Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman: Six Hours Long, Yet Surprisingly Not Awful

Jennifer Fox's Flying should be a supremely irritating movie. For starters, it's a six-hour meditation on the filmmaker's love life (screened in two three-hour blocks, thankfully). It's accompanied by an accordion-heavy score. And Fox's voice-over narration is slow and deliberate, as if she were talking to a class of first-graders. Also, she insists on referring to her two boyfriends as "lovers." And did I mention that the movie is six hours long? Still, the cumulative effect of so much personal footage is hypnotic. I know how Jennifer cracks eggs, how she eats cereal when she's alone. I also know that she has spent the better part of the past few years obsessing over Kye and Patrick, the aforementioned lovers. I've seen Jennifer's naked body as she bathes, and her naked face as she learns that she's had a miscarriage. (I've also, unfortunately, seen several of her gynecological exams.) But what truly redeems this self-indulgence is that Fox uses her overwrought personal crises as a jumping-off point to explore the emotional lives of dozens of women around the world—women who tend to be more interesting than Fox herself (and certainly have more common sense). In the end, Flying is a gentle monstrosity, swollen and silly, but shot through with some wonderful stories.