Mutual Appreciation

As expected, this will be my favorite new movie this year. Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha is one of those movies that looms larger in my memory as time passes--even though I liked it a lot to begin with. I think this also fits well as a sort of Film of My Year since I feel like I've been discovering, understanding, and enjoying a lot of slower and "emptier" films this year: Slacker, Jim Jarmusch stuff, Ozu's Floating Weeds, Bergman's Winter Light, Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies, etc.

SYNOPSIS Alan (Justin Rice), a musician whose band has just broken up, shows up in New York to pursue his burgeoning rock and roll career. He starts by searching for a drummer for a show he’s already lined up, and otherwise goes about the mechanics of self-promotion. He finds a champion in Sara (Seung-Min Lee), a radio DJ who sets her sights on a submissive but uninterested Alan—and finds him a drummer. In his down time, Alan drinks and strategizes with his old friend Lawrence (Bujalski), a grad student, and Lawrence’s girlfriend Ellie (Rachel Clift), a journalist. Alan endeavors to keep his shoulder to the wheel, while Ellie finds herself compelled by him. The attraction is mutual, but both parties are reluctant to take a next step.

Bujalski was there tonight at the Northwest Film Forum for a Q&A afterwards, and one of the most interesting parts for me was a comment by this guy a few rows in front of me, probably 50, who said that even though the film is often tapped as a great document of current post-collegiate social life, he was reminded of exactly how things were back in his day. This interested me particularly because in discussing Mutual Appreciation, critics love to namecheck John Cassavetes, whose work has seemed to me, at least when I saw a few things in early- to mid-2005, full of weirdly off-kilter improvisational performances that don't imitate any experience of life that I have. The disconnect for me between Cassavetes and Bujalski, which I took for a generational difference, may therefore not be well-founded. I'll have to watch and rewatch Shadows, Faces, et al. when I get to Iowa and see if my opinion has changed.

Another thing I got out of the Q&A was when Bujalski mentioned how much he loved the lengthy party scenes, including one in which Alan goes to this party he's told about while very drunk, and very much by himself. It consists of three young ladies sitting on the couch having some sort of discussion. He spends much of the scene nearly mute, possibly close to passing out. The director commented that while he would have loved even more of the scene, which he didn't hesitate to tag as potentially "boring." That got me to thinking about what it is I enjoy, functionally rather than just aesthetically, about films like this. It could be that without an overstuffed script, the experience becomes much more ruminative, as the audience can potentially contemplate the oblique dialogue and unclear gestures, impossible at a more hurried pace. If the actors were reading lines at a Howard Hawks-like speed, the story would be totally incomprehensible, but since we are able--within the running time of the film--to puzzle over the remarks made by the awkward and cryptic characters, with reinforcement from their physical gestures and glances which are more noticeable during the silence, the work coheres by the end.

See the Mutual Appreciation home page for a trailer and more. Here's an interview with Scott Foundas published in CinemaScope last year.

Bujalski says he's at work on an adaptation of a novel for Hollywood. In a perfect world that novel would be Indecision.