Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be actresses—that’s pretty much all we took home from this creepy, grating exercise in non-filmmaking. Director Hershey purportedly wrote a script for what sounds like an utterly abysmal indie drama about a wounded WWII combat photographer, a lovely young nun who nurses him to health, a ballerina and a painter’s model of the stand-around-in-the-buff variety. Do the gender math and that adds up to three hot girls for every boy, a ratio that maybe doesn’t quite account for Hershey’s decision to audition 350—count ’em! 350!—hot, young thespian babes in Berlin, Chicago, London and Los Angeles.
Unaccountably, the heartfelt little film for which Hershey went to all that trouble never quite made it into production. Instead, the resourceful filmmaker opted to boil down 70 accumulated hours of interview and audition footage into this mess of a doc, whose voyeurism is no less icky for being archly self-conscious, and way more icky for being synched to a cloyingly sensitive faux-Satie score.
There’s no indication whether or not the women onscreen were in on the scam, and one gets the sense that some would have shown up either way. But if they did jump through Hershey’s hoops in good faith, we’d advise them all to get together to watch Takashi Miike’s highly relevant psychodrama Audition (1999) and then maybe discuss possible retaliation scenarios.