Michelle Pfeiffer gives her all in problematic ‘Kyra’
There’s a political idea, a stylistic idea and a story idea in “Where Is Kyra?” and all of them taken separately are interesting enough, or at least sincerely committed in a way that’s not typical in movies.
There is also a serious actress on the premises — Michelle Pfeiffer — willing to go to the wall for this film and give it everything she has. This is what
Pfeiffer always does and one of the reasons she’s an extraordinary talent.
But the movie’s stylistic idea gets in the way of its story, and the story is too slim to sustain a fulllength feature. And as the political ideas become as self-conscious as the style, “Where Is Kyra?” starts to feel a little like poverty porn, an opportunity for audiences to feel pleased with themselves for two reasons: for being caring people who are willing to sit through this; and for being better off than the title character.
Director Andrew Dosunmu shoots “Where Is Kyra?” mostly in long takes and from a distance and usually in darkness. A common technique he employs is to have the action take part in the right half of the frame, while the left part of the screen is in shadow. Sometimes he will interrupt the shot with a close-up, but never so that you can feel close to the action, and sometimes there are no close-ups or medium shots at all.
That’s definitely an idea. But it’s the sort of idea that went out with Alice Guyblache, which is to say that filming everything in long shot pretty much exhausted itself as a storytelling strategy circa 1910. It’s hard to see what’s gained by watching a middle-aged daughter talk to her aged mother as though we were witnessing this from two rooms away. Nor is there any benefit apparent in filming, as though from the next apartment, a woman washing clothes in the sink.
At the start of the film, Kyra (Pfeiffer) has been out of work for two years, having been downsized from her job, and serves as the caregiver for her sick mother. Soon her mother dies, which is a source of grief, but also panic. The mother’s pension was the only source of money in Kyra’s life. So now Kyra must look for a job, which she does and keeps doing, walking into every store and office that has a sign in the window. Sometimes the camera follows her into the stores. Sometimes it just hovers on the other side of the glass, again for no reason except perhaps to make the audience feel as frustrated as the character.
Along the way, she meets up with Doug (Kiefer Sutherland), a nice guy with (it’s suggested) a rocky past, who is only marginally better off than Kyra. He has a job, but it doesn’t pay much. Meanwhile, a woman who looks very much like Kyra’s mother is seen slowly shuffling down a Brooklyn street. But Kyra’s mom is dead, so who is this woman?
Occasionally, Dosunmu’s filmic approach pays off, as in the early scene when Kyra comes home to find that her mother has died. Filming from a distance and staying with the single shot conveys the emptiness of the moment without any of the usual relief that movies provide. Someone is gone, and someone is alone, and there’s nothing else.
But the rewards of the strategy are limited and should have been used sparingly, because after a while, the movie feels more committed to the style than to the lead character. Pfeiffer is good — she’s always good, and raw, and effective — but watching her here is like seeing her under glass from a block away. The best scene in the movie, and also the most consequential in terms of plot, comes at the finish, when Dosunmu finally strips off the stylistic straitjacket and puts us inside the moment. But by then, it’s too late.