Chicago-based Chelli Look, the topic on the centre of this diffuse documentary, looks like a pleasant particular person, with a expertise for designing and making minimalist leather-based purses. Not lengthy out of highschool, the most effective buddy with whom she deliberate to start out a enterprise died in a automobile accident. Then her elder sister, Megan Henneberg, was murdered in 2007 by her husband Brian, leaving Chelli, her mother and father, siblings and prolonged household to take care of the harrowing loss.
And but, regardless of how a lot sympathy you may really feel for Chelli and her household’s trauma, or curiosity you may need in her bagmaking expertise, or engagement along with her as an individual, someway these core parts don’t coalesce to make this feature-length documentary really feel important and even particularly obligatory. A self-described introvert, Chelli herself is a fairly opaque determine though she speaks fairly expressively and intelligently about her strategy to design. We solely get tiny glimpses of her house life with husband David, so she’s not likely developed as a “character” sufficiently to hold the movie.
In the meantime, the story round her sister’s homicide has one thing of a shroud round it, which is comprehensible to an extent, however then turns the movie into a wierd fan dance, alternating revelation with concealment concerning the details of the case. Ultimately, the truth that Chelli discovered a strategy to forgive her brother-in-law in a spiritual sense, appears to be the massive takeaway, however the wafty haziness round the entire challenge reduces the homicide to a brutal however incidental noise off-screen.
Probably the most participating elements of the movie are the scenes the place Chelli is at work at her fancy industrial Juki stitching machine in her alarmingly tidy, sepulchre-white studio. The hum of the equipment is as seductively lulling as an ASMR video and watching Chelli purchase leather-based hides is pure buying pornography. Much more visually lush is the sequence the place Chelli goes off to Florence to take a course in leatherwork and design to refine her expertise, providing the film-makers an opportunity to shoot one of many world’s extra photogenic cities at crepuscular instances of the day. All of which makes the shock ending much more baffling, denying viewers the redemption–by–small-business-ownership ending the movie seems to be striving for.