Surveying the Mumblecore-manic media coverage of the last week or so, three features are in danger of slipping through the cracks. Totally coincidentally, these are the three films of the fest that I’m currently most interested in. At the risk of sounding like a Swanbergian heroine (and more on the Ladies of Mumblecore from me next week), my crushes on individual films and filmmakers come and go in manic waves, and right now, I’m crushing heavily on Team Picture (directed by Kentucker Audley, who appears to be the same person as the film’s star, Andrew Nehringer), and Frank V. Ross’ Hohokam and Quietly on By. These are the least-known films on the schedule for sure, although all three have made appearances at Harvard Film Archive’s Independents Week. Seen as a unit, the three films point in an exciting new direction: towards the suburbs.
As has been widely noted, films like Hannah Takes the Stairs, Quiet City and Mutual Appreciation are, unabashedly, about white, largely post-collegiate urban youth. In LOL, Kissing on the Mouth and Quiet City, no one seems to really have to work; elsewhere occupations are ancillary to relationships and artistic pursuits. In Hannah Takes the Stairs, Hannah is an intern and her roommate, Rocco, is unemployed. They can’t afford air conditioning, but someone (Daddy?) is paying for the city apartment and the beer. Class is a deliberate non-issue in a lot of these films, for the same reason that it’s deliberately not mentioned in most of Woody Allen’s movies that aren’t murder mysteries: when your characters don’t have to struggle to satisfy basic needs, they have a lot of time leftover to screw and be screwed.
And most of that screwing takes place in cities. Hannah and her first boyfriend recline on a beach under towering Chicago skyscrapers; Hannah and her third boyfriend discuss their “chronic dissatisfaction” to the sounds of buses and sirens and neighbors outside the window. Bujalski’s films take place in hipster villages reminiscent of Slacker Austin; the Brooklyn Alan wanders in Mutual Appreciation is virtually the same territory traversed on the G train in Quiet City. Both Brooklyns are occupied by artists, musicians, and the carefully-coiffed knockouts who love them.
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