Day Thirty-Three

Today's work on the list involved folding a Mountain O' Laundry and watching a new-to-me movie. I actually went into the video store in search of the next disc of the last season of "24", since I was too excited about what came next to wait for it to come via Netflix. Instead, I got distracted by the rather disturbing movie title "Disfigured." I'm not quite sure what prompted me to try out an indie film I'd never heard of about a fat woman and a recovering anorexic, but I'm glad I did.

It did not have the classic Hollywood plot, in which the women bond over coffee (no cream) and take walks together, and the overweight lady loses 150 pounds "without even noticing" and the anorexic lady gets magically healthy by means of a montage of heartwarming moments of friendship and apple pie against a quirky but inspiring musical background.

At the end, Darcy is still anorexic, and Lydia is still obese. They swear at each other, argue, cry, laugh, and have deeply awkward conversations on the phone - in other words, they're far more normal than any other skinny-fat friendship combination you've ever seen on the big screen. Nobody gets married at the end. It ends on a positive note, but much is left unresolved. Also rather like real life.

Lydia really is that big, and while Darcy is not actually anorexic in real life, she is painfully thin. This gives each woman a believability that is miles from Gwyneth Paltrow and her fat suit. It occasionally makes the movie cringe-inducingly raw, but (for the viewer, at least) the reality of these characters makes it worth whatever each woman went through personally to see her ribs or belly displayed on screen.

I only hesitantly recommend it to men or to anyone who is uncomfortable with onscreen intimacy, since Lydia does have a love scene that is painfully, intensely real. But if any of my readers are women with body image issues and you don't mind seeing a little more of an actress than you'd normally see, watch this and be ready for a fairly wide range of emotional responses. I have a feeling I'll be filling in my movie title spreadsheet with a few more movies that got awards that didn't involve little gold men. This was a good one!

Favorite lines:

Darcy: You take an insecure woman and give her a nose job, a tummy tuck and a boob job, and what do you get?

Lydia: A reality show!

Darcy: An insecure woman in a mask. With scars.