January 2008

In her gen­er­ally neg­ative appraisal of the “mumble­core” move­ment in the November/December 2007 issue of Film Comment, Amy Taubin reserves praise for the two fea­tures written and dir­ected by Aaron Katz, calling him a “breakout talent” and praising both the “lyric beauty” of his cine­ma­to­graphy (although acknow­ledging he used dif­ferent DPs for each film) and his “expressive” sound design. I’d seen the posters for both films, and some stills and the trailer for Quiet City, and was intrigued. Though I’m still a mumble­core novice, I’ve made some assump­tions of my own, and before even seeing Katz’s films, thought he had a much more developed visual sense than some of the others. With pre­con­cep­tions in mind, I sat down to watch both films this weekend, thanks to the gor­geous DVD package from Benten Films, avail­able January 29, 2008. In addi­tion to both films, the DVD package fea­tures dir­ector and cast com­ment­aries on both films, altern­ative and extended scenes, an early short film, footage from Quiet City’s New York premiere, and more. Benten are quickly becoming the Criterion of the indie film world.

Quiet City (2007, Director: Aaron Katz): In its brief 78 minutes, Quiet City was able to accom­plish some­thing quite remark­able. By the end of the film, I was begin­ning to care about a couple of people whom I almost dis­missed at the start. Though the script still feels a bit under­cooked in places, and the sound mix often had me straining to hear what was being said, the editing and acting actu­ally felt nat­ural so that I jour­neyed with the char­ac­ters from awk­ward­ness to curi­osity to empathy to genuine connection.

The story arc is modest, to say the least, and I wouldn’t con­sider my plot sum­mary to be spoiling any­thing, but just in case, con­sider this a spoiler alert and skip to next para­graph if you like. Jamie (Erin Fisher) arrives in Brooklyn toward evening. At the subway stop, she asks stranger Charlie (Cris Lankenau) dir­ec­tions to a diner where she’s sup­posed to meet her friend Samantha. When Samantha fails to show, Charlie and her spend the rest of the evening and the next day together. For the first ten minutes, their twentyso­mething slacker (lack of) vocab­u­lary was driving me nuts, with each “like” hit­ting my eardrums like a sharpened stick. But it’s remark­able how their dia­logue improves as their nervous­ness dis­sip­ates, and before long, they’re teasing each other good-naturedly. There’s a def­inite attrac­tion between them, but each is careful not to spoil it by making a wrong move. The film really catches fire as the two attend a gal­lery event the next evening. At a party after­ward, they sep­arate, Charlie chat­ting ami­ably with strangers about nothing much, and Jamie having a ser­ious con­ver­sa­tion with her friend Robin about Robin’s fear of intimacy. In her friend’s halting speech, com­plete with more adoles­cent “likes,” we see how far Jamie has moved in just a short time. When they leave the party together, it’s as if they were meant to be together, so dif­ferent do they seem from anyone else they’ve encountered. They share a lovely chaste moment of affec­tion on the subway and the film ends.

Katz’s achieve­ment is to accom­plish this in such a short space of time, and with no grand speeches or declar­a­tions of love. The plot sounds very sim­ilar to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, a film I’ve not actu­ally seen, but knowing Linklater, that film is bound to be more lofty and chatty and intel­lec­tual than this one. And per­haps less real for that reason. As a mar­ried man in my 40s, I can cringe at some of the things these char­ac­ters say, but it’s only because they’re acting within their lim­it­a­tions. Their awk­ward­ness and lack of dir­ec­tion are genuine, as is their des­perate desire to hide them beneath a layer of cool.

The cine­ma­to­graphy was gen­er­ally excel­lent, bathing Brooklyn in a warm and golden light. There were a few occa­sions where a tripod would have been wel­come, though, and a few of the camera set ups seemed a little slap­dash, but the feeling of the images was per­fect. As was the music, which was used spar­ingly and to good emo­tional effect.

I’m quite sure that Quiet City will reward repeat view­ings, and I’m looking for­ward to listening to the cast and dir­ector com­ment­aries to see how Katz man­aged to turn my feel­ings around so quickly. It seems a little like magic.

(7/10)

Dance Party USA (2006, Director: Aaron Katz): Although released in 2006, this film was actu­ally shot in 2004, and so seeing it after Quiet City, I expected to notice to be a huge leap for­ward in Katz’s devel­op­ment as a dir­ector. Instead, I found myself enjoying the earlier film even more. Similar in struc­ture and even in theme, there is a pretty big dif­fer­ence in tone and in at least one of the char­ac­ters. I found Dance Party USA more direct and the script was much tighter.

Set among a group of high school stu­dents in Portland, the film shares the basic arc of Quiet City. Over the course of a day or two, a male prot­ag­onist reaches out to a some­what mys­ter­ious woman and the film ends with them reaching a sweet and rather tent­ative con­nec­tion. In the case of Dance Party USA, our prot­ag­onist is the teen­aged Lothario Gus, first seen brag­ging about the sexual con­quest of an underage girl to his vacuous friend Bill. Played by Cole Pennsinger, Gus is a guy on the brink of leaving his adoles­cent per­sona behind him. His Beavis and Butthead exchanges with Bill are leaving him unful­filled, and he’s looking for a more real con­nec­tion than the “hook-ups” he seems able to achieve with ease. One night at a Fourth of July house party, he meets Jessica, sit­ting alone out­side. She’s a friend of his ex, and she’s aware of his repu­ta­tion. But he sits down and, almost like he’s in a con­fes­sion booth, he begins to tell her about some­thing he’s done in the recent past, some­thing that was very wrong. Somehow, he feels he can trust her, and after sit­ting silently through his con­fes­sion, she lights two spark­lers and hands him one. “Do you want to go some­where?” she asks. Each sees some­thing in the other that no one else has yet seen, and each wants to be that some­thing more than any­thing else. Gus is actu­ally finding that being a horny teen­ager is get­ting in the way of him finding a real con­nec­tion. Jessica is more of an enigma, but played by the lovely Anna Kavan, she oozes mys­tery, if not depth.

Later in the film, Gus attempts to make things right for his earlier mis­deed, but finds he’s awk­ward and unsure what to do. And his later exchanges with Bill are frankly hil­arious, as he talks about wanting to pursue some­thing cre­ative (pho­to­graphy, painting) and then asks Bill for a hug. There is a lot of dia­logue in this film, com­pared to Quiet City. The exciting thing is to see the drunken sin­cerity of teens at a beerbash devel­oping into the first halting attempts at full-time adult sin­cerity. Pennsinger and Kavan both show their vul­ner­ab­ility in dif­ferent ways. Gus has to escape a per­sona, albeit one that has served him well for some time, while Jessica has just seemed unim­pressed with the quality of the men she’s been around, and is opening her­self up for per­haps the first time. Maybe it’s because I’m more of a dia­logue person than most, but I found these per­form­ances stronger than the ones with fewer words in Quiet City.

All in all, a great pair of films and a great intro­duc­tion to an exciting young director.

(8/10)

Buy Quiet City/Dance Party USA from Amazon.ca

Buy Quiet City/Dance Party USA from Amazon.com

UPDATE 6/21/08 Both of these films played at the Toronto stop of the Generation DIY mini-festival which is trav­el­ling across Canada in the next few weeks. Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Aaron Katz held after the screening of Dance Party USA. The first loud voice is your humble author asking a ques­tion, the second loud voice belongs to my friend and col­league Bob Turnbull, and that’s Canada AM’s film critic Richard Crouse hosting the session:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 13:10

Tagged as: bentenfilms, generationdiy, independent, mumblecore

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