Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

[therewillbeblus]

SpoilerShow

I read it that way too initially but then I remembered that Dussollier‘s description in the woods of how she disappeared seemed alien, though I’m sure you’re right and if I went back and rewatched the end it would be more ambiguous. (It’s not within my character to take anything at face value so something must be up here)

The train ride itself subverts any expected romanticism or philosophical catharsis that only adds to the banal ‘realism’ to contrast her memory of that train observation of another woman’s emotion. Of course she’s unconscious for her own moment here, and perhaps this hits on actuality failing to live up to the self-imposed fabrication of significance assigned in processing memories.

I did like how Dussollier’s desperation to believe at the end is hidden underneath his passivity and isn’t “desperate” in the way it’s normally defined; instead his own emotional gravity moves him gently towards the only stable option on a semi-conscious level wherein he chooses to believe her because it affirms his own connotation of her worth and their connection, rendering any objective mental illness meaningless.

Mostly I just struggled to engage with either character enough to invest there, and I think that’s really due to the wavering personalities throughout the first hour but the ideas really do lift this into a special place especially that final moment in the woods as a quiet crescendo. I’ll look forward to revisiting this for the sci-fi project, as it’s a very corporeal meditative take on the concepts which alone give it an edge for me in twisting the aims of the genre back to ground zero.

[therewillbeblus]

The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1972)

I haven't seen this since I was in my early 20s, at a time when I was much less in tune with acknowledging the reflection Grodin's character casts in the audience, as well as more leisurely coasting through life ready to 'deal' with the Lilas of the world no questions asked. Revisiting this in my 30s is a bizarre combination of soul-destroying and cathartic, witnessing deeply uncomfortable behavior yet validating its truth. May captures the tone of comedy through a straight-demonstration of clashing selfish actions as products of relatable predicaments, and her neutrality for the sake of laughing at life is not wholly sneering but laughing both with and at humanity.

The unmasking comes in gradual, at times painfully slow methodology, but can also feel sharply forced, and May's intentions are complex in validating the behaviors as well as one's shame for the behaviors! It's a grey picture that is inclusive of the awfulness as just as natural as hating oneself for unveiling the defenses keeping us from seeing this selfish side of us. I didn't relate to any character on a literal level, but this film triggers that selfish component that lashes out internally or externally, resents, tells white lies or outright lies without realizing it, talks about or listens to talk about someone behind their back, and goes on the offensive to protect oneself from surrendering their shell to acknowledge what's really going on.

Most of all, this is a film for everyone who has been in a relationship and knew it was doomed but could not dare accept it, just as it is for the person who thinks the next girl is 'the one,' doomed to repeat the cycle all over again; or the person who enjoys being sought so much that they cannot realize the harm or reality of the person on the other end. Grodin is magnificent as the typical average 'nice' guy who emerges as just as much of an asshole as everybody else (What a view of our cores as inherently selfish- My kind of movie!) Berlin walks a fine line between a figure we want to shut the door on too, but also feel incredible sympathy for, standing for a reminder of the sobering reveal that occurs when the blindness of love fades. Shepherd's bewitching vamp is also complicated in how we watch her nonverbal communication, even when blurred in the background of a scene, always hypervigilant of the emotions she's manipulating whether directly or watching an interaction play out for thrills.

All three characters are completely equal in their self-indulgent goals, always at odds with one another. Berlin wants her husband to be around her all the time and accept her quirks without imposing an identity of his own, Grodin wants to chase- to obtain a person's affection to feel special- before inevitably getting bored, and Shepherd wants to control others from an aloof state for personal amusement. Each wants power and unconditional devotion on their terms, and a part of each's quirk is in most people in some small, broad form. The empathy lands too because none of these people are even aware of their issues: Berlin cannot see her problematic positioning, Grodin cannot see that he is doomed to hunt, and Shepherd eventually translates her attraction to puppeteering to sexual attraction for the partner rather than the act! I've long said that being in a relationship is the most insane thing we do as people- for we bare our vulnerabilities around another human being with a different perspective and selfish agenda and expect to align. This is a film that says, yep that's crazy, we're gonna keep doing it anyways, and it's pathetically -and honestly- funny!

