Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At her

This odd little movie is not my usual cup of tea, but I found myself drawn in.

Glenn Close is a doctor caring for her extremely old mother. She consults a tarot card reader, Calista Flockhart, who seems to be right on target in her reading of the doctor.

Holly Hunter is a bank manager who becomes fascinated by a crazy shopping cart woman. She finds she is pregnant, gets an abortion. The doctor is Glenn Close. She has a one-night stand with Matt Craven, who has a nine-year-old blind daughter.

Kathy Baker is a divorced mother of a teenage boy. A dwarf moves in across the street, and she becomes fascinated with him in a way that is at least partly sexual.

Amy Brenneman is a police detective disturbed by the suicide of a woman she knew, slightly, way back when. She lives with her blind sister, Cameron Diaz. Matt Craven, with the blind daughter, starts dating Cameron.

Calista Flockhart is a lesbian and her lover, Valeria Golino, is dying of cancer.

I deliberately left space between all those story threads, because there is only the most tenuous connections between them, as with the abortion doctor. None of the stories comes to anything like a resolution. Often I don’t like that, but here the stories were so interesting that I kept right on watching. I’m sure this isn’t for everybody, but we liked it.

This was the first and almost only feature film by writer-direction Rodrigo García, who has done a whole lot of television since this. Oddly enough, we saw this the same week that García’s father, the renowned Gabriel García Márquez, died.