If Panahi can consistently find the perfect balance of emotional thrust to be affecting without being cloying, then Andrea Dorfman's Flawed would be a sort of antithesis to that, coming off as a pandering, endlessly didactic film that must be aimed at children, as it has absolutely no value to any reasonably well-thinking adult. But, like the worst of children's literature, it suffers from a lack of self-awareness about the message it purports to be teaching. It suggests the old platitude that we should accept people for who they are and not judge them based on superficial looks, but it does so by relating the story of a woman who ends up in a relationship with a plastic surgeon. I suppose because it is told from the woman's point of view (and narrated by the director, implying an autobiographical quality to the film) it somehow justifies that her opinion on the matter is the one that is depicted and the film achieves its happy ending when she has convinced her surgeon boyfriend to see things from her perspective, yet it comes off as narcissistic and braggy. What about his opinion? What about encouraging children not only to look deeper than the surface, but also to have healthy and meaningful conversations with the people around them rather than resorting to manipulation and celebrating "winning" the argument. She never once asks why he became a plastic surgeon, only telling him why she resents them and our superficial culture. She also somewhat suggests that people with things that make them different should be okay with martyring themselves to ridicule and emotional suffering for the greater good of eventually convincing everyone it's okay to be different.
As a person who generally feels that cosmetic surgery is a bad way to stem the tide of superficial prejudice, this film somehow made me walk out being more okay with it than I was walking in. It convinced me that maybe, if I sounded like her, I might be the one who was wrong.
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