[therewillbeblus]

Rewatching Bachelorette, the humor still clicked though I was more conscious of how the dark elements helped authenticate the imperfections in adult friends, by displaying their surface-level flaws only to reveal them as defense mechanisms to push away, or cover up, from the more universal pains we can identify with. The scene where Caplan and Scott cry on the bed goes for broke and earns its impact, but my favorite moment is one that actually twists traditional cinematic sexual politics in a subtle way. When Fisher and Bornheimer are smoking and she says she's self-conscious about not being smart, his response is a classic 'movie-nice-guy' line that speaks an ounce of truth, but after she returns by stating that she didn't understand his philosophical verbal affirmation, he admits "neither did I." It's a genius addition that cements an equality in a film that only a woman could have made, because Bornheimer isn't allowed to self-actualize her. His 'line' is made transparent to be a supportive gesture with shreds of wisdom, and certainly well-meaning.. but also, well, a line. Not a soliloquy from a gatekeeper to ignite her resurgence, but instead this is left to his kindness, and the unconditional action that speaks louder than words. Dunst has the toughest part, pulling off the role of your typical stone-cold-b*itch as ultimately sympathetic without compromising her character. All around a great comedy, and one that's far more unnerving than one might expect- especially if anyone says, "It's like Bridesmaids" though I think that part of why this one is harder for some to like is that its characters too damn real, and not many people want to see these parts of themselves on the screen.

[therewillbeblus]

The Girls (Mai Zetterling, 1968)

What a lovely, bizarre experimental narrative on complex femininity. Zetterling beautifully implements a nouvelle vague style to convey the tribulations drawing even the most self-fulfilled women back into the world of men, as well as to formally express their loose playfulness which becomes a continual reminder of resiliency. The technical choices blur the line between dream, memory, imagination and reality, all of which hold equally significant weight, but the filmmaker also professes that these imposed burdens from the conjunction of the self and society can be traversed, alleviated, embraced, and assigned subjective value as part of the practice of female empowerment. For example, Bibi's hosts' internal monologues are an odd insert in giving them first-person narration. Are they her anxious projections or the reality of behavior interpreted from the outside? Either way she’s left simultaneously unaffected in continuing to chat away, greeting them with compassion, and being her authentic self - and yet she is also clearly poisoned with self-consciousness when they leave. This conflict delivers information of personal disharmony in minor bouts of private despair, and showcases the ability to assert the self in harmony by overcoming ennui, at the same time.

This duality extends to all three of the women, who are in cyclical fluxes of being inescapably drawn to and repelled by men, and have a complicated relationship with their own responses to this magnetism. Running away from a man helplessly in the snow, trying to flee a life tied to him, is juxtaposed with a joyous mattress shopping scene where they cannot help but spill their playful bedroom intimacy out into the public world, confidently without embarrassment. Who is who across these scenes is unimportant, as evidenced by the obscure editing, but the aura of contradictions evaporates into a universality that drives enigmatic emotional unity. The friction of their desires for connection with those for independent self-esteem, and the lack of clarity in processing these contrasting needs, is emphasized by the elliptical formalism to construct a narrative that is fluid in its internal logic but not a typically sensical display.

The tv interview the girls do, where they laugh at the contradictions they spew in trying to explain the play, is a summation of what this film is, and what their lives are- impossible to pin down, but sobering in both its truth of unavoidable malaise and the equal truth that one can escape into harmony with oneself far more than they think. Most of all this was incredibly fun, spirited, and tenderly atmospheric. I don’t know if I can definitively call this the best feminist film I’ve ever seen, but the self-reflexive nature, the exposition of foggy terrain that women traverse daily in being torn between their deeply-ingrained gender roles, biological drives, and will to be free of these constraints- as well as trying to decipher what “free” means, and if, or how, that definition can shift to exclude men without guilt- are all cause for its candidacy.

