Attraction

“Attraction” juxtaposes several styles of narrative film (TV comedy and melodrama, neo-realist, documentary, and TV commercial) in telling the anti-story of a young woman’s return to her chaotic home after dropping out of college. Molly Senso has come home to write a novel about her family; its text is a layering of memory, television, and psycho-sexual confusion. The characters in “Attraction” can’t seem to decide at what level of fiction to lie their lives; the only constant is the ever-spinning progression of television commercials through which the characters are “exposed”. “Attraction” is as much a documentary on the effect of the mixed signals of television advertising as it is a narrative film. Its world is one in which the “excitement of consumption” has been replaced by the mechanical exchange of money, images, and the body. In the end, Molly attempts to leave the distortion and fragmentation of her suburban home behind, without, however, any specific destination in mind as substitute. She is frozen in the film’s final shot, her head turned away from the camera. The film has been exhibited at film festivals in Italy (Cinema Giovani, Turin) and the United States, and was first broadcast by WHYY, the PBS affiliate in Philadelphia, as a part of its Independent Acquisition Project. “Attraction” was also included in the Independent Focus programme at KQED in San Francisco, where it was broadcast in May, 1988. The film will also be included in the Downtown Community TV Center’s Fall Screenings programme in New York in November of 1988.