A review of fairuza in Personal Velocity from Reel Movie Critic.com by Lee Shoquist.

Paula (Fairuza Balk, underplaying to great effect) is a young pregnant woman from Manhattan who takes an impromptu road trip into self-analysis when her life is spared during a freak accident.  Along the way, she picks up a hitchhiker; a mysterious, badly beaten teenage boy. They share a ride to her mother's (Patti D'Arbanville, in a nicely performed scene) house, with a few stops at a Dunkin' Donuts and some quiet conversation in a motel.  Of the three segments, this one is the most shapeless, least written and probably most fascinating, in that very little is spoken and maybe less accomplished on a narrative level.  But the velocity driving this piece is Balk - an underrated presence in the movies today, who has never fit anyone's idea of what a young actress should look or act like - who conveys an aura of sad displacement, maternal care and developing personal responsibility.  She's appealing her in her contemplation, and manages to say much, particularly in her evolving relationship with her mysterious new friend.



One sunny October afternoon on a Malibu beach, the stars of ''Personal Velocity'' -- Parker Posey, Kyra Sedgwick, and Fairuza Balk -- are arguing about who among them was most qualified to play the role of town slut Delia. ''I think my ass would have been better,'' jokes Posey, 34. ''My ass is a little small for Delia,'' Sedgwick, 37, replies with a sly smile. Despite her seemingly inadequate posterior, Sedgwick won the part in writer-director Rebecca Miller's drama (which United Artists will release on Nov. 22), a trilogy of stories about women struggling to change their lives. For Miller -- the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and wife of actor Daniel Day-Lewis -- the movie itself was a singular struggle.



Here is a better Synopsis of Fairuza's character in Personal Velocity

Paula

Driving through the rain, Paula (Fairuza Balk) picks up a young hitchhiker-Kevin (Lou Taylor Pucci), a bruised and dirty fifteen-year-old boy. When Paula runs into get donuts, she trustingly leaves the kid in the car with the keys in the ignition. As she waits on line, she has a vision of him stealing her car. But when she returns, he is waiting.

On an impulse, Paula decides to visit her mother in Why, NY. She invites the boy in, but he chooses to wait in the car. Paula's mother (Patti D'Arbanville) and her mother's boyfriend Peter (David Patrick Kelly) are startled by the unexpected visit. Peter is not happy to see her. We learn that Paula ran away from home several years ago. Her boyfriend Vincent (Seth Gilliam), who she lives with now, rescued her from the streets. She seems to have maintained a relationship with her mother, but it is strained. Paula explains to her mother why she began her journey. She was fighting with Vincent the night before.

Feeling restless, she decided to go out with her girlfriends. When she met a handsome, charming, foreign man at a club, she thought he might be the reason she went out that night-a sign.

They left the club together and were just innocently strolling and talking, when suddenly a car sped by, splashing mud all over Paula. The man apologized, saying he should walk on the outside. So they switched places, and then suddenly, another car sped by…and killed him. Paula didn't even know what happened at first. When she realized, she became more confused-was it supposed to be her? When the police showed up and started asking questions, Paula took off. She just got in her car and drove.

As Paula is relating to her mother what happened, Vincent calls. Paula doesn't know what to say to him. He is frantic, worried, and jealous. She tells him almost nothing, and leaves again. Her mind begins racing with ideas, ambition-she wants to paint, to write, to make things happen.

Paula decides it is time for the boy to go. She gives him some money and sends him on his way. But as he is getting out of the car, she notices the bruises all over his arms-he's been tortured. She decides she can't leave him. He is too scared to go to a hospital, but she convinces him to let her treat his wounds. They stop in a pharmacy for supplies and check into a motel.

After she treats his wounds, he goes to sleep like a child. She calls Vincent and tells him everything that's happened-the guy at the club, the accident, the runaway boy. She wants to take the kid home with her, and let him stay with them. Vincent is taken aback, but he agrees. He just wants Paula home. He tells her to leave the car and come home. Paula is relieved. Things are starting to make sense…

Just a little something about how Personal Velocity was made

The cameras are breathing,” says director Rebecca Miller as she watches cinematographer Ellen Kuras and camera operator Martina Radwan each carry a Sony PD-150 onto a wood porch facing the main drag in the small town of Rosendale, New York. “They are much more fluid. They are alive. . . . Plus, you work twice as fast.”

