Ry Russo-Young’s You Won’t Miss Me is identifiable as a film about a young woman made by young women, which is unusual enough at Sundance that the film’s very existence is almost a revelation. By immersing us in the world of 23 year-old aspiring actress/recent mental patient Shelly Brown, and burying the point of view so deep within the character that Shelly’s social imbalance sometimes feels contagious, writer/director Russo-Young and co-writer/star Stella Schnabel remind us how rare it is to see a film about the inner life of a beautiful, troubled young lady without the objectifying filter of the male gaze, without the beauty and the trouble fusing into a fantasy cipher of a postmodern damsel in distress.
Shot on five different formats, from 16mm film to low-grade consumer video, Miss Me splays out in episodic fragments of Shelly’s life in crisis, strung together with shards of a conversation between the young lady and her shrink on the last day of her hospital stay. Russo-Young’s camera(s) follow Shelly from all-night parties, where deapan flirting gives way to either cotton-mouthed seduction or resentment-stoking rejection, to a number of auditions for “artists” whose visions of the world seem just as dangerously subjective as that of our barely-holding-it-together heroine, who punctuates many sentences with a sharp sniff.
“I have nothing but time,” Shelly tells a theater director, and in a way she’s doing what a lot of early-twentysomethings do, dabbling in life experience to fill the hours of the day with the assumption that at some point, something will come into focus. But Shelly’s also drawn to acting as an escape from the real, one that’ll legitimize her uncanny knack for theatricalizing every real-life situation, and infinitely delay her deadline for assimilation in a zipped-up world.
If the the intention of each discrete shooting format isn’t always crystal clear, Russo-Young pulls off the blending of the formats beautifully. The look of the film continually recalls the photographs of Nan Goldin, particularly “Nan and Brian in Bed” and other iconic images of from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The allusion comes to mind not just because Shelly is a woman who feels distant from her lovers even whilst still in bed, and not just because Russo-Young occasionally bathes Schnabel in a similar golden glow; Shelly also seems to move within a Goldin-like milieu.
Russo-Young says in her director’s statement that her intention was to “make a film that could only be made at this particular moment in time, that would speak to our entire visual existence today” — and, in terms of the way she clashes technologies to talk about the way personalities mutate under different eyes, she succeeds. But the film also seems infused with the spirit of the laregly-disappeared downtown New York of the late 70s/early 80s, an aspect of the city’s personality that lives on in certain bars, blocks, brownstone walk-ups, but which has been scrubbed clean from the media image of the city entirely. It’s the natural environment for a story in which self-conscious creative spirit often gives way to destructive self-indulgence. Like Goldin’s slide shows, Miss Me feels less like a narrative than a private image journal-turned-enveloping time capsule. Both are so intimate that the viewer becomes not just privy to the protagonist’s self-destruction, but virtually implicated in it.
This is tricky business, asking a viewer to take on the point of view of a girl who spends virtually the entire length of a film fighting against drowning; what’s actually on screen could potentially be overwhelmed by the alternating novelty and discomfort of seeing it. But when You Won’t Miss Me succeeds — which it does more often than it doesn’t — it’s because it taps into a universal sense of youthful rootlessness, recklessness, and confusion, while challenging us to look at these familiar states of being with neither nostalgia or romantic revision, nor condescension. If the narrative and its execution seems sometimes at loose ends, the volatility of the emotions at the film’s center demand it.
Russo-Young’s first feature, Orphans, premiered at SXSW in 2007, where the director also appeared in a supporting role alongside Greta Gerwig in Joe Swanberg’s mumblecore super-group feature Hannah Takes the Stairs. There’s a scene in Miss Me featuring Gerwig and Swanberg, as well as Mary Bronstein, Michael Tully and, most prominently, Aaron Katz. The Quiet City director plays an independent filmmaker named “Joe” who puts auditioning actresses (including Schnabel and Gerwig) through a serious of exercises designed to rake the depths, which instead skate the absurd and resolve in hostility. Is this scene a reference — mockingly, lovingly, maybe both? — to Russo-Young’s Hannah experience?
In talking about an artist like Russo-Young, who so clearly pulls from the personal, I don’t think you could count out real-life influence completely, but the more I interrogate that scene as a statement on the filmmakers who cameo in it, the more that read falls apart. Hannah Takes the Stairs is a film in which unlikeable behavior is put under a microscope so that we can critique it. As the rest of Miss Me shows, Russo-Young is a filmmaker who looks for the beauty in a character’s flaws, sympathizes with their missteps, and ultimately withholds judgement. The motives behind You Won’t Miss Me seem too generous in spirit for a single-scene gear-shift into acid in-joke.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth