The debut feature of A Chip & A Chair Films, IF YOU COULD SAY IT IN WORDS was featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s “In Focus” section in Summer 2007, and has begun to garner support from the Asperger’s community. The director and the actor playing Nelson were recently interviewed for www.WrongPlanet.net, a website run by and devoted to people with Asperger’s and other autism-related disorders. After showing some of the clips of the film, it has earned praise for its realistic and nuanced portrayal of this condition.
Nelson has Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that impairs social function. Undiagnosed, poor, and a painter, he has been pushed to society’s fringes. He is working on a triptych of emotional portraits that he understands more intellectually than intrinsically. He meets Sadie, a young woman with broken dreams who now treads water at a job that’s not her career, has a roommate who’s not her friend, and sleeps with her married boss, Mark.
A one-night stand grows into an unlikely romance wherein two people lost in different ways begin to find themselves through each other. With Sadie, Nelson is now overcome by the emotions he struggled to paint. With Nelson, Sadie is freed from the strain of her own self-imposed expectations.
As the weeks go by, they come to share their secrets freely, but sharing feelings comes slower. Nelson becomes more immersed in his triptych, racing to capture on canvas what he cannot say in words. Feeling neglected, Sadie pushes him to join her in more conventional social settings where he can barely cope. Soon their entire relationship is in jeopardy. When at last the cost of dating erodes Nelson’s meager finances, he agrees to sell Mark a painting he had already promised to Sadie. In Sadie’s eyes, this is betrayal. In the end Nelson is left alone with his canvases to ponder what went wrong and to mourn what could have been.
