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 palindromes interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Todd Solondz spends his life savings. “You’ll always be you.” So coos a loving mum of WASP-mould, to her enormously overweight black little girl, Aviva. The opening scenes of Todd Solondz’s latest shake-em-up, Palindromes, challenge preconceptions as much as the rest of the film often confirms stereotypes. Fleeing from her family bosom after an enforced abortion, the 12-year-old Aviva goes on a picaresque journey into the heartlands, falls in love with a paedophile and settles with a family of pro-life extremists. A whole array of different actresses, girls, a boy and two women, with mutating body sizes and skin colours, step up to play this character with one single motivation: to have a baby. Or as Solondz puts it in his neurotic NY whine, “Really she’s on a quest for love.”  Solondz’s film catalogue - Welcome To The Dollhouse, Happiness and Storytelling - represents a fearless exposé of American double standards, and a humane probing of the darker secrets of our natures. Palindromes, made with Solondz’s own life savings, pushes the confrontational strain of these earlier films to new extremes. What this translates as on screen is a Utopian family of handicapped children, presided over by a pro-lifer Mama Sunshine, who organises hits on doctors who perform abortions. “I ask of the audience here, in some sense, to examine their positions, their prejudices and biases so to speak, and try to fully understand the consequences of what it means to take this kind of stance,” he says, referring to the opposing sides of the abortion debate. “I’m not out to convert or change anybody - I’m not sure a film can really do that - but I can, I hope, illuminate certain realities that define who we are.”  Palindromes takes a departure from the realism of his previous work with a fable-like, Wizard Of Oz structure. Solondz reflects, “In The Wizard Of Oz, one of the things that the Scarecrow and the Tin Man come to understand is that when they receive a PhD degree for the Scarecrow, or the Cowardly Lion gets a badge for courage from Oz, that these are just trinkets. “It’s not that they suddenly became courageous or compassionate or intelligent, but rather they discovered who they are in fact, and who they’ve always been. In a sense this applies to my film, in so far as these characters want to change and be something other than they are. And they discover they can’t change because we are, for better or for worse, encased in a certain kind of identity.”
Skye Sherwin
Palindromes, on selected release 06 May 05.
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