mumblecore

Funny Ha Ha (2002, Director: Andrew Bujalski): Perhaps the first of the films later lumped together as “mumble­core,” Funny Ha Ha was written and dir­ected by 27-year-old Harvard film graduate Andrew Bujalski. Made on a shoes­tring budget with non-professional actors, it toured film fest­ivals for almost three years before get­ting a lim­ited the­at­rical release in 2005. I believe this is the first time the film has screened the­at­ric­ally in Toronto.

Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer) is a recent col­lege graduate still living in the stu­dent ghetto near her school. Though she’s no longer a stu­dent, she seems unable to move on to the next phase of her life. She still hangs around with her col­lege friends, partying and working temp jobs. Her obses­sion with her friend Alex is obvious to everyone, des­pite the fact that he’s already in a ser­ious rela­tion­ship. Nonetheless, when she hears Alex has broken up with his girl­friend, she’s reluctant to make her feel­ings known, des­pite the urgings of all her friends, including Alex’s sister. She meets another guy, Mitchell (Bujalski), at her temping job and he awk­wardly asks her out. Then her friend Rachel’s boy­friend Dave kisses her drunk­enly after a party. None of these rela­tion­ships are going the way she wants. She quits the temping job and finds a better one as a research assistant. Alex begins hanging out with her and flirting ambigu­ously. Then sud­denly she finds out he and his girl­friend have not only reunited, but eloped and gotten mar­ried. But he still shows up drunk late on the night of her birthday. “Marriage is com­plic­ated,” he says.

With pro­spects like these, Marnie clearly needs to get away from these people and maybe even this town, and by the end, we get an ink­ling that that’s what is going to happen. But for about 90% of the film’s run­ning time, we float through Marnie’s life just the way she has. What saves it from being com­pletely tedious is Dollenmayer’s open and pretty face, and her gradu­ally increasing determ­in­a­tion to move on with her life.

Funny Ha Ha is extremely prim­itive, with no music and no external lighting. As my col­league Bob Turnbull expressed, it’s almost a Dogme 95 film. But there’s plenty of humour, of both the goof­ball and the cringe­worthy vari­eties, and a sym­path­etic prot­ag­onist. When the film ends rather abruptly, I wanted to know what was going to happen to Marnie, and that means that Bujalski has hooked me.

NOTE: I was delighted to find out that Kate Dollenmayer is actu­ally an anim­ator whose credits include work on Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001).

Official site of the film

(7/10)

Tagged as: generationdiy, independent, mumblecore

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Nights and Weekends (2008, Directors: Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig): A fit­ting opening night film for the Toronto leg of the Generation DIY mini-fest, Nights and Weekends is co-director Joe Swanberg’s fourth fea­ture film in four years (in addi­tion to two series of online shorts), and he’s still just 26. Perhaps no other dir­ector better exem­pli­fies the DIY spirit right now. This par­tic­ular film grew out of a close col­lab­or­a­tion with Greta Gerwig, who has acted in most of Swanberg’s pre­vious films. Their real-life friend­ship informs and adds some ten­sion to this story of a long-distance relationship.

James lives in Chicago while his girl­friend Mattie lives in New York. We eaves­drop on their hur­ried love­making and awk­ward con­ver­sa­tions in both cities and then quickly it’s a year later and they’ve broken up. The last half of the film deals with their unre­solved feel­ings as they both want to make it work but know that it can’t. For anyone who’s ever been involved in a long-distance romance, much of this will ring true. Physical dis­tance cre­ates both intense longing and emo­tional blind spots. The film begins with them tearing each other’s clothes off at the begin­ning of a rare weekend together. But once that’s done, they spend the rest of the time trying not to deal with their impending sep­ar­a­tion. Though they promise to come up with a plan to be together, it never takes shape. The film is full of awk­ward silences and glances, as these inar­tic­u­late char­ac­ters struggle to hold onto what they have. There is a ten­sion throughout the film that gradu­ally slackens into sad­ness, and in another sex scene near the end of the film that bookends the opening scene, both char­ac­ters can’t keep their fatalism at bay long enough to con­sum­mate their desire. It’s an emo­tion­ally affecting scene, even in the absence of any par­tic­u­larly well-written dialogue.

According to Swanberg and Gerwig, a lot of the dia­logue was impro­vised, and credit must be given to the skillful editing (also by Swanberg) for shaping this into a film with an emo­tional arc. Of all the “mumble­core” dir­ectors, I think Swanberg is the least con­cerned with film­making “flour­ishes”. His films are the least “arty” in my opinion. Instead he seems to aim for emo­tional authen­ti­city and in this case, he has the per­fect col­lab­or­ator. Gerwig is the better actor (some­thing Swanberg freely admits), and her mood changes effect­ively com­mu­nicate her con­fu­sion and frus­tra­tion in every scene. It doesn’t hurt that the camera adores her. Even the harsh­ness of digital video cannot dim her nat­ural beauty.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t men­tion the intensely intimate sex scenes in the film. Though we never see James and Mattie actu­ally having sex, there is plenty of nudity and fore­play on screen. When Hollywood films show people in sexual situ­ations, you’re keenly aware that these are actors who prob­ably don’t know each other very well, but here we have two real-life friends, co-writers and co-directors of the film, not only emo­tion­ally but phys­ic­ally naked in front of each other and the audi­ence. It’s raw and brave and awk­ward all at the same time. I couldn’t help but wonder what Swanberg’s wife thought of all of this, though he’s fea­tured this sort of matter-of-fact sexu­ality in all of his films.

In my review of his film LOL, I wondered (per­haps a little unfairly) what it would be like for Swanberg to work with “real” actors, but I think Gerwig is the real thing. Still, I’d like to see him stay behind the camera (prefer­ably a 35mm film camera) and work with a fully-formed script next time. That being said, and although this film feels unpol­ished and slightly unfin­ished, Nights and Weekends con­tains moments of genuine emo­tional power.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ectors Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig from after the screening (and that’s Canada AM’s film critic Richard Crouse asking the first few questions) :

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Duration: 25:49

Official site of the film

(7/10)

Tagged as: generationdiy, independent, mumblecore

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