Miss Mary

Miss Mary was meant to be an excellent motion picture. It is well written, with intelligent dialogue, the color photography is stunning. The cast was well chosen and includes some of the best Argentine players, who brilliantly support the wonderful work of Julie Christie. Maria Luisa Bemberg has shown her directorial talent before.

But... this picture in completely incoherent. The editor makes the action go back and forth, inserting flashbacks that could have been more comprehensible if shown in the natural order. Miss Mary is a movie with no sense of time. We never know if the sequence we are watching happens in 1938, in 1945, or in between. We never know when the action goes from the "estancia" to Buenos Aires. It has been a loss for the art of the cinema, that modern editors have forgotten the classic grammar of the great directors of the past, such as the fading ins and fading outs that indicated the pass of time, and now limit themselves to cut and cut and cut. The sense of continuity and the sense of time have been lost. And Miss Mary is a sorry example of what has happened to movie editing since the 70's.