In director-star Lila French's riveting version of the Leonard Melfi two-character play, waitress Velma Sparrow is closing up a cafeteria in Manhattan late at night on Valentine's Eve. She is cleaning tables when she meets the bartender, Frankie. It is his first night as a cashier and after a game of glances they initiate an awkward connection. At closing, Velma seems unwilling to start home, and he invites her to his apartment. She is very unsure but goes anyway, revealing that she has never been alone with a man, perhaps because her selfishly cruel mother convinced her that no man would want her. Frankie loosens up after a couple of drinks and reveals some about the women in his past, but when he tries to dance with the uptight Velma and embrace her, she pulls a knife on him and starts screaming, revealing details of a rather nasty crime.
Running a mere 45 minutes, BIRDBATH unspools in a wonderfully, unpretentiously straightforward manner. Melfi specialized in portraying disenfranchised or eccentric characters whose melancholy lives offered pointed truths about the human condition. He also could write stuff that actors could have confident fun with. The dialogue here is seemingly amicable but also double-bottomed, at times even threatening. Running through the movie are subtle power shifts between Velma and Frankie that are captured by a camera that starts with solid, stationary angles but move into nervous handheld shots timed to those shifts in mood.
The acting is excellent. As Frankie, Chad McKnights is all tallness and fairness, breathing sensitivity into the somewhat tired seeming poet. But truly sensational is Ms. French, not only for having produced and directed but for providing Velma with a simple kind of eloquence that more than hints at deeper, darker waters flowing beneath her offhand friendliness. Her command over the penultimate confession scene treats the viewer to the voice, the demeanor, the essence of sublime acting. Highly recommended.
