Director: Aaron Schimberg

I’m really working overtime on this one. It’s one of those films—which I personally love so much—that resists explanation, resists definition. But I’ll do my best because I really want you to see this one.

The film opens with a quote from Pauline Kael, written across the screen: “Actors and actresses are usually more beautiful than ordinary people. And why not?”

It’s clear quite early on that this film is satire, an examination of the expectations of beauty, the falseness of cinema, and the standards by which we treat those who don’t meet those expectations.

It’s another film-within-a-film (I just finished One Cut of the Dead), a film about a pretentious German (maybe) director shooting his first American film (Marked for Life) about a doctor who operates on the disfigured, trying to make them look “normal.” (Think Eyes Without a Face.) Herr Director (no, seriously…that’s what he’s called) has decided to cast actual disfigured people as extras in the film. The bus full of them arrives, introducing us to Rosenthal, a man with neurofibromatosis (Adam Pearson). He is paired up with Mabel Fairchild (the underrated Jess Wexler), an actress who plays Frieda, the doctor’s blind sister, in Marked for Life. Much like her character in the film, Mabel can’t make eye contact with Rosenthal. At least at first.

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