Movie/TV Show Reviews:

• 

  1990, Oklahoma City. Accidental drivers find an unconscious young woman on the road, who at first glance looks like a victim of a hit-and-run. A seemingly ordinary accident turns out to be the trigger for a criminal investigation that will preoccupy detectives and journalists across the United States for over 20 years. The Girl in the Picture is a documentary about one of those crimes that seems too implausible to be true; a crime that overwhelms, evokes helplessness and surpasses Skye Borgman herself - there was no experienced documentary filmmaker. Who is the blonde girl who is smiling broadly for the camera? - Sharon Marshall, Tonya Hughes, or maybe Suzanne Sevakis? At different times in her life, the girl in the photo was every one of them. In Georgia, she was known to friends and teachers as Sharon - an ambitious and talented teenager who dreamed of a career in science. As Tonya, she worked in a strip club in New Orleans and Tulsa, where her colleagues at work often saw her bruised. Suzanne has always been - but she was never aware of it. The woman's almost 21-year-old life resembled a nightmare from which she never managed to wake up. No matter how many times she changed identities, moved to different cities, and changed jobs, the shadow of Clarence, first known as her father and then her husband, always loomed somewhere on the horizon. The narrators of the tragic story are the heroine's closest friends and criminologists, who for the lion's share of their career tried to put together all the puzzles. Skye Borgman's production does not impress as an absorbing documentary that leads us thread by thread to a terrifying and at the same time fascinating truth. It's more of an archive film that collects a series of memories of Sharon from her past lives. In "The Girl in the Photo", however, it is not the meticulous account of the heroine's life that arouses curiosity, but old faded photographs that bring the woman to life in the viewer's imagination. Thanks to archival frames, we get to know Suzanne as a missing, traumatized girl; a teenager full of energy and dreams, and a young, devoted mother, for whom her beloved son was the only motivation to act. The use of authentic records from Suzanne's life makes her fate not just another material for an exciting true crime story. The title photos shorten the distance between the message and the viewer, making all the woman's nightmares tangible. Books were written about Sevakis' tragic life and journalistic reports were created. Borgman's film is the final piece of the puzzle - a summary of years of struggle, including FBI agent Joe Fitzpatrick and investigative journalist Matt Birkbeck, who analyzed Suzanne's life in the best-selling book A Beautiful Child. For Fitzpatrick, who had solved just about every crime in Oklahoma, the case of a murdered girl and her missing son, Michael, was the only unfinished case of his career. When it was time to retire and Clarence was sentenced to death, Birkbeck took care of Suzanne's secret and, thanks to an accidental discovery, finally managed to reveal the girl's true identity. The hardships and efforts of the policemen become the narrative axis of the documentary, in which the director meticulously collects testimonies from each detective investigating the case. Constant jumping around broken threads, as well as countless witnesses, institutions and people wanting to solve the mystery of the crime make it easy to get lost in the criminal tangle of clues and false leads. Compared to other items from the rich portfolio of Netflix crime documentaries, "Girl in the photo" falls quite pale. But is genre the right criterion here? The image of Skye Borgman is far from a full-blooded true crime, it is rather a film file, or an account of the heroine's emotional struggle. Borgman, as an archivist with a detective bent, focuses not on the viewer, but on the injured protagonist, wanting to make up for her lost life with truth. She gives Suzanne's fate a symbolic coda, giving a voice to every person who knew her, loved her or wanted to, but had no chance to meet her. Unfulfilled scientist? A teenage stripper from Tulsa? Or maybe a scared young mother who is a victim of domestic violence? Regardless of who Suzanne Sevakis really was, her story - whether through Birkbeck's book or Borgman's film - simply deserved the publicity. Just as the perpetrator of the crime deserved his punishment.

  12/7/2022