BAMcinématek: Shy People

Part of the BAMcinématek series Tangerine Dreams

Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm

Directed by Andrey Konchalovskiy
With Jill Clayburgh, Barbara Hershey, Martha Plimpton

(1987) 113min, 35mm

Part An Unmarried Woman, part Deliverance, Shy People chronicles the uneasy, unlikely female bond between Diana, a Manhattan photojournalist (Clayburgh) commissioned to do a story about reconnecting with her roots in rural Louisiana, and Ruth (a formidable Hershey, who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes), the steely matriarch of an insular bayou clan.

Bypassing the more obvious choice to use regional music, Konchalovsky employs Tangerine Dream’s dreamy electronics to convey Diana’s sense of extreme dislocation while journeying into the heart of bayou darkness. Roger Ebert called it “an utterly original melodrama—with an undercurrent of poetry and philosophy” but Shy People received only a perfunctory theatrical release and remains unavailable on DVD or Blu-ray.