Educational Media Reviews Online

The concept behind Group is simple: seven women who respond to a flyer advertising group therapy sessions. Together with a therapist they thrash out the problems plaguing them. The group comprises a diverse set of women, who have dissimilar backgrounds and mores. This becomes painfully clear when in the first scene Violet questions the “queer friendly” portion of the ad that brought them there. With the aid of a therapist who guides the sessions, they are also working through different issues, the nature of which we gradually discover through the film’s progress. Over the course of the film, the women work out their issues and learn to communicate with each other - with varying degrees of success.

The performances are of a high caliber. They make it easy to become so wrapped up in the character’s respective stories that it is possible to completely forgot this is not in fact a documentary of real therapy sessions. According to the film’s official web site, the actors worked with the Marilyn Freeman and Anne de Marcken to develop their characters to fit a general outline for the narrative. The therapist is actually a real therapist and she serves to guide the sessions and the process.

A few of the characters have more prominence then others. Some have unusual backgrounds that have made them seek out therapy. Clansey’s fiancé is a paraplegic suffering from amnesia. Grace is a hypochondriac devastated by the revelation that her father is having an affair with a seventeen-year-old student. Others like Pipi, “the punk amputee” and Violet “the bigot” take center stage because of their dominating personalities (although Pipi also has a compelling story of her own). A few are less defined.

The film is divided into segments, each of which is preceded by a placard placed in a store window. The director employs a split screen technique, most of the time using six different camera shots. The camera is rarely still which can be distracting. In fact, it is both a flaw and an advantage that the viewer needs to be actively paying attention at all time. Music is employed to full advantage in Group, but for some reason, when the film shifts to a montage, the volume of the various songs rises to very high levels. The avant garde techniques detract from the quality of the film, which is otherwise excellent. . Supplemental material can be found on the Group web site. Group is recommended and would be a good addition to collections supporting psychology, women’s studies, and gay and lesbian studies.