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MARION BRIDGE
Winner of the Best First Feature award at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival, this intimate, affecting effort from Canadian director Wiebke von Carolsfeld follows the newly sober Agnes, who leaves Toronto to return to her Nova Scotia home town, where her sisters Theresa (Rebecca Jenkins) and Louise (Stacy Smith) are caring for their dying mother (Marguerite McNeil). The relationship between the two stay-at-home sisters, one an uptight Christian who’s been dumped by her husband, the other a slacker who may or may not be a lesbian, is deftly acted and devoid of easy categorization. Carolsfeld directs with distinctive but unaffected lyricism, and the depressed rural town mirrors the women’s interior lives, but the star here is the luminous Molly Parker, whose most recent work includes her delicious guest appearances as a rabbi on HBO’s Six Feet Under. As a young woman struggling to come to terms with a traumatic past, a present tinged with denial, and an uncertain future, Parker is shaded, unsettling and ultimately triumphant. (90 minutes)
BY LOREN KING
Issue Date: April 17 - 24, 2003
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