Though it’s the places this goes and where it ultimately leads us that seals the deal and is cause for celebration. We land in self-actualized rhapsody, and while still within the confines of society, Bibi’s final act bleeds the play’s independence into real life and allows the joke to become serious in part without being wholly one tone- much like the tv interview banter sets the stage for thematically. The action isn't sourced in specificity, but in the refusal to remain stuck in the murky waters of prolonged consideration, taking a tangible action and embracing it. Regardless of the pros and cons, the liberation is in the choice itself to trust the gut, divorced from the details of the act to follow. I loved this film, which deconstructs femininity void of any purpose of evaluation, instead as a necessary step to reconstruct the experience back into a stronger energy, and as proof of worthy emancipation, not for us as social observers but for the women themselves.

[hearthesilence]

For a second, I misread this as "Women Pictures List Discussion," but that could be an interesting one to do. (Amusingly, the best directors that come to mind are all men: George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls, Josef von Sternberg, Todd Haynes, Delmer Daves in his later years...)

[soundchaser]

Ah, yes, the three Gs of Women’s Pictures: German, gay, or GDelmer Daves.

[therewillbeblus]

Mens (Isabelle Prim, 2019)

If the rest of Prim's work is anything like this unorthodox, singular, yet seriously committed film, Moullet's hyperbolic praise makes a lot of sense, especially coming from his own leanings toward the eccentric. It's challenging to talk about this movie, which imbues a Godardian eclectic approach to the relationship between history and storytelling using the tool of imagination masked as memory. The narrative strings are most reminiscent of Ruiz, as a young boy named Jean, in the present day, begins reading through his deceased grandmother's dated records from 1895 on a long car ride, and finds information on a police investigation involving the death of who may be his great-grandfather. He drifts into a dream and finds himself as a lead detective in the case, and the rest.. well, it's an entirely esoteric approach in the versatility of artistic expression used to convey a kaleidoscope of feelings and concepts. Prim's film is also a buddy-cop comedy, existential detective story, and surrealistic fantasy toying with narrative, time, and physics, though it's executed with a heavier weight than one might expect from that description, and even when being funny takes itself very seriously. Even the wildly anachronistic details exist as more of a fusion of realities to reach timeless truths than they do for any other comedic purpose.

Right away there are plenty of instances where we transcendentally acknowledge how small we are compared to vast landscapes, or the grand scheme of time, while also holding the competing truth that we are the central character in our own narratives. This film is, in part, about recapturing some sense of comprehension of the incomprehensible to forge our own realities and explore our worlds by proxy through fantasy. Just by making himself a character, the boy actualizes a desire to be omniscient. The way he follows the notes but takes breaks to playfully insert his own personality in a different era- such as a side bet to his police partner, “Do you think I can get the ball in the basket?” “Yes I believe in you.” Even more suggestive is a scene where his partner recounts his dream, which of course is all about Jean, the child dreamer. In the dream, he finds a theatre hall full of people where everyone is Jean, which itself explains a lot of this wish-fulfillment for ubiquity! Jean asserts his identity into the printed materials of his mind, and claims the joys of the possibilities in invention, whether film or creative daydreams. Though the consequence that he doesn’t get the ball in the basket when he throws it could draw further psychoanalytical ideas, which Prim has gone on record as implementing freely in her work. Sometimes Jean can successfully embrace this world, and at other times he falls short. This film is full of conflicts between two poles, each of which reveals greater colorization of the other.

Jean is constantly finding himself either immersed in, or at odds with, his environment; whether leaning into a woman to make her tangible by discovering her through physical intimacy, or fumbling with where his body is as he and other characters, mostly his partner in this investigation, awkwardly interrupt one another and lose control of the vision. The hold he has on his images isn’t even solid, which exposes a sobering deficit with humor, and also inversely celebrates the possibilities of imagination by mirroring the limitations. So many senses are used to attempt to attain the experience of this world. Sight (of course) but sound in music, and especially touch and smell, are meditated on frequently with eloquence that elicits a spiritual sensation. Prim’s camera will linger on a seemingly trivial object to pronounce it, and stress our protagonist’s freedom to 'perceive' as a gift that is invaluable and unique to the beholder, thus empowering the rest of us to dream and gaze a little harder in new places.

