholas and Todd Field insist on making social misfits clownish so indie audiences can feel superior to their crises of neurotic loneliness? Or is Doug-the-Stalker meant to represent Homeland Security?
Alone With Her makes its perspectival points blatantly without the obfuscation of Michael Haneke’s Caché. Nicholas frames most of the movie from the POV of Doug’s many hidden cameras, following the consistency that won Haneke praise. But this “rigorous” consistency shouldn’t be mistaken for art; real movie art makes us understand the human condition. In digital video, emphasis is on technique—the hobgoblin of glib aesthetics.
