TIFF 2011: Union Square

Last night's movie was the world premiere of Union Square, the latest from writer/director Nancy Savoca (Dogfight, If These Walls Could Talk).


It stars Mira Sorvino and Tammy Blanchard as Lucy and Jenny, sisters who have been estranged for more than three years, and takes place over about 48 hours. Lucy, who we meet first as she is erratically shopping and making phone calls, drops in on her sister's apartment (she lives in Union Square) unannounced and sets up camp on the couch. She's a bit of a whirlwind, clearly has some issues and is very emotional. Jenny is sedate, almost repressed, and has clearly not told her fiancé Bill (Mike Doyle) much about her family and most of what she has told him is a lie. What follows is a lot of talking, some confrontations, lies, resolutions and one drama-filled night out for the pair. It ends as a very interesting character study, without a clear tied up resolution.

I thought the movie was quite good. One of the great things about it is how the truths seem to unravel, almost like peeling back layers of an onion. Each time we discover something new I expected that issue to be the main crux of the relationship or problem to be resolved, but the movie continued to surprise me until the very end. Sorvino and Blanchard are also very well cast and give terrific performances in very different roles, playing off each other beautifully and completely believable as siblings.

Writer/Director Savoca, co-writer Mary Tobler, producer Neda Armian and actors Sorvino and Doyle attended the film and held a Q&A afterwards. Some of the interesting things we learned included the fact that the whole story seemed to come from a dare from Armian to Savoca to make a movie in her apartment (and that is indeed what they ended up doing) and that they filmed the entire movie in sequence, which is very uncommon. Sorvino talked about the character's motivations (you can tell she has great affection for Lucy) and about some of the improvisation in the film. Savoca discussed a bit about women in filmmaking (it was an estrogen heavy production), the casting and filming process and gave us a bit of a perspective on what would have happened to the characters after the final scene.

The movie doesn't have a distribution deal yet and I hope that it ends up finding it's way to an audience.