Rating: NR | Runtime: 93 minutes
Release Date: January 13th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Gravitas Ventures
Director(s): Julian Acosta, Xan Cassavetes, Gia Coppola, Ryan Heffington, Boma Iluma, Gillian Jacobs, Ken Jeong & Alex Takacs
Writer(s): Julian Acosta, Xan Cassavetes, Ben Del Vecchio, Ryan Heffington, Tran Ho, Boma Iluma, Nick Iwataki, Gillian Jacobs, Antonio Macia, Alex Takacs & Kaydee Volpi

What version of yourself do you want to be?

While he doesn’t get a director’s credit, The Seven Faces of Jane is Roman Coppola’s baby. It’s an “exquisite corpse” exercise wherein he recruited eight different creatives to come together and tell the story of a woman (Gillian Jacobs’ Jane) embarking on a genre-hopping, introspective journey through mind and soul during the brief time in which she finds herself alone after dropping her eight-year-old daughter off at camp.

Coppola passed out cards with settings and ideas; set a chronology insofar as which director’s short would go first, etc.; and told everyone to go and make something to their own specific styles and voices to be merged later without any knowledge of the others’ work.

The result is a fun experiment with varying degrees of success depending on your tastes and interests. There’s comedy, drama, action, dance, and a very front-and-center Mustang driving us through each vignette as though Ford was the main financial backer of the project (I couldn’t stop thinking of “The Hire”, BMW’s series of shorts from Ridley and Tony Scott—amongst others—starring Clive Owen). We learn about Jane’s regrets. Her aspirations. Guilt. Desires. Fears. She runs into ghosts from the past to reconcile who she was and who she is now while wondering whether there’s another evolution on the horizon.

Jacobs, being the star and thus cognizant of everything, was tasked with directing the prologue and epilogue alongside her character’s daughter (Joni Reiss). Gia Coppola (Roman’s niece) delivers the first chapter as an off-the-wall, surreal gangster lark. Boma Iluma and Ryan Heffington come next with my two favorite shorts of the bunch—gorgeously shot, heartfelt, and devastating. Iluma’s “Tayo” is a snapshot of Jane’s former boyfriend (Chido Nwokocha) being reborn while Heffington’s “Guardian” memorializes a friendship (with Sybil Azur) more powerful than distance or death.

Xan Cassavetes and Julian J. Acosta supply numbers four and five with a comedic air while Ken Jeong helms a dramatic, potential turning point for Jane via a wonderfully emotive long-take opposite Joel McHale before Alex Takacs rounds things out with the unsettlingly dark “The Audition”.

Mileage will obviously vary. I personally thought there was something to like about each and the disparate aspect ratios, film grain, and genre trappings keep everything fresh so that Jacobs’ performance can be the connective tissue. The pieces probably work better than the whole, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing considering how purposefully segregated their productions were. The “feature film” nature of the finished project is but the vessel with which to share the individual works with the world. It’s also perhaps an incorrect label. Coppola’s exercise of combining disparate visions ensures its status as an anthology.

---

(L-R) Gillian Jacobs and Joni Reiss in a scene from THE SEVEN FACES OF JANE. Photo courtesy of Super Fab.