Spelunking for Love In Unlikely Places

From my LoveCinema blog: 

Chill out in a cinematic snow-globe from the Wholphin archives.

With the steamy summer sun beating down, perhaps you’ve already exhausted your options at the air-conditioned multiplexes. If you’d prefer to stay in and navigate the film world via the Web, I suggest you take a look at some back issues of Wholphin, McSweeney’s “DVD Magazine of Unseen Things.” It’s a periodical DVD collection of short films, oddities, and visual snippets. Wholphin is available for purchase on the McSweeney’s website, or you can check out individual short films at your leisure on YouTube).

A particularly cool cinema short from the first issue of Wholphin is available here:

It’s called “The Big Empty,” and it’s not your typical ‘girl meets boy in arctic womb’ story.  Written, directed, and produced by J. Lisa Chang and Newton Thomas Siegel, and adapted from the story “The Specialist” by Alison Smith, “The Big Empty” stars Selma Blair as a girl with an infinite emptiness inside of her.  It’s a feeling that is expressed simply as something that “aches.” 

The film opens from a gynecological perspective, a womb’s eye view.  A lonely girl visits doctor after doctor to cure herself of the “ache” described by some as “the feminine bleeding wound.”  She sits on a stack of books like some lovely melancholy Alice in somber-land, dark eyes blank and searching a moon-lit fairy tale.  She radiates pain and despair from every porcelain pore.  Her indescribable “ache” eventually leads her to a doctor known only as “The Specialist.” 

During a gynecological examination, The Specialist dives inside the girl with a pith helmet and a flashlight to discover a vast and unending arctic nothingness that he sees as his ticket to fame.  He exploits the girl’s “empty” and transforms her into a vision of angst, a star medical anomaly, an Antarctic beauty queen, and a curious media sensation. The girl has other ideas.  She finds a kindred spirit when a boy at a talk show raises his hand to ask her if her “big empty” aches.  Then he bravely dives inside of her to see for himself. 

It’s true that the ‘meet cute’ happens in the most unusual of places, places we’d least expect, in the darkest corners of the body.  But the path is not the point.  The final scene is a beach gone frigid, snowflakes rising over a pixie Blair (it’s a gorgeous little film). When the adventurous boy delves into the deep wound, he becomes lost in an icy and inhospitable place of uncharted vulnerability.  He finds his way to the girl’s heart while trekking the vast fallopian emptiness of the human soul.  It’s a beautiful place to leave footprints.