This is significantly a murder mystery story where a boy is trying to solve the unsolvable, but keeps getting distracted and musing on the more interesting elements of life that populate the crevices of such a narrow focus. Again, the dualities of the investigation and the peripheral exposure to infinite sublime helps color in the vast connotation of the latter. Jean gives himself the opportunity to be an adult, and valued as one, involved in adult-like action but with the attention span of a doe-eyed child seeing organic magic everywhere, even in the concocted spaces of his mind. When he trails off from the corporeal function at hand to a violinist playing arresting music, we enter a shadowy exhibition of the boy trying to follow the writing in the dark. In another similar scene, he leaves the plot-heavy room to bask in the breezy air on a balcony for an extended moment. In these scenes, he and we arrive at the truth; the meaning and possibilities of being alive in all shapes and forms, even the ones we didn’t know we could obtain. That these serene moments happen when the boy breaks from his one-track focus attempting to obtain a specific task tied to expectations is no mistake, nor is that the boy is investigating formulations that draw him back to placing responsibility onto women.

Through a continuous juxtaposition between detached factual delivery and fervent liberties taken to the material, Prim gives voices to the women blamed throughout history and humanizes them even in the face of male oppression, through complete fantasy. It’s a marvel when she gives life to the emotions through fabrication of cold facts in the scene where the women uncovers the body. Emotion, music, and visualized action editing frenzy together with solitude, completely pierces through the banality of atmosphere creating an entirely novel one, offering the woman an escape to dimly-lit frames that reality or words alone cannot do. This is done through breaking the principles of continuity editing in new ways, repurposing the self-reflexive nouvelle vague style to literally give this woman a moment of grace alone and apart from her accusers and abusers and hold onto it, before bringing us back to the scene. Prim actualizes the power of cinema to do this for the voiceless women through her protagonist, and by extension us. Women may be side characters here but are central to the story. The boy cannot believe them because they are enigmatic, inaccessible even in dreams. When he interviews a woman and then asks to speak to her brother, we acknowledge the issue that he disbelieves her testimony, but when he finds himself lured to the window to gaze at her through a barrier of glass, we can see the deeper polarization of push-and-pull magnetism that compels us to, and drives us from, the unknowable. His mission is doomed by searching for objective truth in assessing the opposite gender, let alone his blind spots in available information in the case files written in a manner that segregates the reader from sentiment, especially that of the women's points of view.

The ending confrontation with the image of his grandmother insinuates that a recontexualization of the way history is presented may reveal biases and inform perspectives today, just as ours can affect past records to derive new interpretations that advise our own beliefs. "Am I accused because I’m guilty or for what men say about me?” "Justice remains a hypothesis.” These poignant yet abstract lines brilliantly condemn a default of unconditional trust for any stance other than critical thinking and multisensory engagement with our or others' histories. We shape and are shaped by our relationship to the inconclusive, our search for tangible truths, and the revelations when we find it elsewhere, often in the ineffable beauty of trying to get there. The story fittingly ventures from murder mystery into love, that unattainable kind that drives us to compromise everything, and that could not be further from the detached specifics of case files into the universal specifics of empathy and connection. This brings us into timelessness, using the past to evoke feelings pervasive to our current time as much as any, and every, other.

This film is many things, but it's ultimately a life-affirming proclamation of how the past and present are intertwined by interest, passion, and willingness to make meaning and revitalize archival memories from others via our own distinct and special subjective lenses. It’s the process by which we draw our connections and rest in our imaginations that derives life’s greatest rewards, and Prim exercises the power of art to liberate and bind us at once, and emit a fluid pattern of disinhibition and sobriety to our greatest desires and discomforts together. I'll just stop now, because like a lot of the most complex cinema, this film induces an entirely innovative experience that utilizes familiar postmodern concepts through new experimental methods, and -like a defining motif of Mens- said experience is not adequately able to be grasped through the unidimensional medium of the written word, nor should it be.

