Work . Nashville Scene . 08-03-98

Work

DIRECTED BY: Rachel Reichman

REVIEWED: 08-03-98

Loosely following the affair between a white, married young woman and her college-bound African American neighbor, this stark indie drama takes The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love to more uncommercial (read: truer) ends. It's set in a depressed factory town where 22-year-old Jenny (Cynthia Kaplan) grows tired of cooking for her clueless husband (Peter Sprague); gets treated with condescension during interviews for dead-end jobs; and whiles away the summer with June (Sonja Sohn), who's heading off to school and thus feels less pressure to sell her time for an hourly wage. Commendably, writer-director Rachel Reichman refuses to draw simple connections between Jenny's marital discord and her affair, or between her unemployment anxiety and her faint resentment of June's scholarship; she's more interested in capturing the tumult of her heroine's life than explaining it. Reichman's elliptical editing and verit cinematography are riveting; and her title is provocative when applied to the film's vast scope. Marriage, love, looking for a job, merely "living" it's all work.

--Rob Nelson

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