Brandi (Kelly-Ann Tursi), a 20 year old girl who's sick of being broke and has dreams of making it big as a real estate investor, meets a guy named Chi Trang (Paul D. Nguyen) who gets her into the one hour fantasy business.  The service provided is one hour of anything you want as long as it doesn't involve her getting nude, having sex or kissing.  Other than that, she'll act out whatever fantasy the customer wants for $150 an hour.  This involves some incredibly bizarre stuff, and having to deal with that, plus the pressures put on her by her manager / friend / pimp Chi Trang, have basically turned her into an emotionally dead and highly frustrated person who just wants to save up enough money to get into real estate investing so she can escape this life and move on to something better.  Throw in a guy who tried to stab her and ended up killing her manager, and another guy who totally scams her and takes all of her savings, and it's really surprising that she didn't just commit suicide.

This film says it's based on a true story.  I'm not sure how accurate it is in relation to the real story since I don't know the actual story its based on, but it's really unimportant in terms of this review, as I'm only going to be talking about this particular film and not making that real story / film adaptation comparison.

It's been a week or two since I've watched this film, so I've had time to reflect on it some since then, which have led me to some conclusions about certain characters, and left me with questions about others.  Sometimes, as with a film like this one, you need that cushion of time in between the viewing and the writing of the review, so as to properly assess what you've seen.  So what is my conclusion?  Well...

The girl who played Brandi, Kelly-Ann Tursi, played the character as basically emotionally dead.  The only emotions she seemed to have left were frustration and despondency.  While she did a great job playing the character like this, it also made it very hard to actually care about the character.  She was so one-dimensional and almost robotic that it was hard to really identify with her or to even care much about what happened to her.  I wanted to see some spark of humanity there that would make her struggle for a better life inspiring and would really make you pull for her to succeed, but I just didn't see it, and as such, I didn't care.  Now mind you, I'm only talking about the character itself here, not about the actress who played her, as I'm assuming this is how it was supposed to be played.  Kelly-Ann Tursi did a fine job of presenting the character as it was intended to be presented and I have no complaints about her performance at all.  I just wished there had been something underneath in the character itself.  Some spark of life that made me want to care.  It just wasn't there at all.

I thought the relationship between Brandi and Chi Trang was rather interesting.  There was a level of friendship there, and of him caring about her well being and making sure she was safe, but there was also that aspect of the pimp / whore relationship where he'd get angry if she didn't take good care of a client.  He had a dream as well.  He wanted to make it big in the music industry, and was going to use the money she made for them to achieve that.  The relationship was complex, and actually, I thought it worked quite well in the context of the story.

Joe Morgan Woodward, who played Roger / Infant Man, was another notable character.  This guy had some serious issues, and every time he was shown having his fantasies fulfilled, they became more and more bizarre.  Wanting to be treated like a pretty little girl, wanting to be treated like a baby, wanting to be forced to eat a sandwich out of a dog bowl after Brandi urinated on it, etc...  He handled the character amazingly well, and it eventually got to a point where it would make your skin crawl every time you saw him in a new scene.

Joe Luckay played Bobby Richards, who at first seemed to be a mild mannered and even a rather shy kid from Montana.  What he really was though, was a scumbag con artist / thief with a gambling problem who took advantage of Brandi's desire to find a better life away from everything she was going through.  He seemed like a nice kid, but when he turns and you find out who he really is, you end up feeling like you could put a bullet in his head with no regrets whatsoever.  Joe really played the character well to have pulled off that sort of a turn, and deserves kudos for his performance.

While the story in this film is generally solid and coherent, there were some things that either confused me or just flat out didn't work for me.  Most of them were minor and not worth mentioning, but the one big problem I had were the scenes in the diner.  Brandi couldn't manage to sleep at home, so she would go to this diner at night and pay them twenty bucks or whatever to hang out in a booth and fall asleep there.  The diner's owner couldn't stand having her around and only tolerated her there at night, but wanted her gone by the time he came in in the morning.  Now a few things bothered me with this part of the film.  The owner's animosity toward her is never really explained, nor is her relationship with the waitress who works there at night, who also seems to not give two squats about her but tolerates her anyway, and yet, they seem to have some sort of a friendship or something on some level.  That waitress character is never really explained in any real way, and while she seems as emotionally dead as Brandi, Brandi seems to care about her for some reason.  There really should have been better story development there to explain what was going on with this aspect of the film and the characters involved.  It all just ended up rather confusing and didn't seem to have much of a point to it other than adding two more crappy people to the story for her to deal with and to give her a place to crash at night.

Another smaller problem I had was the fact that Brandi, both emotionally and personality-wise, was little more than a cardboard cut out.  I mean just totally flat and emotionless.  So why were people paying $150 to spend an hour with someone like that?  How could she have any return customers?  It would seem to me that if you're going to be in that business, you'd have to act like you actually wanted to be there fulfilling the customer's fantasies rather than acting either like you were pissed off about something, or like you'd rather be anywhere else, doing anything else.  I certainly wouldn't pay that much to have someone act like that toward me.  Hell, I could get that on any street corner for free.

Something else that bothered me was that I couldn't figure out why the hell Brandi was keeping the money she saved in an envelope in her apartment.  She was big on getting into real estate investing, which meant she had to have even a little bit of business sense, and yet she couldn't even open a savings account?  That would have been the first thing I'd have done.  Keeping the money in her apartment made no sense at all.  Still, if it was based on a true story and that's what happened in the real story...it's still dumb, but I can understand why it was like that in the film.  It also had to be like that so she could get it stolen later on in the movie, but still...dumb!

As far as the technicals go, the film was very well made.  The camera shots were nicely set up, the sound was generally good, although it could have been better in parts of the diner scenes, and the editing moved the story along at a nice pace, never dwelling longer on any particular scene more than was necessary.  The lighting was good as well.  Even in the darker scenes, the action was clearly visible, and at no time did I have to wonder what was going on in the dark.

One Hour Fantasy Girl is a drama with some twisted elements to it, and as such, will be more appreciated by people who like those kinds of films.  It does have some problems, but looking at the film as a whole, both good and bad, I don't have any problem recommending it, albeit with the caveat that it does have a few issues with the characters and story.  While I may seem to have put a lot of emphasis on these problems in the review, truth be told, most of them would end up being minor for your average viewer.  As a result of being a movie reviewer, I tend to watch films with a more critical eye, so I pick up on the problems more than a casual viewer would.  The casual viewer probably wouldn't even notice or think about much of what I've mentioned here, but more critical viewers would.  So if you're a casual viewer, this is a film definitely worth checking out.  For the more critical viewer, you'll notice the problems, as I did, but I would submit to you that it's still worth seeing.  There are some very interesting aspects to the story that run at a deeper level and will make the film worth your time to see.

If you'd like to find out more about this film, check out the film's website at http://www.onehourfantasygirlmovie.com.