[domino harvey]

Victoria (Justine Triet 2016)
Virginie Elfra from Mouret’s wonderful Caprice is the titular Victoria, a divorced French lawyer who gets suckered into representing her friend in a criminal case after his girlfriend accuses him of stabbing her at a wedding. Elfra has her own problems apart from the case, though, as her ex has started a “metafictional” blog about her, accusing her of sleeping with judges to win cases among other insults. In the midst of all this, she goes on lots of awkward one night stands and invites a former client, an ex-drug dealer, to live with her as an au pair for her young girls. I loved the friendship between the protagonist and the former dealer in the first half of the movie and I guess I should have known it would blossom into love considering this is a romantic comedy, albeit a strange one, but I liked their interactions so much more when it didn’t hit those conventional beats. The movie’s biggest asset is Elfra, who is staggeringly beautiful but believable here as a fuck-up in a tailspin whose flaws make her more interesting and increase audience investment. I could have done without the finale in which she has to get shit on by her paramour before they can reconcile, but, honestly, his complaints aren’t wrong. If a film as unexpected, dark, and often quite negative as this is what passes for popular romantic comedy entertainment in France, no wonder they’re so much more fucking cultured than us! Recommended.

This is now streaming free with English subs on Amazon Prime as In Bed With Victoria

[domino harvey]

Unfortunately the three weakest films I saw at Lincoln’s Center’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema this year were directed by women. Here’s my thoughts on the movies, in order from best to worst:

Tout ce qu’il me reste de la révolution (Judith Davis 2018)
A young urban planner is fired from her job and in an effort to find guidance in her life imitates her once-radical parents by forming a socialist collective. This is a strong premise, and watching the film start promisingly with writer/director/star Davis petulantly lashing out at her amiable and indulgent former bosses leads to false hopes. While Davis has good instincts in her direction and is able to sell this character well at the outset, this film has every indication of being undermined and destroyed by external script notes: either Davis received a lot of bad advice, or no advice at all, because there are significant and glaring problems with the construction of the film’s narrative, which soon shoehorns in utterly generic elements like a romance with Malik Zidi and a reconnection with an estranged mother (Mireille Perrier). The film is so lost by the end that it’s not until the credits roll do we realize the embarrassing, drawn-out argument showcasing a minor secondary character was intended to be the finale (in retrospect I understand what Davis is attempting to do here in comparison with her own outburst at the start of the film, but mon dieu it does not work), capped with a “happy ending” to the romance that I suspect no one in the audience was invested in.

The film’s best moments are the ones specific to the premise, as Davis finds herself at the epicenter of a collective with no purpose or forward momentum (in the film’s funniest scene, no one but Davis can even state with authority something they believe), the kind of radical group that detours into a discussion of what the word “someone” really means. And there’s an amusing running joke that Davis will keep meeting people hostile to her ideas who are then smash-cut into appearing at the next collective meeting, but this like every other good idea is not exploited nearly to the degree that it should be.

Davis was supposed to be at the screening but her bag with her passport was stolen right before she was to fly over, but the audience was treated to an exclusive video she shot in her apartment to talk about the film. Most of this video was taken up by her crediting her co-stars, four of which are members of an acting troupe Davis co-founded. These are obviously her friends and colleagues and I get why she’d want to emphasize their involvement, but the only thing that works in this film is Davis’ performance, and watching her sideline herself in both her own passion project and even this video gave the film an additional level of disappointment. Like most of the films in the festival, I highly doubt this will ever receive an English-friendly release (even on back channels), but while it didn’t work, I was glad to see it on the strengths of Davis’ performance and her direction. I would definitely see another Judith Davis movie, as I suspect based on what we see here that she could be capable of giving us a great movie one day if she learns to lean-into what makes a film worthwhile and forgoes the Screenplay 101 crutches she relies on here. [P]

Quite unexpectedly, I was wrong and this has turned up with English subs on back channels! I can't really recommend it but I think about the circular and needlessly micro-focused meetings depicted in this movie all the time (as recently as earlier this week, even)

[Mr Sausage]

The Gulls (Ella Manzheeva, 2015)

