Screening to be followed by a Q&A with writer/director Sally Potter
SYNOPSIS
Writer and director Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken follows 24 hours in the life of Leo, a man who came to the U.S. from Mexico when he was young and now lives alone in New York. He is supported by a visiting caregiver and — on this day — by his loving daughter, Molly. She is a busy young journalist who arrives at his apartment to take him to the dentist. As their day together progresses, a series of routine activities turn into tragicomic catastrophes.
Leo’s erratic behavior, faraway expression and apparently incoherent speech suggest that he has fallen deep into mental illness, possibly a form of dementia. Seen from Leo’s perspective, however, things look very different. In those moments where, to Molly and others around him, he seems to have “lost it” and is drifting far away, he is, in fact, slipping in and out of parallel worlds in which he is fully living the “roads not taken,” the selves he might have become, had he made different choices at crossroads earlier in his life.
In these parallel existences he is — simultaneously — still living with his first great love in rural Mexico, and struggling as a writer on a Greek island: two possible life directions he had sacrificed as a young man to stay with his wife and daughter in New York City and become a responsible, loving father.
During Leo’s 24-hour odyssey, the puzzle of his other interlocking lives gradually emerges. Molly eventually realizes that her father’s symptoms may be masking an entirely different reality, one that everyone else is blind to, but his mental disability has allowed him to see. As their epic day together draws to a close, she is, at last, able to grasp what he is experiencing.
The film stars Javier Bardem (No Country For Old Men, Skyfall), Elle Fanning (20th Century Women, Ginger & Rosa), Branka Katić (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Cleaning Up), Milena Tscharntke (Isy Way Out, Druck) with Laura Linney (The Savages, The Big C) and Salma Hayek (Frida, Beatriz At Dinner).
