Lexie Cannes is the surreal tale of a deaf, transvestite prostitute named Lexie Cannes (Courtney O’Donnell) who tries to clean up the streets she’s forced to survive in while she also pursues her hobby of being a photographer.
As a prostitute, Lexie’s stalked by voyeurs with video cameras like Syd (Tom Bertling) and by a mysterious serial killer (Steve Molyneux) that preys on prostitutes. She tries to use whatever influence she has to make a difference and bring the dangerous people around her to justice. In the mean time, she also tries to make things work out with her girlfriend Rhonda (Jeska Duckworth) who doesn’t seem to want to settle down.
Because Lexie Cannes tells the story of someone who is deaf, the entire film is designed to be without spoken dialogue, using subtitles during sign language sequences and written or typed notes when dealing with non-deaf (or non-bilingual) people. The concept is very creative and causes you to become immersed into the reality of the story in a different way than you might in nearly any other film. To fill in the space where dialogue would normally go, a sweeping sound track by Bill McGee was used. (Now, despite the creativity of this, there were some issues with the implementation, but we’ll get into that in the use of audio section.)
Now that we’ve discussed the way that Mr. Bertling made his content available, let’s look at the actual content that was presented. First off, as you can probably guess from the way in which this film is set up, this is a film that is more experiential and experimental than a normal theatrically released film, and is best viewed by audiences that expect more of an arthouse experience.
The acting in the film was believable and the actors facial expressions backed up the intensity of the subtitles that interpreted what they were saying to the non-signing audience.
While the tale was fairly straightforward in some ways, it didn’t quite know what type of tale it wanted to be. For more than half of the film, it wanted to be a mystery that involved Lexie foiling a serial killer, which it did a pretty decent job with. For the other half, it wanted to be a more traditional love story about Lexie and her girlfriend. I felt that because these areas were so divergent (and because this is a silent film) this film probably would have worked better as two medium short films, as opposed to one very short feature film. (Without credits, the film comes in at nearly exactly 60 minutes, which is a very awkward length for a feature.)
Additionally, if the love story were extended, we could understand a little bit more about Lexie Cannes and her self image/sexuality situation. The reason I phrase it this way is because the movie currently portrays Lexie as two rather distinctly different people: the first is a heterosexual transvestite who has sex with women in a traditional manner whereas the second is as a transgender lesbian who wants to become a surgical transexual. We really need to see more clarification on this, because they currently conflict. (For example, Lexie has sex with her girlfriend in a heterosexual manner, yet her girlfriend, Rhonda, tells her mother that she’s a lesbian and that Lexie is her girlfriend. Later visualizations of Lexie as an actual woman seem to contribute to the transgender element, but it would have been better if this has been clearer cut in the film.)
