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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Dina: I like the woman, but I have issues with the film

DINA (Antonio Santini, Dan Sickles). 103 minutes. Opens Friday (November 3). See listing. Rating: NNN


Roger Ebert used to say it’s not what a film is about, but how it is about it that’s a quotation I come back to often, and it popped into my mind several times while I watched Dina.

The new non-fiction feature from Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles, who made the 2014 documentary Mala Mala, introduces viewers to Dina Buno, a 48-year-old Philadelphia woman on the autism spectrum, and her fiancé, Scott Levin, who is a little younger, also on the spectrum, and maybe not as ready for an interpersonal relationship as Dina would like him to be. 

Santini and Sickles track the couple on their path toward marriage. Scott moves into Dina’s apartment, they plan their stagette and bachelor party, that sort of thing. And the pair take a trip to Atlantic City, where Dina gives Scott a copy of The Joy Of Sex, hoping he’ll take the hint. As they go, the filmmakers start to fill in the specifics of pre-Scott Dina’s life, and we start to understand what she means when she refers to herself as “a survivor.”

Dina, the documentary, has been embraced on the festival circuit as a portrait of an unconventional romance, and that’s certainly how it presents itself what’s a little more nagging is the level of calculation and manipulation the filmmakers apply to their footage, and even how some of the material was captured. 

For instance: is someone behind the camera in the bedroom scenes? Wouldn’t that make Scott, already uncomfortable with intimacy, even more so? 

By neither anticipating nor addressing these questions, Santini and Sickles put an unnecessary filter between their audience and subjects. I liked Dina, the person, just fine. But I have real issues with the movie that bears her name.

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