The Aussies have a go at the alternative-realities game: the Run, Lola, Run game, the Sliding Doors and Twice upon a Yesterday game, the Smoking/No Smoking game. And it was only a matter of time, with so many people having a go at it, that the game would dissolve into cozy convention and frivolity. In writer-director Pip Karmel's version, a go-getter investigative reporter looks around at her loveless life and wonders how it would have been different if she hadn't said no to Mr. Right thirteen years earlier. She gets to find out -- more or less -- when she steps off a curb and directly into the path of a car driven by her alternative self: married, with three children, and a writer of fluff for a slick women's magazine. Rachel Griffiths, seen for the next little while as two separate people on the same screen, is a highly skilled and a hard-working actress (Hilary and Jackie, Among Giants, Muriel's Wedding), even if here she is acting like a TV sitcom star with a loyal following she wouldn't want to disappoint. And the three kids are commensurately cute. (Pre-teen daughter with fuchsia-streaked hair: "Mum, if you haven't got your period yet, do you have to use a condom when you have sex?") But the dubious premise -- that you can step into someone else's life, without having taken the same steps to arrive there, and know what it's like to live it -- diverts us from the alternative-realities track and onto the dead-ringers track. The main issue becomes whether or not the imposter can get away with the masquerade. This leaves plenty of latitude for madcap antics (the borrowed diaphragm that lands in the toilet), but not much for metaphysics. And the resolution scarcely brings things into sharper focus when the game turns out to be not so much a matter of alternative realities as of parallel universes, each of them equally and concurrently real, with similarly if not quite equally happy endings. The mind doesn't so much boggle as blow a fuse. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.