Women in Trouble

Plot

The film focuses on six women in Los Angeles as their lives become intertwined in the course of 24 hours.

Porn star Elektra Luxx (Carla Gugino) discovers she is pregnant. Leaving her doctors office, she gets stuck in an elevator with Doris (Connie Britton), sister to Addy (Caitlin Keats). Addy has recently started taking her daughter, Charlotte, to see her therapist, Maxine (Sarah Clarke) (While secretly using the visit to sleep with the therapists husband, upon choosing to follow her therapists advice to "live with more risk."). Upon finding out about her husbands secret during a therapy session with Charlotte, Maxine rushes out and gets into her car. While backing out, she hits Holly Rocket (Adrianne Palicki), adult film star. Holly and Bambi (Emmanuelle Chriqui) were running to safety after a session with one of Bambis clients is interrupted. Meanwhile, flight attendant Cora (Marley Shelton) finds herself the object of rock star Nick Chapels (Josh Brolin) affection on a flight to his bands upcoming show.

Cast

Production and sequel

The film was directed by Sebastian Gutierrez. Production began and ended in Los Angeles. The film premiered at the 2009 South by Southwest Film Festival. The film opened in the United States on November 13, 2009. A sequel, Elektra Luxx, was released on March 11, 2011. Gutierrez returns as the writer-director, and the cast includes Carla Gugino, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Timothy Olyphant, Julianne Moore and Justin Kirk. Gutierrez is planning on making a third installment, tentatively titled Women in Ecstasy which was initially planned to be released in 2012.

Critical reception

Women in Trouble polarized critics. On the positive side, Joe Leydon of Daily Variety gave it a rave review, calling it "A compulsively watchable mix of high camp and grand passions, soap opera and softcore sex. Very much in the deliriously lewd style of Pedro Almodovar—who has co-written unproduced scripts with Gutierrez, and gets a shout-out in the closing credits—this exuberantly uninhibited indie has the anything-goes spirit of something tossed off in a single burst of collaborative energy." Kevin Thomas of The Los Angeles Times assessed: "Women in Trouble has sleeper written all over it and a sequel is already in the works." Kyle Smith of the New York Post said "Unlikely accidents, shared secrets and zany twists combine to whip up a pleasing froth.". John DeFore writing for The Hollywood Reporter praised the direction: "Gutierrezs script can not supply female characters as believable as Almodovars, but in the directors chair he gives his cast room to compensate with funny, self-aware performances".

At the other end of the spectrum, Melissa Anderson writing for Village Voice said "blue material mixes awkwardly with sob stories". And Manohla Dargis of The New York Times was not amused, complaining that "The amateurish production values might be pardoned if the cliches—the hard-core porn star with the soft heart, the therapist who needs to heal herself—inside the poorly lighted, badly shot images were not so absurd and often insulting".