The cinetrix watched Funny Ha Ha for the second time last week. The first time she saw it was as a projected DVD last winter. At the time, filmmaker Andrew Bujalski was on a barnstorming tour with his feature debut, then already a year old. Knowing nothing about it when I went in, the film left your pal the cinetrix speechless. I sorta got it together later over beers with Andrew, the Fesser, and Britopia afterward, but I couldn't write about it.
Here's why. This ambling, unassuming story of Marnie, a 23-year-old drifting through dead-end jobs, drinking too much, and nursing unrequited crushes, felt too much like an outtake from the cinetrix's own mispent post-collegiate youth. Sure, certain regional specificities of the film's Boston location--an Upstairs at the Pudding poster, scorpion bowls, the distinctive architectural details common to student ghetto apartments in Brighton--were especially wrenching, but Bujalski has done something far more universal with his film. It doesn't matter where you lived after college: I defy you not to find yourself surpressing a horror film holler at the screen of "Don't!" as Marnie lets her unrequited crush Alex toy with her heart again and again, in awkward phone calls and flirting-with-earnestness front-step conversations late at night.
Of course, the characters' stop-and-go dialogue, which seems so natural and halting and diffuse that it must be improvised, is anything but. Language is an artfully constructed baffle, erected to hide real, often painful feelings, and the silence between words is often incredibly fraught.
My second viewing of Funny Ha Ha--projected in a 35mm print with improved sound at the Brattle last Thursday--left me with an even deeper, less personal appreciation of what Bujalski is up to in his affectionate, self-aware portrait of friends in flux. He is dangerously observant. Unlike Marnie, he and the film take the long view of this particular post-adolescent moment, carefully presenting scenes that seem so unforced they verge on the documentary and letting them play out. But they are anything but happy accidents.
Amy Taubin, in an interview with Bujalski that ran on the Film Comment website last year, noted that after watching the film again she felt self-conscious speaking to him and that she was talking like the characters in the film. I know that feeling myself.
When I posted about the Brattle screening last week, a couple of folks asked about the fortunes of Bujalski's second film, Mutual Appreciation. So I went to the source. Here's the skinny from Andrew, currently in San Francisco in support of Funny Ha Ha.
Well. I guess you can announce to the world that we are trying to seduce all the small distributors & having a predictably hard time of it & if we can't get a fire lit under any of those folks' asses in the next couple months we'll seriously start to consider doing another self-distribution scheme like we did w/ FHH. Requires a lot of blood-sweat-tears, & of course we'd prefer not to do it that way, but at least it would be nice to see if we could learn from our mistakes on the FHH release, I think we'd be excited to try some new stuff out...
So there you have it. Step up to the plate, distributors.
