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Flannel Pajamas - Preview

Flannel Pajamas

Preview by Jack Foley

ONE of the audience favourites of the most recent Sundance Film Festival is now charming its way into US cinemas, winning acclaim from both critics and viewers alike.

Flannel Pajamas is directed by Jeff Lipsky and is a love story that was described by the Sundance writers as “the kind of honest and truthful romantic drama that can only come from American Independent cinema”.

It follows the fortunes of Stuart Sawyer and Nicole Reilly who meet through mutual friends on a blind date and experience a magical evening in a local diner on a rainy night in April.

Both sense that their time together may never get better than this but they subsequently enjoy a stunning courtship and, later, a reversal of fortunes.

Though sexually compatible, their disparate family backgrounds and the religious chasm between them inform their selfishness, naiveté and, ultimately, their destiny.

The film stars Justin Kirk, Julianne Nicholson, Rebecca Schull, Jamie Harold and Michelle Federer.

Director Lipsky says of the film: “It’s about hope in the face of failure, about second chances when all seems lost, it’s about loneliness amid the embraces of a large family. It’s a film that attempts to explore love, cruelty, egos run amok, selfishness, tenderness, marriage and religion.

“It does so, I hope, without excessive melodrama or the easy shock of physical violence. If one woman in Hungary sees my film and identifies with my fragile woman from a large Montana family, then in my mind Flannel Pajamas will be a success.”

The majority of critics in America seem to agree that it is one. Newsday, for instance, wrote: “As raw and biting as a December morning in Montauk, writer-director Jeff Lipsky’s depiction of modern metropolitan romance honours the sensibilities of John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman.”

The Hollywood Reporter, meanwhile, referred to it as “a thoughtful dissection of the courtship and marriage of two ultimately mismatched New Yorkers”.

While Entertainment Weekly praised it on many levels, noting that there are “moments in Jeff Lipsky’s low-budget, high octane battle of the sexes when Stuart and Nicole dredge up a grubby intimacy that most relationship dramas avoid”.

The film could well be one of the independent releases to look out for in UK cinemas in 2007.