Film Synopsis

On her 25th birthday, New York filmmaker Tessa Blake flew to Houston to receive a million-dollar trust fund from her father. Six months later, she went back with a movie camera...

Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me is her portrait of an 88-year-old man with a trail of Texas Exes: Houston oil man, Hollywood playboy, hotshot lawyer and serial monogamist Tommy Blake. On a quirky and intimate journey, a daughter looks beyond myth, money, and society -- and all that hair -- in seeking the truth of her father.

Named an Outstanding Contemporary Documentary by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Oscar nominating committee, Five Wives is set against the extravagant backdrop of Houston society, a microcosm in which wives One and Five lunch together, wife Three comes for the holidays, and the current secretary has been around longer than all of them put together. Injected into this tight-knit circle of women is the younger Blake, film crew in tow, asking questions no one has dared pose until now. For nearly three years, she re-enters the much mythologized world of the Texas jetset into which she was bom. Are there real people beneath the soap opera cast that Tessa calls her family? So the search begins. Family member by family member, friend by friend, employee by employee, she asks questions, some pointed, others circumspect, seeking to demystify her own familial history. But she discovers that there are as many versions to every legend as there are Stetsons in Texas.

Class and race struggles emerge as essential components of the Blakes' world, the inevitable tarnish on a gilt frame. Examining the narrow byways of her father's story, Tessa observes the consequences, both comic and tragic, of caste stratification. Often, she finds in herself the unlikely junction of disparate cultures, the link between master and maid. In her childhood nanny Chelo, she finds a quiet sincerity that is in many ways more a home than the house her father shares with his latest bride. Yet in the end, by the code of behavior that informs life throughout the South, she is unfit for entree into either culture. In one world, she is a mysterious renegade; in the other, a friendly debutante. Neither, of course, speaks to the truth of who Tessa is, any more than Giant speaks to the truth of her subjects' lives.

Along with searching out the truth of family myth, Five Wives explores the madcap comedy of Texana, that odd cultural crossroads of Deep South and Old West. From five-story statues of founding fathers to five-story hairdos of determined debutantes, the film captures the outrageous excesses of the Lone Star state. It is an affectionate look at the fine lines between type, stereotype, and archetype.

Finally, Five Wives is a film about a daughter who comes home to make a film about her father. As the viewer's guide through the strange and often forbidding world that her father calls home, Tessa becomes the protagonist of the story. What role, then, does that leave her father? Antagonist? In some instances, yes. But more accurately, they are most often dual protagonists - if dueling protagonists as well. The real villain of the tale is the rigid code of secrecy that supersedes class, race, age, and gender with an unyielding grip on Southem society. If Five Wives is a film about its own making, it may be its own resolution as well, for the hope of redemption is found not in the questions we ask, nor even in the answers we receive, but in the very act of asking, the shining of light in dusty, hidden comers.

As the youngest daughter of a man who is more icon than father, Tessa searches for the truth beneath her family mythology and discovers that the only truth, finally, is her own.