Chained for Life

Sharing its title with a 1952 exploitation cheapie starring conjoined twins Violet and Daisy Hilton, and opening with a Pauline Kael quote on screen image, Aaron Schimberg's sophomore feature is a fascinating treatise on conceptions of beauty. Along with knowing nods towards John Cassavetes, Robert Altman and David Lynch, echoes of such self-aware classics as Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore (1971) and François Truffaut's Day for Night (1973) bounce around the set where a Euro auteur (played by former child actor Charlie Korsmo) is channelling his inner Tod Browning (director of cult 30s chiller, Freaks) while making a movie with a supporting cast of circus performers. Almost inevitably, the production begins to blur the reality being lived by its leading lady, Mabel (Jess Weixler), as she strikes up an unexpected friendship with her co-star, Rosenthal (Adam Pearson), who suffers from neurofibromatosis. Slyly played and strikingly photographed in Super-16, the action is defiantly off-kilter and disarmingly compassionate. For all its laudable ambition, however, it eventually becomes a bit bogged down in its own meta-ingenuity.