Rebecca Miller's (she's the daughter of playwright Arthur) not very cinematic adaptation of her own novel is a dramatic triptych that feels strangely anachronistic. Though the film is a serious and honourable effort to tell the stories of three women of distinctly variegated social and intellectual backgrounds, the film's sensibility and old-fashioned take on feminism are straight out of the early 80s. Most of us, post-feminist feminists included, have seen it all-or at least read about it all-before.

The film might be better titled "Escape Velocity" in that each of the three women-Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey and Fairuza Balk-are revving up their empowerment engines in order to finally escape from the personal and social baggage that has contributed to their unhappy lives. In part one, Sedgwick plays Delia, an undereducated mother of two whose husband beats her. Her tale, the least interesting of the three, details the nuts and bolts of her past and what it takes to break free for a better future. And it does so in a completely predictable manner.

Part two-the least schematic and most psychologically interesting of the three-gives us Posey's Greta, a "happily" married recipe-book editor with a "fidelity problem" (that is, she likes infidelity) and an overbearing father (Ron Liebman). Simultaneous with a big promotion, Greta begins to question her marriage to the perfect guy, wondering whether or not to "dump her beautiful husband like a redundant paragraph" (the film's best line). Greta is the only character with an element of mystery to her; I'm not sure whether it's the writing or Posey's acting but Greta is the sole character whose actions contain the hint of the inexplicable we associate with real life.

Former Vancouverite Balk's punky Paula anchors part three. She's an erstwhile street kid now living with the man who helped her when she was down. Running from some unspecified (until near the end) trauma, she is unsure of what to do about her newly discovered pregnancy. An injured adolescent boy she picks up on the highway and tries to care for provides her with a "sign." Balk-who has come a long way since her debut in Return to Oz-does what she can with a script that saddles her with a New Age-y penchant to look for "signs" in everything she encounters.

Despite its overall lack of narrative thrust (the film is really three shorts very tenuously tied together) and a tendency to engage in dime store Freudian psychologizing Personal Velocity won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. This is at least understandable: the film's earnestness, serious intentions and good acting are qualities juries tend to admire. That it also copped the cinematography prize is, however, beyond comprehension. Digitally shot, the film is grainy and washed-out most of the time. I know that Sundance is on the cutting edge in the promotion of digital cinematography but this is just plain ugly.