A WINTER TAN
With Burroughs, Erando Gonzales, Javier Torres, and Diana d’Aquila.
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Ironically, this collectively conceived and generated feature comes across very much like a one-woman show, a “concerto” for Burroughs (who is probably best known in the U.S. as the female lead in The Grey Fox). Indeed, without Burroughs’s capacity to bring a certain charismatic range and inflection to the letters, the project probably would have been unthinkable. But at the same time, it is worth noting that Burroughs’s spiritual affinity with Holder is not matched by any congruence in appearance or age. According to filmmaker Mark Rappaport, who knew Holder in school–and is incidentally an enthusiastic fan of A Winter Tan–she was at least a decade or more younger than Burroughs is in the film, she was shorter and heavier, and one side of her mouth was paralyzed. The film has to be regarded as a work of fiction in which the letters of Holder play a central role rather than a biopic in any ordinary sense. Regarding the circumstances of Holder’s murder, the film remains almost completely reticent, although whether this is due to lack of information or to other motives is not clear.
Sometimes, in the course of the film, Holder addresses herself; sometimes she addresses the camera; and at still other times she addresses whomever she happens to be with–lover, friend, or acquaintance–all the while reciting the text of actual letters. Occasionally these varying forms of address slide briefly into a naturalistic context as dialogue, but we never lose sight of the fact that what we’re hearing is highly literary and reflective prose being written to someone thousands of miles away; and part of Burroughs’s triumph is her graceful way of handling all the permutations in this fragile conceit, allowing us to respond to her lines both as prose and as drama.
The movie’s limitations are the dramatic and narrative limitations of the intimate letters, which alternate between anecdote and reflection, without the shaped or “finished” coherence found in a polished piece of fiction. Indeed, the main continuity offered is one of character, and this is furnished at least as much by Burroughs’s flavorsome performance as it is by the letters that serve as her libretto.
