Andrew Bujalski's There There, a COVID-era experiment that uses lockdown-era restrictions to test the limits of interpersonal connection, would have seemed considerably less bizarre had it been released in time for the first of the film festivals. "virtual". Still at SXSW 2021, it might have been received as a defiant attempt to keep creating even when what his art relies on (humans sharing the screen while trying to share themselves) was unavailable, or at least quite inconvenient to organize. . More than a year later, with the filmmakers enduring whatever it took to deliver everything from small dramas to superhero movies, the compromises are harder to miss. Regardless of how Tribeca's audiences respond this week, it's hard to imagine that There There won't quickly become a curiosity championed only by Bujalski's biggest fans, who will quietly admit that he is the one they love least.
Here, we never see two actors on screen at the same time. From the first scene, a sweetly awkward next morning in which two strangers supposedly lie in bed staring into each other's eyes, the picture is offered to film schools as a demonstration of how reliant conventional cinematic illusion is on two shots. Throughout the sequence, it's almost impossible to make yourself believe that these two are in the same room.
Suspending disbelief is even more difficult in the next sequence, where Taylor, playing a recovering alcoholic, meets her sponsor in an empty cafe. Rather than cast two actors who could play their roles at different times in the same place, Bujalski chooses completely different restaurants, even including an over-the-shoulder shot at one point that flattens any imaginary places the viewer may have built for help yourself. stay involved in the scene. Without that illusion of togetherness, it's hard to stay interested in the meandering, semi-comic anecdote Taylor shares about her latest sponsor, a hippie with catastrophically bad ideas.
Director: Andrew Bujalski
Writer: Andrew Bujalski
Stars: Angela Bedekovic, Molly Gordon, Jasmine Skloss Harrison
The film reveals itself as a series of conversations between two people, separated by scenes in which a lone man wanders through his house and plays beautiful bits of music on mandolin, bass clarinet, etc.
After coffee, we cut to the most compelling scene in the film, a dizzying parent-teacher conference between LaGanga and her son's (Molly Gordon) hapless English teacher. LaGanga's son has been covertly bullying a fellow student and, with strange sadism, LaGanga manages to blame Gordon for the boy's perversion. As he tortures the teacher, viewers can correctly guess that There There will be a gathering of people who are at best deeply flawed and at worst horrible.
That suspicion is confirmed in the following sequence, a video conference between a lawyer with ethical problems and the technical owner of the platform in which that terrible child has shared exploitative videos of his classmate. Later scenes will find Schwartzman receiving a surprise visit from his conscience, Nash turning down a Tinder date drunk and careless, and an extended full-circle encounter that re-introduces Taylor's potential new boyfriend James back on his own turf. .
Considering the movie appears to have been shot remotely, with camera phones wielded by whoever was on hand, there are fewer distracting, poorly framed shots than we might expect. They are there, but the iffy photography is the image's most forgivable flaw. More troubling is the way the dead air awkwardness and intentionally unnatural performances make several of these interactions feel too long or less interesting than they could be. Taylor's monologue about his former sponsor, for example, might have drawn laughs under other circumstances. But at the premiere screening of There There, there were some awkward laughs at best.
At this point in the pandemic, with the majority of Americans choosing to act as if it no longer exists, there may simply be no audience left for a gimmicky experimental narrative about people failing entirely to connect with those around them.