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College of Education and Human Development University of Minnesota 128 Pleasant St. S.E. Minneapolis, MN 55455 ryahnke{at}umn.edu

Bunny and Leona. Video/2004/60 min. Directed and produced by John Kastner, in association with CBC and the Documentary Channel. Distributed by Filmakers, Inc., 124 East 40th Street, New York, NY, 10016. 212-808-4980. Online: www.filmakers.com. E-mail: info{at}filmakers.com. Rental, $85 (90-minute version, $100). Purchase, $295.

Two sisters, Maxine (Bunny) and Leona, have lived together for 30 years. After Bunny's divorce, Leona moved in and helped her raise her four children. According to Bunny, Leona was like another mother to her children. But now the two sisters face a crisis: Bunny, 67, disabled by a series of strokes, must move to a nursing home. While she waits in the hospital for a nursing home bed to become available, her sister Leona, 72, decides to move into a long-term care facility as well. She chooses an assisted-living facility and faces a difficult transition—living apart from her sister and also facing the prospects of living with a stranger, who will share her room at the institution.

At first, Kastner emphasizes the emotional equilibrium of Bunny, who is looking forward to leaving the hospital and beginning her new life in the nursing home, as compared to the emotional disequilibrium of Leona, who initially has difficulty making the transition to long-term care. In early scenes, Bunny is shown expressing concerns about her older sister's state of mind. But once Leona settles into her assisted-living home, and begins to bond with her new roommate, her frame of mind becomes more positive. Soon she is taking a cab to visit Bunny on a regular basis, and before long the narrator announces, "A newly assertive Leona is emerging." We also see evidence of her transformation. She shops with her roommate, she talks on camera about her positive relationship with her roommate, and she participates regularly in activities at her facility. That reversal of attitudes is at the heart of this video's meaning. After a long wait, Bunny finally is admitted to a nursing home, and yet none of her family comes until the fifth day of her residence there. For four days she faced this difficult transition alone—and the feeling of abandonment is a blow to her psyche. Although she improves her state of mind in the next two months, eventually she appears to be worn down by living amid older and more frail and disabled elders—many of whom are 20 or 30 years older than Bunny. An exception is her 101 year old roommate, Gert (See review above). Bunny seems to find some companionship in Gert; but the warmth of that relationship does not ease her feelings of detachment and loneliness. She becomes increasingly confused and depressed at the loss of function in her right hand, and near the end of the video she is shown talking to herself as she sits in the day room of the nursing home. Her decline is precipitous. The video ends without explaining what happened to Bunny; but viewers of Gert's Secret learn that Bunny died only a few months after her move to the nursing home.

Bunny and Leona is available in 90-minute and 60-minute versions. For the purposes of this review, I was sent a copy of the 90-minute version, and I was disappointed at the slow pace of the scene structure. I think the 60-minute version would be more useful and effective in the context of gerontology education. In the 90-minute version, Kastner devoted too much time to aspects of both women's stories. Early in the video, too much time is given to Bunny's experience in the hospital (awaiting her room at the nursing home), and too much time is devoted to Leona's move into the assisted-living facility. Later, a long section of the video is devoted to the conflict between roommates at that facility. The outcome of their contention is that they are separated, and one of the two is assigned to Leona's room. The move works well both for Leona and her new roommate; but I was not as interested in the attention given to the disputes between the former roommates. I did not need to know that much context. Too much time also was given to a scene showing Bunny's family celebrating her birthday at the nursing home. Kastner incorporates excellent clips of dialogue from both women, and he often shows a keen eye for visuals to support the narrator's voice-over; but I was frustrated several times that the narrator announces the meanings of the sisters' interactions, instead of showing the interactions and letting viewers decide for themselves. In fact, there was altogether too much narration in this version of the film. Kastner focuses on the reversal of attitudes in the two sisters: the change from Bunny's self-confidence and forward-thinking to her growing sense of isolation and abandonment in contrast to the change from Leona's initial anxiety and lack of motivation to her increasing sense of self-confidence, assertiveness, and self-fulfillment. But as I viewed the video, I often wanted Kastner to maintain his focus on this point and set aside the many contextual scenes. He also added long interview segments with one of Bunny's sons and his wife; but I found their opinions and interactions with Bunny distracting and unsatisfying. After all, where were they when his mother moved from the hospital to the nursing home? Another distracting feature of the video was Kastner's use of expressionistic video techniques; that is, he incorporated eerie music and a shaky camera in order to recreate Bunny's feelings of disorientation, anxiety, and confusion. But that technique seemed to inflate the emotional content of Bunny's decline, and it added little to my ability to empathize with Bunny's plight. I also wonder why Kastner decided not to follow Bunny's story to the end and include her death as part of the drama.

In summary, Bunny and Leona—certainly in the 90-minute version I viewed—was the least effective of the three videos in this series. I was intrigued by the deft characterizations of Phillip and Helen in Living Dangerously; and Kastner's structure, moving back and forth between the stories of the two elders, added to the drama. The video's theme of the conflicting needs of autonomy versus safety was well conceived and presented. I was impressed with the richness of Gert's character in Gert's Secret. She is a memorable elder! In some respects, Leona in the latter video may turn out to be another Gert if she lives long enough and maintains her essential health and emotional well-being. That video also was effective because it provided insights into the universal fear of making a move to a nursing home, and yet showed some of the ways that staff members and residents can tolerate that move and adapt to life in a nursing home.

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