The Seven Faces of Jane
Directed by Gillian Jacobs, Gia Coppola, Boma Iluma, Ryan Heffington, Xan Cassavetes, Julian J. Acosta, Ken Jeong, and Alex Takács
Written by Gillian Jacobs, Nick Iwataki, Boma Iluma, Ben Del Vecchio, Ryan Heffington, Xan Cassavetes, Julian J. Acosta, Antonio Macia, Kaydee Volpi, Tran Ho, Alex Takács
Starring Gillian Jacobs, Joel McHale, Chido Nwokocha, and Daniela Hernandez
Runtime: 92 minutes
In Theaters and On Demand January 13

by Mathilda Hallstrom, Staff Writer

In The Seven Faces of Jane, the story of Jane (Gillian Jacobs), a young, single mother in Los Angeles, is told through the eyes of seven different directors. Assembled by producer Roman Coppola, all seven directors played a game of exquisite corpse: each individual contribution was written and directed with no knowledge of the rest of the film, and later put together by Coppola to tell the story of Jane as she opens herself up to new experiences. After dropping her daughter off at sleepaway camp, Jane meets new friends, says goodbye to old lovers, and wanders the landscape of Los Angeles.

While The Seven Faces of Jane is certainly interesting in its premise, it leaves much to be desired in its execution. The film is forced to migrate through different genres, tones, and pacing, sometimes rather awkwardly and seemingly little consideration for the structure of the film itself. Frankly, most of the film presents itself as a car commercial, with entire segments dedicated to showing Gillian Jacobs driving, charging, or dancing on top of her electric Mustang.

When Coppola isn’t hawking a Ford product, the film does make an honest attempt to tell stories about Jane: Boma Iluma’s “Tayo” offers a visually arresting journey into the past for Jane as she reunites with an ex, and Ken Jeong’s “The One Who Got Away” pulls two very earnest and touching performances out of Jacobs and co-star Joel McHale (hopefully this isn’t the Community movie we were promised, though).

But in a film that purports to tell the story of one woman, we never really get to know Jane. We don’t see seven different versions of the same woman or derive any real complex understanding of her life or interiority, we just see different stylistic clippings of who Jane might be. In Xan Cassavetes’ “The Lonesome Road”, Jane picks up a young female hitchhiker, Valentina (Emanuela Postacchini), a woman whose only self-reported interest is finding cute boys to flirt with. Jane announces to Valentina that she’s running away — from nothing and no one, seemingly, for no reason — and as soon as she and Valentina part ways, she’s right back where she started.

Moreover, The Seven Faces of Jane was given the opportunity to tell rich, stimulating stories about life, and half of them are filled with meaningless garb and exposition and, again, innumerable expository shots of Jane’s car. To its credit, star Gillian Jacobs’ performance rarely wavers through the film’s discrepancies — she is willing to let the directors take her where they need her to go while doing her best to pin something down in all of the mess.