Six Degrees of Separation (film)

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

New Yorkers Ouisa and Flan Kittredge are upper class private art dealers, pretentious but compassionate. Their prized possession is a double sided Kandinsky, one side that represents control, the other side chaos. They relay a story to their friends and acquaintances that over time becomes legendary. It is their encounter with a young black man who they had never met or heard of but who comes stumbling upon their front door one evening as they are courting an important investor, Geoffrey Miller, who could make them wealthy beyond what they could have dreamed. That black man is Paul Poitier, who has just arrived in the city, was just mugged outside their building and is sporting a minor knife wound to the abdomen. He is a friend of the Kittredge's children, who are attending Harvard, but more importantly is the son of actor/director 'Sidney Poitier' (qv). Tomorrow, Paul is meeting up with his father who is in town directing a movie of "Cats". Beyond the attraction of talking Paul into getting them roles in the movie, Ouisa, Flan and Geoffrey all end up being captivated by the charm, charisma, pedigree and eloquence of Paul, who the Kittredges, after tending to his wounds, invite to stay the night. Their encounter with Paul ends up being an all too familiar story, which they will soon learn, and leads the Kittredges on a search for Paul after he leaves their abode the next morning. In that search, Ouisa, in particular, begins to view critically their life and just how much compassion they really have.

Keywords: african-american, art, art-dealer, assumed-identity, bare-butt, based-on-play, based-on-true-story, bisexual, bookstore, business

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Quotes:

Ben: That's your problem in a nutshell: you're so limited.

Tess: He offered you parts in Cats? I thought you hated Cats. You said it was an all time low in a lifetime of theatre going. You said, "Aeschylus did not invent the theatre to have it end up a bunch of chorus kids in cat suits prancing around wondering which of them will go to kitty-cat heaven."

Ouisa: I am a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes. I am all random.

Tess: I will not be part of this conspiracy!::Flan: It's not a conspiracy, it's a family!

Ouisa Kittredge: There is so much you don't know. You are so smart and so stupid.::Paul: I'll be treated with care if you take me to the police. If they don't know you're special, they kill you.::Ouisa Kittredge: Oh, I don't think they kill you.::Paul: Mrs. Louisa Kittredge, I am black.::Ouisa Kittredge: I will deliver you to them with kindness and affection.

Ouisa: And we turn him into an anecdote, with no teeth, and a punchline you'll tell for years to come: "Oh, that reminds me of the time the imposter came into our house." "Oh! Tell the one about that boy." And we become these human jukeboxes spitting out these anecdotes to dine out on like we're doing right now. Well I will not turn him into an anecdote, it was an experience. How do we hold onto the experience?

Paul: It is the worst kind of yellowness to be so scared of yourself that you put blindfolds on rather than deal with yourself. To face ourselves - that's the hard thing. The imagination - that's God's gift, to make the act of self-examination bearable.

Paul: You watch. It gives me a thrill to be looked at.

Flan Kittredge: I thought, dreamt, remembered how easy it is for a painter to lose a painting. He paints and paints, works on a canvas for months, and then one day he loses it - loses the structure, loses the sense of it. You lose the painting.

Paul: The imagination. It's there to sort out your nightmare, to show you the exit from the maze of your nightmare, to transform the nightmare into dreams, that become your bedrock. If we do not listen to that voice, it dies, it shrivels, it vanishes. The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.

Six Degrees of Separation