| In his first movie since the critically acclaimed “Sonny Boy,” director Robert Martin Carroll reaffirms his status as one of the most unflinching and original young directors in America. After the David Carradine starrer “Sonny Boy,” which the Los Angeles Times called a “cult classic,” Carroll and screenwriter Dalene Young now take on a deceptively simple subject: what kind of person would sell her own children? Out of that theme, they have fashioned a dark, complex film that is likely to draw the same critical and controversial response as “Sonny Boy.” Applying his usual sensitivity to a cast of unknowns, Carroll gives us the story of Lee Ann, a troubled teenager whose existence revolves in and around downtown Los Angeles, a world of desolate streets and run-down tenements a million miles from the sunny city most of us know. Pregnant, against the wishes of her artist boyfriend, Lee Ann agrees to sell her child to a middle-aged couple -- only to discover the couple has a secret even more troubling than her own. |
