Image courtesy of Fandor
The concept of identity is explored in many films, but in Theodore Schaefer’s Giving Birth to a Butterfly, it’s examined with a nostalgic whimsy that’s difficult to define. Changing identities, questioning identities, having identities stolen…they’re all on the table here and presented in a gamut of ways, ranging from the painfully mundane to the intangible abstract. While the methods vary throughout the film, however, one thing’s for sure: this Fantasia International Film Festival selection has an identity all its own – for better or worse.
Diana Dent (Annie Parisse) is feeling unfulfilled in her home life. She’s an online seller whose overbearing husband Daryl (Paul Sparks) is obsessed with spending all of their money on opening his own restaurant, leaving little for their two children’s college educations. Money seems tight for them now, but then matters are made worse when their son Drew (Owen Campbell) brings home his pregnant girlfriend Marlene (Gus Birney), asking if she can stay with them, despite the baby not being Drew’s. The final nail in the coffin happens when Diana falls for an internet scam that steals her identity and wipes out her family’s life savings. Diana decides to take action and recruits Marlene to go to the perpetrator’s home address in an attempt to reclaim her money, and the film becomes a road trip that goes a little differently than anyone might expect.
Giving Birth to a Butterfly seems broken into two acts: what happens prior to the road trip and what happens after that, almost akin to how Wizard of Oz is broken up between Dorothy’s home life and her time in Oz. In some ways, they’re two distinctly different films despite the 16mm muted pastel color palette tying them together. The world prior to the road trip plays out like a Hallmark family drama, shot in a straightforward manner with no score to set the tone or flashy cinematography to captivate the eyes. In sharp contrast, the world during and after the road trip takes on a slightly surreal essence that is thick with pastiche and metaphors. For instance, Diana describes a dream she had to Marlene in a sequence filled with ethereal music and stylized shots abstractly depicting what she saw in it, with the sense that the dream means more than meets the eye. When Diana and Marlene arrive at the identity thief’s address, this dreamworld is explored on a whole new level, complete with a pair of unsettling yet strangely welcoming elderly twin women who seem like they’re from another era and a toy train that is the alleged primary form of transportation in and out of their town.
While the film absolutely needed something other than the more straightforward drama it initially displays to maintain interest, there’s not enough of a natural balance between the realism and surrealism to feel like an impactful piece. This results in the film feeling tonally akilter and even amateurish at times, with masturbatory dialogue clearly intended to be rich in metaphor throughout but instead coming off as the content of an overly ambitious student film. There’s nothing organic about the surrealism thrown into the mix, and it feels amusing at best and entirely ham-fisted at worst. The only saving grace for the film is the acting between the two main leads: Parisse and Birney give grounding enough performances to keep audiences compelled to see how the story of Diana and Marlene pans out.
While Giving Birth to a Butterfly has a clear ambition to say much about the American Dream and the complexities of the roles we’re given in life (self-imposed or otherwise), it instead comes off as a pretentious “Alice in Wonderland”-esque experiment with little to no payoff in the end. Both the realism and surrealism feel equally awkward here, making this trippy road trip an unfulfilling ride.
—Andrea Riley