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YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT I GOT

As she states at the beginning of You Don’t Know What I Got, filmmaker Linda Duvoisin chose the five women profiled in this documentary because "they had something I did not — an undying passion for life." The line-up: Linda Finney, a Minnesota police superintendent and a poet; Julie Brunzell, Finney’s colleague on the police force; Myrtle Stedman, an octogenarian artist from New Mexico; Jimmie Woodruff, a seventysomething housekeeper from Tennessee; and, overshadowing the rest with her energy, talent, and celebrity, singer-songwriter Ani Difranco. Duvoisin glibly interweaves her subjects’ thoughts on such issues as sex, men, independence, and the meaning of it all, and though we get some sense of their passion for life, the stuff of life goes largely unexamined. Limiting themselves mostly to platitudes, the women shy away when the talk gets edgy — when Brunzell mentions her work on domestic violence and sex-abuse cases, for example, shouldn’t the topic be pursued? Between sound bites, Duvoisin fills the space with cutesy, generic archival footage, and except for the snippets of Difranco in performance, we still don’t know what they got.

BY PETER KEOUGH

Issue Date: October 17 - October 24, 2002
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