Things Behind the Sun, a 2001 Sundance selection that played Showtime before its current theatrical run (at the Brattle November this weekend), is a courageous fictional take by filmmaker Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging; Sugartown) on her gang rape at age 12, the repercussions of which won’t go away. Now 46, Anders says, "I have dealt with my childhood rape in therapy, through acting out sexually, through self-medication, through spiritual work, by making public confessions, by every means possible, but I was still in a dark place. With . . . sexual trauma, I think what it does, it just dominates your life."

Beset by drinking problems in recent years, Anders determined to exorcise her demons. She returned to the place where the crime occurred, a still-standing house in Cocoa Beach, Florida. For healing, she opted to make a very personal film, fictional and yet close to the events that scarred her. The result is Things Behind the Sun (from a 1972 song by cult singer Nick Drake). Anders does herself over as Florida-based rocker Sherry (Kim Dickens, a blonde Sheryl Crow), whose promising career keeps getting derailed by her promiscuous misadventures and by her troubles with alcohol.

Who will she sleep with? Anyone (including doing a threesome with a couple of dim frat boys) except the deep, kind man who loves her, manager Chuck (Don Cheadle in a lovely, self-effacing performance). As for her drinking woes, she gets particularly shitfaced once a year, and on one such occasion she ends up trespassing in the yard of a family of strangers, for which she is arrested and ordered to report to AA.

What’s all this about? In grueling flashbacks, we learn that the property — a recovered memory — is where Sherry was gang-raped. Anders uses as a locale the very house where, more than 30 years ago, she was victimized, and she plays again the song — the Left Banke’s "Pretty Ballerina" — that she heard as various teenage boys brutalized her.

The movie’s plot: Sherry is hitting the charts with "Never Knew Your Name," a song about her rape. Owen (Gabriel Mann), a senior reporter for a hipster LA-based music magazine, is flown in to do a profile on her because, as he blurts out at a staff meeting, he knows the real story of the rape. He certainly does: his incarcerated brother, Dan (Eric Stoltz), was the leader of the rapist pack. The most powerful scenes in Things Behind the Sun take place at a state prison, brother talking to brother with a window of glass between them. Stoltz is terrific as a sleek psychopath, a junior-level Lecter, totally unfettered by the trail of rape he’s left behind: he wants to know whether his journalist brother has made it with rock star Jewel.

There are places where Things Behind the Sun tests your credulity by shoveling on the melodrama and masochistic suffering — for example, when it’s revealed that Owen was there at the original rape and was more than an innocent. And for a movie that is so delicate about the trauma of sexual encounters, what are we to make of that elongated LA bed scene between Owen and a bosomy female reporter? Gratuitous sex is just fine in lots of movies — who cares? — but it feels dank in a film about the consequences of rape.

NOBODY COULD PERSUADE ARTIST ROBERT FERRANDINI to go to an actual movie theater. He was a stay-at-home recluse who watched countless oldies on tape, especially those made by director John Ford. It was over a love of Ford that we bonded, as I was the rare person who could pick out his redoings of Ford skies (from such cavalry pictures as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) in the illustrious landscape paintings he displayed at Newbury Street’s Gallery NAGA. On October 22, Bob, 53, was felled by a massive stroke that sent him to Massachusetts General Hospital. Now he’s at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Center, and the prognosis is not good — he lay on the floor of his Winthrop apartment for three days before police found him. Bob’s right side is totally paralyzed. He can’t paint; a brilliant, original conversationalist, he can’t even speak. Contributions can be sent to the Robert Ferrandini Fund c/o Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury Street 02116. If you know Bob, visits can be scheduled through Carolyn Stuart at cstuart01@aol.com.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

Issue Date: November 8 - 15, 2001

Back to the Movies table of contents.