Rating: ***
Dying In Plain Sight, directed by Michelle Ouellet , is a disturbing ingenuous film on a bodily disorder known as atypical anorexia .
Did you know that anorexia is not restricted to thin people? Overweight people too suffer from this terrifying eating disorder. Meet Morgan(played with sassy splendour by Raffa Virago). She is young and gifted, but also decidedly overweight. To compound her woes, her mother Kim (Nicola Correia-Damude) is sinfully svelte.
The comparisons at home when the mirror chooses not to lie, are not flattering. Kim keeps reminding Morgan what “fun” it would be for mother and daughter to share-wear the same clothes.
Morgan’s bland junkfood of a school life with most of her time spent with her best friend Emmy(a delightful Adrianna Di Liello) shooting videos on phone and discussing boys, is intellectually uplifted by an English teacher who believes Morgan has it in her to make something of her life.
But before Morgan could make anything of her life, life makes a mess of Morgan. Dying In Plain Sight is not a pretty film to sit through. Although it outwardly taps the cute-overweight-highschool-girl trope, it is much more than that, peeling off as it does vital layers from the all-is-well face that we carry round in our workaday lives.
Other than its hitherto unexplored plotting territory the film also has a terrific ensemble cast . Raffa Virago brings in a terrific static energy to the plot.Her weight issue never obstruct the larger picture that the film so effortlessly spreads out on the table without counting the calories.
Dying In Plain Sight reminded me, in a good way of actress Anne Bancroft’s 1980 film Fatso which starred Dom DeLuise as a 40-year coming to terms with his weight issues. Awareness of her girth comes early to Morgan in Dying In Plain Sight. What comes after is what gives heft to this weighty work on weight issues.
