Palindromes
Aviva is 12 and wants a baby – someone who’ll always love her. She has sex with the son of family friends and becomes pregnant. At her mom’s insistence she has an abortion and soon after runs away. She turns up at the home of Mama and Papa Sunshine, fundamentalist Christians with a huge adopted family of unwanted and disabled children. Aviva finds love.
Director Solondz’s earlier films Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness are funny, hardhitting satires on Middle America. Palindromes is a simpler, bleaker story, and perplexing – Solondz casts eight different children and adults as Aviva. Although tricksy, even weird, it works – the different actors reflect changes in Aviva. Abandoned after a sexual encounter, gawky white teenager Aviva becomes an adult African American woman – she’s older, wiser, more mature.
In the final scene, a lonely nerdy character, who looks remarkably like Solondz, lectures Aviva that people are programmed by genes and chance and they don’t change. The film’s title suggests this – a palindrome reads the same when read normally or backwards, like ‘Aviva’. So is Solondz saying people are the same however we look at them, that fundamentally they don’t change?
Aviva certainly ends up where she started, living at home with her comfortable, status-conscious family – and seeing the boy who made her pregnant. He now calls himself Otto – another palindrome. Yet Solondz casts 30-something Jennifer Jason Leigh, who’s been round the block a few times, as the final Aviva. Leigh’s presence suggests she’s bigger than suburban consumerism or desperate Christianity. Palindromes doesn’t offer Aviva much of a choice, but it’s grimly entertaining, intriguing, and challenging.
- Product information
- writtend and directed by Todd Solondz
- Star rating
|
|
Todd Solondz's latest: tricksy and weird but it works.
|
Join over 10,000 people just like you. Get e-mail updates about new content, issue alerts, contests, and more!
Voices from the margins:
Multimedia: video, podcasts, and more.
- Poetry Slam in Zimbabwe
- The House of Hunger poetry slam held in Zimbabwe in 2006, and organised by the Pamberi Trust, showcased young artists performing inspirational work on issues from corporate power to child soldiers. The video features four of the poets.
Published by Pambazuka News.
- Iranian women speak out
- 3 March 2007, London. Women's rights activists marched through the English capital last week to celebrate International Women's Day with a protest against the misogyny of the Islamic regime in Iran and the threat of invasion by the US. Hear the voices of Iranian feminists Azar and Leila Parnian and the sounds of the demonstration as it passed through the heart of the city. Click here to learn more about the campaign.
Produced by Heidi Bachram.
- Raised Voices audio:
- Benny from West Papua on Corporate Power
- Vinayan from India on agriculture