Propelled by the thought, Miller jumps to the task at hand: Shooting her super-low-budget Personal Velocity—at $150,000, a film that would not be getting made were it not for those two living, breathing, ferret-sized digital cameras. She talks with actress Fairuza Balk and then returns to her place behind two monitors. After Balk and actor Lou Taylor Pucci enter the house, Miller yells, “Cut!” and a flurry of production assistants and makeup crew descend upon the actors.

Miller takes a few steps back. “Every time you cut, you break the energy,” she says. “People flock on the set like pigeons and they do what they have to do. But every time it happens, the energy goes neeeaaaw,” she says, deflating her body. “It’s a huge time-suck.”

But it’s a world of difference from Miller’s last movie, 1995’s Angela, which was shot on 35mm film. “We are working much, much faster. Digital video is a mind-set,” Miller says, adding that this nimble process helps her “get to the little elements of alchemy inside the actors.”

A few feet behind her, actress Parker Posey bends, stretching her back, waiting for the next scene to be shot. “The studio system swept up the indie movement,” Posey says with a twinkle of hope. “Maybe the digital revolution is like our taking back the night.”

And, oh, what a night: The creative explosion in digital filmmaking can be traced to the evening of May 17, 1998, at the Cannes film festival. It was there that Danish director Thomas Vinterberg first publicly showed The Celebration, his wildly innovative tragicomedy, which was shot with natural lighting, minimal props, and several digital video [DV] cameras.

“The Celebration is The Birth of a Nation of digital features,” says Next Wave Films president Peter Broderick, who was at the Palais Theatre that night. “I was stunned. Watching this movie, which was shot on a camera designed to take pictures of a baby’s first steps, and it wins a special jury prize and goes on to get distribution in over 40 countries. I thought, ‘Okay, things are really changing here.’ It provoked filmmakers to rethink the way movies can be made.”

United Artists  buys rights to distribute the movie  

 United Artists nabbed "Personal Velocity," Rebecca Miler's subtle, psychologically precise triptych based on three of her short stories about women -- impressively played by Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey and Fairuza Balk -- caught in the process of reinventing themselves.

    At once artfully allusive and easily accessible, Miller's film received the festival's Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Feature. The award may turn out to be a mixed blessing -- some festival goers claim, only half-jokingly, that a "Sundance curse" often befalls Grand Jury Prize winners -- but "Personal Velocity" should generate enough critical and word-of-mouth support to attract an audience regardless

Velocity 'Dances on Top

by Marcus Errico

Jan 20,2002 1:55am

The 18th annual Sundance Film Festival came to a close with Personal Velocity and Daughter from Danang dancing away with top honors.

Personal Velocity--Rebecca Miller's film about a trio of women (Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey and Fairuza Balk) facing traumatic personal crises--received the coveted Grand Jury Prize for drama, the fest's top award, during Saturday night's award ceremony.

Miller, who adapted the film from her owen book, previously won directing and cinematography kudos at the festival for her 1995 entry, Angela.

Velocity also earned cinematography Ellen Kuras accolades.

Actress trio in ``Personal'' triumph

Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (Trilogy, color, no rating, 1:25)

By Dennis Harvey

PARK CITY, Utah (Variety) - Adapting tales from her recent short story collection of the same title, Rebecca Miller's ``Personal Velocity'' is a fresh and striking fictional triptych catching three young New York state women -- played by Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey and Fairuza Balk -- at moments of life change.

While not tethered to Miller's 1995 little-seen first feature ``Angela,'' a stunning mixture of mysticism and childhood-in-hell realism, this sophomore omnibus shares its assured directorial invention and ease with literary approaches to character psychology. Pic will be a challenge to distribute but merits careful marketing to audiences hungry for unpredictable drama outside Amerindie norms.

Each segment is named after its protaganist and takes up a roughly equal share of overall running time. First centers on Delia (Sedgwick), a mother of three living just above the poverty line in a Catskill trailer with husband Kurt (David Warshofsky).

Bitterness underlies her everyday actions; when a tacit criticism chills the family table at dinner, Kurt abruptly lets fist fly, and the film freezes -- backtracking to Delia's sad childhood caring for a terminal-stoner dad (Brian Tarantina), her discovery of sexual power as ``the high school slut'' and marriage at 17.

