I have rather mixed feelings about this movie. It brings up an interesting, forgotten scandal, which I give it credit for. But I felt the movie was always straining a little too hard to be interesting, as though the filmmaker knew he really only had a 40-minute short but was determined to get a feature length film out of it.
The movie is a mix of a documentary about the rape and a documentary about uncovering the rape, and I found that an interesting, fairly successful approach. The various film clips range from relevant to flippant. The filmmaker's worst instincts came out during the interviews with the victim. Tossing in film clips earlier made a certain amount of sense, but doing the same thing during her painful answers felt gimmicky and insensitive and just took away from the power of the scene. Sometimes you have to be willing to let a person or a situation speak for itself, but that doesn't happen in this movie.
The movie is a mix of a documentary about the rape and a documentary about uncovering the rape, and I found that an interesting, fairly successful approach. The various film clips range from relevant to flippant. The filmmaker's worst instincts came out during the interviews with the victim. Tossing in film clips earlier made a certain amount of sense, but doing the same thing during her painful answers felt gimmicky and insensitive and just took away from the power of the scene. Sometimes you have to be willing to let a person or a situation speak for itself, but that doesn't happen in this movie.