Set in a small fishing village in Kalmykia, on the Caspian sea, among the Kalmuks, a Mongolic people who are mainly Buddhist. This is a classic art film in the sense it has little outward plot or character, and favours long takes and silence and a pictorial eye to build a sense of atmosphere. This is a beautifully shot movie, but not a pretty one: it's set on the steppe in winter, in a fishing village, so everything is flat and cold, the colours mostly brown and white. And yet the photography turns that muted, stark landscape into a character in itself. The people are deeply internal; they rarely talk, and what they think, feel, or even mean by what they say lies several layers under the surface. Little is expressed outwardly, by design. So the movie uses its compositions, rhythms, and cutting to create a sense of who the characters are and what they feel. The takes are long and contemplative, the soundscape quiet, the compositions often bare and empty, or sometimes even flat or cramped, with the sides of the frame occupied with a doorframe or a cabin. There are numerous head-on shots of people working or waiting. Faces are photographed at length. People exist in the landscape, they don't pass through it. All of this works up a considerable atmosphere that externalizes what characters leave hidden, projecting their worries, fears, and anxieties out into the landscape. Especially those of the lead character, a young wife and music teacher whose husband, a fisherman, does not come back from an illegal fishing trip. There is plenty of latent drama here, with a family and community dealing with the loss in different, sometimes culturally specific ways. But the drama is so quiet it sometimes barely even becomes dramatic. And yet the muted emotions coupled with the slow rhythm, stark atmosphere, and intense, physical sense of place creates a stirring experience. The movie had a genuine emotional effect I found beautiful, and a style that, for all its slowness, kept my attention without trouble. I can't claim the style and content wasn't mostly familiar from European art films, but it made good use of its material.

It's currently -25 in my city, and this cold, crisp movie made a perfect companion.

[therewillbeblus]

Valley Girl (Martha Coolidge, 1983)

I somehow went three and a half decades without seeing this all the way through, and I'm glad my first fluid exposure to it wasn't until now with some film-literacy behind me. This is some kind of brilliant, and in a way that never would've registered without knowledge of, and experience with the conventions Coolidge subverts and manipulates to create a liberated tone that's very much its own thing, as well as meta-contextually resonant to its softly radical attitude.

While I don't generally consider Coolidge an auteur (not a criticism, she clearly prioritizes collaboration over control), this film feels like an exceptional vehicle of authorship. Yes, there's a feminine edge here subverting norms of genre and general narrative models: Female-centric hangout scenes exist between the verbal wit of Hawksian camaraderie, the elastic surveillance of genuine minute countenances in Rozier, and the airy concentrations of Rohmer's study of social engagements. Cage inexplicably disappears for half the film so Foreman and co. can breathe validity into their perceptions and cultural context freely. There's a preferential interest in detailed anthropological observation, admirably neglecting attempts most movies of this ilk would take to overstate an external logic for the central romance, instead allowing it to unfold in real time based on an ineffable attraction that doesn’t need to be justified outside of its vacuum seal. Coolidge is comfortable trusting (and allowing her characters to trust) the instincts of emotional truth, rather than anxious to force lucid, organized answers to the audience and the self as an all-too-common symptom of insecurity to authenticate action.

However, beyond that arguably feminine-driven tint of maturity, there's a genderless, universal self-reflexivity in how Valley Girl's structural unconventionality falls in step with its thematic ambitions of shattering the mirage of value placed on superficial external influence, which threatens to usurp true individualized desire and tangible romanticism (perhaps an early symptom of the trepidation towards Reagan's commodification of culture, bleeding out the remaining countercultures' self-actualization). The vibe is oddly spacious and restrained for a mainstream rom-com, starting with the party scene, which ends in an expected fashion only to (literally) turn back around as Cage says fuck it and refuses to conform to a traditional pattern of regrouping in a new setting to further the narrative at a later time. Why wait, when The Moment Is Now? This seems like a reflexive statement of the film’s loose and playful structure, a slapdash impulse to capitalize on the urgency of a feeling one just can't place, and that the film respectfully can't quite yet either - for it's too busy curiously bathing in the textures of messy blossoming romance, in sync with its offbeat Romeo-and-Juliet dyad. Coolidge avoids a lot of tired contrivances while simultaneously leaning into the necessary broad skeletal stages, though strung together in at-times just slightly novel ways to release the picture from its ostensible chains. Yes, just like how Foreman believes she must take a conventional path, when she knows deep down that's not what feels 'right' inside, even if she can't explain it - which causes doubt, of course, in a milieu dominated by superficial markers of identity and merit. This might seem like an on-the-nose connection, but it's communicated with deftly faint craft. This is not a very 'showy' movie for one so entrenched in its eclectic cultural atmosphere, at least as far as identifying its bedded intentions or diagnosing its complex socio-emotional targets.

