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Rebecca, Laura, and Jennifer are three college friends who are just now facing the cruel, calculating nature of life outside school. The fact that they graduated some seven years before apparently means nothing to their sorority sisterhood. Each has hooked up with a guy who really freaks out their female intuition.
Laura thinks her husband is an immature, cheating louse. She leaves him only to discover he has depleted their credit cards (to the tune of $47,000) and screws anything that moves. Rebecca is turning 30 and her free-spirit sexuality is starting to stink like old hashish. She is sleeping with an older man who has an unnatural obsession with his always scantily clad teenage daughter. Jennifer, on the other hand, is married to a rich attorney and has a lovely little daughter. But she apparently gets a little too toddler tantric at time, so she robs the rough trade cradle outside of high schools and bangs the acne out of them in hotel rooms.
Between Laura’s emotional breakdowns, Jennifer’s sexual suicides, and Rebecca’s incest inquest, these gals maintain a pretty heavy emotional social calendar. When Jennifer abandons her family for life as a streetwalker, her educated friends go running to the rescue. Will they locate the MBA madam (yes, BJ, Jenny went to graduate school) or are they destined to simply sit down and cry until the Mascara smears in telltale pools around their pre-plastic surgery cheeks?
Go ahead: call me an insensitive male chauvinist pig. Brand me with testosterone and serve me up, Neanderthal style. Heck, just go ahead and call me what I am - a man! But this critic did not get Mascara, not one mind-numbing, pre-menstrual moaning minute of it. Imagine a version of Lilith Fair with only Tori Amos playing atonal songs about her vagina. Picture yourself wedged between Ani DiFranco arguing with the Indigo Girls at a fundraiser for breast cancer awareness. Jeez, if you’re married, just think of any completely pointless argument you’ve had with your spouse, and Mascara will pretty much match it for cockamamie Kabala crapola.
This movie is so in touch with its feminine side that the Divinyls are suing for copyright infringement. Now, perhaps this burly bag of snips and snails was not the intended audience for this exercise in estrogen and completely non-erotic gal-on-gal bonding. After all, they say men are from Mars and women hate penis. That would explain the alien ass gas, indecipherable suffragette stool samples that come pouring out of our lead lassies’ mouths. The girls of Mascara speak in Oprah-ready sound bites and live lives filled with every feminine hot button nightmare, from abuse and betrayal to boyfriends who have sex with their teenage daughters. About the only anti-social agenda points not experienced by our everyday ladies are female circumcision and bisexual lesbian experimentation.
Mascara is a movie that wants to say something deep and profound about young women in a society that has convoluted the rules as to what makes them female. It ends up being a poor woman’s Sex in the City, with tract housing and the Galleria substituting for material girl Manhattan.
Part of the problem is filmmaker (?) Linda Kandel’s horrible direction. After watching 30 minutes of her nervous, constantly in motion camera work, you’ll swear that she and her cinematographer suffer from ADD, St. Vitus Dance, and reverse motion sickness. The Blair Witch Project didn’t have this much Panaflex pandemonium going in its hand-held hurricane. With every shot, every edit, the frame and composition are in motion. Pan camera to the right. Move frame up and to the left. Dolly past a couple as they walk down the street. Perhaps she is trying to baffle us with visual tricks to keep us from focusing on her less than laptop screenplay that substitutes symptoms for statements.
But Kandel also can’t handle her actors. You have to wonder who Ione Skye screwed over during her Tinseltown tenure to have such a horrible voodoo curse thrust upon her once-promising career. The formerly transcendent talent plays a human hippie version of the null set so blankly that she threatens to supernova and implode into a black hole, taking the rest of the movie with her. Not that Duran’s Duran, Amanda De Cadenet, is any more lively. So disconnected that telephone operators should be standing by to warn you she’s not in service, her unhappy whore housewife is all blank stares and empty gesture. She does have one scene of quiet dignity though: depressed after having sex with a punky teenager, she sits buck naked in the shower, water running over her shoulders as she gobbles a plate of meatballs and drinks red wine from the bottle. The fact that she goes off to sell her cookies as a high-class call girl is not as shocking as the idea that, somewhere along her selfish slide into sex for cash, she got married and had a kid.
About the only convincing acting turn comes at the accent of Lumi Cavazos, who personifies the complete and utter simp magnificently. Unfortunately, this means we are treated to 90 minutes of watching an ill-natured doormat get shat upon by the world until, through the magical healing powers of childbirth, she and all our other characters are rehabilitated and cured.
Indeed, the big problem with Mascara is that it wants to tackle every woman’s issue all at once. This overstuffed film plays like a four-year course in gender issues crammed into a single butt-sagging final exam. In the plot are scenes/allusions to sexual battery, assault, date rape, statutory rape, incest, physical abuse, emotional abuse, financial abuse, abandonment, adultery, pedophilia, suicide, mental illness, substance abuse, prostitution, death, familial dysfunction, and bad acting classes. You could survey a women’s prison for six months and not find this many maladjusted, misguided females or omnipresent social ills.
There is nothing realistic about a single character going through 50 of Dr. Laura’s 100 stupid things women do before said female reaches 30, and yet we are supposed to believe that every pseudo-psychological struggle that a human can go through just so happens to occur to all of these idiots in six months of their life. These women aren’t victims so much as they are communicable carriers of interpersonal trauma. And using biology, the instinctual makeup of the female body to reproduce as a life-righting ritual, is cheap and far too simplistic. If all of life’s big-ticket traumas could be cured with a deep breath and a push of placenta, criminologists would be hiring midwives to help solve serial murders.
Mascara is a chick flick that out distances Lifetime and Oxygen in the communal crisis arena. These ladies really do suffer for their lack of a Y chromosome, and just our luck they have a hyperactive camera around to catch their agony for posterity.
