Sew Torn
Raised in a small town in the sleepy Swiss Alps, trained by her late mother, the local seamstress who ran Duggen’s sewing shop, “home of the talking portraits,” Barbara still lives in the apartment above the workshop, her childhood home, everything a reminder of the past, every thread pulling on a memory, every stitch of her life planned and precisely placed and none of it what she wanted for herself, her choices limited by her circumstances.
The store going out of business, the sole appointment for the day the impatient and demanding Grace, waiting to be sewn into her bridal gown for her third wedding, a dropped button derails the carefully planned day; Barbara obliged to return to the shop, she passes an uncommon sight, two injured men thrown off their motorbikes, a suitcase and broken handcuffs, guns, and a spilled bag of white powder which is most likely not flour, a new pattern of choices suddenly revealed.
Radically expanded from his 2019 short of the same name with the encouragement of Joel Coen, Sew Torn is the feature debut of director Freddy Macdonald, co-written with his father, also Fred, starring Eve Connolly as Barbara Duggen, her skills impeccable but underappreciated in her close-knit community, broke and desperate and seeing opportunity in a drug deal gone wrong which she can stitch up to be the perfect crime, no witnesses and her with the cash prize.
Yet regardless of the care taken, any repair will always be weaker than whole fabric, and tied up in the make-do-and-mend are Utopia’s Calum Worthy as Joshua, the young man who panicked and blew the deal, Boys from County Hell’s John Lynch as his psychotic and unforgiving father Hudson, Carnivàle‘s K Callan as octogenarian law enforcement officer Ms Engel, also officiating at the wedding, and Thunderbirds’ Ron Cook as kindly but eccentric local Oskar, all caught up in increasingly tangled threads.
The tranquillity of the grazing cows on the grass between the bends on the road up out of the valley where the town sits at odds with Barbara’s carefully maintained and cloistered life spinning out of control with gunfire, electrocutions and explosions, Sew Torn is mesmerising in the craftsmanship of the complicated setpieces, the sheer joy at watching the creation and payoff trumping any improbability, an absurd and uplifting thriller of contrivances, contraptions and consequences.
Barbara a professional, she knows the importance of testing that the pieces fit and make adjustments before committing herself to stitching, and like Copenhagen the audacious possibilities play out, expanding beyond thread to any cord, flex or shoelace which can be configured to her will, both she and Macdonald masters of knots and tension as the bobbin unspools, Sew Torn weaving ever closer to the edge in pursuit of the perfect finish.
Glasgow Film Festival continues until Sunday 9th March