Other amusing subversions that include examples of what I'm talking about: Pauses in the narrative to spotlight Foreman's parents (a hilarious dynamic of Frederic Forrest and Colleen Camp as aging hippie Cool Parents) engaging in unprompted and unexplained inside jokes pertaining to their risqué past; a close friend's tryst with the ex-bf that never gets revealed to Foreman to create a problem within the group dynamic (this one is so subversive to our expectations, you can practically feel Coolidge's active defiance); bizarre elisions of the dramatic progression of the central relationship to meditate on Foreman's uncomfortable observations of her ex-bf wolfing down her burger as soon as she invites him back into her life (Coolidge's choice to subtly linger on her fine evolution of expressive glances says so much more about the inner depths of her character in an instant than any of the loud drama that follows); the affirming energy in a nonchalantly-weird father-daughter sex talk taking precedence over the ‘problem’ re-introduced haphazardly at the end of the convo; the B-story line with the games of sexual tension between a boy and his girlfriend's sexy mom, played out as a quirky hoot in how it too evades familiar beats in favor or more interesting, hilarious, and honest behavioral awkwardness. The latter bit is a subversive Mrs Robinson device that seems to serve no higher purpose beyond a new angle to examine the folly of youth, and the often cumbersome reality of interpersonal sexual expressiveness.. but it actually slyly highlights Foreman and Cage's chemistry as unique and worth fighting for by existing in a seemingly-disconnected narrative entirely! When Cage tries to win Foreman back, there's no boombox blasting Peter Gabriel, but a clumsy sleeping bag sight gag that's anything but sexy, and his grand romantic gestures take the form of hurried date-interruptions for the sake of provocative mini power-jabs, masking desperate waves pleading for an acknowledgement of his existence - culminating in a dissident climax that begins with a pause to debrief a punchline: That it's based on no plan or skill whatsoever. Just heart, but that counts for everything here. The rekindling in that anti-climax happens so quietly, without a close-up or romantic embrace or confession or contrition, that it's just plain weird - especially when you've seen so many of these films and every single one offers such basic purifying emphases while this one carelessly ignores them. And yet the final moments' steady but relaxed fixation on Cage and Foreman's individual sighs of relief and joy -separately but together- frame an optimistic reimagining of The Graduate's own more ambiguously tragic final long take of dwindling smiles, motivation, confidence, and connection. Coolidge's shot is just as frank, but she chooses the affirmations her characters' earnestness deserve.

So I know I've stressed the film's novelty and Coolidge's participation in birthing some new life-affirming, genre-destroying beast, but if you go in anticipating a pronounced, caustic punk-rebellion of the rom-com, you'll be disappointed. Yes, it's a successful have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too enmeshment of both satirical and genuine narrative Romanticism; and 'romantic' more in the sense of asserting personal convictions and emotional catharses, rather than in placing the worth on the sanctity of the union itself. But it doesn’t completely reinvent the wheel either, and it's precise - at times, elusive - about where and how it's upending these customs. More than any analytical utility, the film succeeds as a fun, funny, spirited youth pic, with a surprisingly fresh sense of economic pace, tweaking the knob from succinct nouvelle vague-bent kittenish hangout scenes to unusually elongated (that house party) or shortened (the prom exit) set pieces, which never underwhelm or overstay their welcome. And this is all pulled off somehow without ever breaking from a balanced, confident brand of internal rhythm. Add a rare killer 80s soundtrack, and a distinctive charm that feels singularly organic in its playfulness, and you get a real unexpected pleasure.