SXSW07–Hannah Takes The Stairs
“You guys like puzzles?”
A couple of years ago, I went to see a movie called Kissing On The Mouth. I was hoping that it would be a pretty good drama about relationships with some interesting sex thrown in for good measure. What I got instead was a slightly exploitive movie with lots of sex and only a tiny bit of substance. It seemed to be trying to break some taboos, but I thought it was doing so in a way that was more “Look at the penis!” than it was “Why are we so freaked out by this?”
I had an interesting exchange of e-mails with the director/writer Joe Swanberg and wanted to check out his next film, LOL. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it during the festival last year, so that one has gone unseen. But I didn’t hear very good things about it. Better than for Kissing On The Mouth, but not much.
After seeing a couple of the trailers he made for the festival this year and thinking that they were really funny, I thought that it was time to really give Joe another chance.
I’m glad I did. I think Joe has come a long way in the last two years.
Hannah (Greta Gerwig from LOL) is a young sitcom writer with a great boyfriend and a pretty good life. But she’s restless. She breaks up with her boyfriend and immediately starts a relationship with a co-worker. She works her way through basically all of the men in her life and never truly feels fullfilled.
The film is pretty much all improv and, for the most part, it shows. The acting isn’t great, but it’s passable and strangely believable. And a lot of the conversations are conversations that we’ve all had at some point in our lives. It’s very funny and very real. There’s still nudity in it, but not nearly as much, it’s more matter-of-fact and it didn’t seem to be out of place. (Mind you, I’m not one to say that lots of nudity is bad in a film. Even exploitive nudity. But when a movie isn’t trying for the exploitation feel it’s a little strange for that much mostly unwarrented nudity to show up in an otherwise serious movie.)
Good going, Joe. I’m glad you got a good one out and I can’t wait to see what you next one will be like.