Back in the present, Kurt's latest extreme abuse -- after savagely beating his wife, he locks her in a closet where she can hear the children screaming in terror -- finally snaps Delia from stasis. While he's passed out on the couch, she packs up the kids and drives off, landing up at the home of an old school friend (Mara Hobel).

Off-puttingly tough and suspicious, even toward those offering help, Delia reclaims a piece of her autonomous self in the darkly funny end scene: Rather than tell a horny adolescent (Leo Fitzpatrick) who's pestered her at a waitressing job to screw off, she briskly services him in his pickup -- gaining grim satisfaction from controlling the exchange.

A lighter but no less incisive tone infuses the saga of Manhattanite Greta (Posey), who at age 28 is both giddily facing the notion that perhaps she's not a ``failure'' after all. Slogging as a cookbook editor at a major publishing house, Greta is surprised to find the hot, young novelist-of-the-moment (Joel de la Fuente) has specifically requested her collaboration on his new book.

Flashbacks fill in Greta's backstory. Daughter of a famous liberal-Jewish attorney (Ron Liebman) whose exacting standards and abandonment of her mother (his second of three wives) cripples her confidence, she married Lee (Tim Guinee) because she knew he'd never leave her.

That was enough -- until now. Riding high on an ambition she'd hitherto repressed, Greta fears outgrowing this sweetheart of a husband. The segment ends on a stinging moment of recognition, when she first realizes she may leave him.

Darkest and most present-tense of the three segments -- if also the least satisfying -- ``Paula'' has its Goth-punk-looking title figure (Fairuza Balk) driving upstate from Brooklyn, seized by panic.

We gradually discern some reasons: Paula is pregnant, but too ambivalent about the news to tell the live-in boyfriend (Seth Gilliam) who'd picked her runaway self off a park bench one year earlier, and had gone out partying with girlfriends instead. She sees a boy she meets in a club killed in a freak accident.

Driving without destination at first, Paula picks up forlorn youth Kevin (Lou Taylor Pucci) on a rainy rural roadside. She pit-stops at her mother's house -- just long enough for us to glimpse why she left -- then rushes out again. But her impulse to send the teenage hitchhiker on his way is checked by discovery that he's hiding horrific bruises and cuts all over his body.

Filled with a maternal concern, Paula wants to take this lost lamb home. His reaction leaves her alone again, stunned yet oddly at peace. While absorbing as it unfolds, this story's murky closing catharsis makes it the most incompletely thought-out of the trilogy.

Despite that slight letdown, ``Personal Velocity'' impresses with the originality of its observation, storytelling techniques and filmmaking style. Flashbacks, still-image montages, the detached yet wry commentary of the narrator (Jon Ventimiglia) and other devices lend each sequence an unpredictable vitality that never seems gratuitous or showy.

Though each of the heroines is adrift, replacing old mistakes with possible new ones, the writer-director's point of view eschews condescension or easy blame. Ditto her lead performers, particularly Sedgwick and Posey in the better developed of the three roles. Former makes a dislikable woman intriguingly flinty, while latter's witty, reined-in work is her best since ``Henry Fool.''

Texturally, pic has an off-the-cuff feel that nicely externalizes impulsive states of mind; Ellen Kuras' DV lensing is often momentarily blinded by glare, as if squinting along with protags not at all sure where they stand. Production design by Judy Becker deftly etches in all we need to know about milieus. Michael Rohaytn's understated score is just right. Special kudos to editor Sabine Hoffman for making narrative left-turns seem organic rather than overly clever.

Narrator ...... Jon Ventimiglia

``Delia''

Delia ......... Kyra Sedgwick

Kurt .......... David Warshofsky

Pete .......... Brian Tarantina

Fay ........... Mara Hobel

Mylert ........ Leo Fitzpatrick

``Greta''

Greta ......... Parker Posey

Lee ........... Tim Guinee

Mr. Gelb ...... Wallace Shawn

Thavi ......... Joel de la Fuente

Avram ......... Ron Liebman

Oscar ......... Josh Phillip Weinstein

Max ........... Ben Shankman

``Paula''

Paula ......... Fairuza Balk

Kevin ......... Lou Taylor Pucci

Vincent ....... Seth Gilliam

Peter ......... David Patrick Kelly

Celia ......... Patti D'Urbanville