Peter Sattler

(On Cable TV, June 2022) As much as I understand some screenwriting imperatives such as creating a central conflict, clarifying a deadline and providing a compelling hook, it annoys me when scripts go out of their way to contrive false choices. So, when the protagonist of Broken Diamonds is quickly established as a young man with a ticket out of his small town to Paris, where he intends to write, the first question –before the central conflict set up by having to care for his mentally ill sister after the death of their father—is a big fat “why?”  Only poseurs go to Paris to write, especially if they don’t appear to speak French. By the time the sister screws up his plans (most notably by carelessly burning his passport), the film is already on life support when it comes to credibility – look, dude, you’re not going to Paris, so stop pretending that you will. It doesn’t help anything that this basic verisimilitude problem compounds the film’s other overwhelming issue – the sheer unadulterated contempt we have for the characters – the meek brother, the unstable sister and everyone else who pops up on screen. While the film attempts to touch upon an unglamorous portrayal of mental illness, Broken Diamonds doesn’t earn the sympathy required to power through the film’s obligatory low points. There’s an overwhelming familiarity to the way director Peter Sattler builds the film – an approach aping countless other independent small-scale dramas going for an obvious execution of shrug-worthy material. I’m clearly not in the target audience for this, but even then – would it have been so hard to make the script just a bit better?