Review: Funny Ha Ha

I fell a little bit in love with the work of Andrew Bujalski at this year's SXSW Film Festival, and I can tell you the exact moment it happened. There's a batch of long scenes right in the middle of his second film, Mutual Appreciation, describing one long night in the life of struggling indie rocker Alan (Justin Rice). At one point, egged on by a group of girls whose flagging party his arrival has accidentally revived, Alan finds himself in the bathroom, drunkenly wrangling a too-big wig and a too-small dress. At that moment, I realised I was far more invested than I had any right to be - I had been completely, unconsciously, seduced. Ever since then, every time I think about Mutual Appreciation, it's like it's this old boyfriend who I haven't seen in awhile, but on whom I still have a little bit of a crush.

Bujalski's first film, Funny Ha Ha - which opens in New York and Boston this weekend, before expanding to other cities later this spring - is less sophisticated than Mutual Appreciation, but no less seductive. Both films build steam slowly, but eventually inspire open-mouthed engagement - Bujalski doesn't allow the spectator to get ahead of his characters, and as a result, you figure out what they're feeling as they're figuring out what they're feeling. They then almost force you to feel along at home.

Ha Ha tracks Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer), a 20-something gal with little holding her down in the real world: she's got "like negative two dollars" in her bank account; her various menial jobs barely qualify as reasons to get out of bed. She drunkenly decides she wants a tattoo, but can't decide between a Celtic symbol and a cow, and anyway, she doesn’t want it to hurt. She seems somewhat distanced from most of her friends, and she's mixture of unlucky and inept when it comes to romantic relationships. We come into her life just as it seems like her luck in that last department might be about to change: her long time crush, Alex, is newly single.

A tall, thin, unassumingly pretty brunette with knowing eyes completely contradicted by a goofy smile, Marnie’s very much a romantic subject, and Alex is very much the object of her gaze. Played by Christian Rudder of the Brooklyn band Bishop Allen, Alex has his charms, but is basically a shit. Knowing he's bad news, Marnie’s somewhat conflictedly cast him as her ingénue. He coyly milks this for all its worth, knowing she’s far too wary to make a move, or to even speak to him about what they both know is going on. He knows it’s up to him to steer this romantic narrative; he knows Marnie is waiting for him to give her something he may or may not actually have to give. But when it comes down to it, she may or may not actually want it in the first place.

Meanwhile, Marnie’s got other options, but they don’t look so good. Bujalski himself plays Mitchell, an enamored co-worker who desperately finagles a dinner date, one which Marnie suffers through like it's charity. Mitchell’s geekery is the old fashioned kind – it’s not a fashion statement, it’s an unchecked nuisance. The scenes between Marnie and Mitchell provide a particularly sharp study of the impossibility of language to convey emotion in any precise way. If transcribed, each exchange between Marnie and Mitchell would resemble polite conversation, but as performed by Bujalski and Dollenmayer, these exchanges tailspin into barely-constrained outbursts of passive-aggression. His courtship is just so irritating that one starts to wonder – if Alex is to Marnie what Marnie is to Mitchell, then, is Marnie to Alex what Mitchell is to Marnie?

Funny Ha Ha is a film nearly devoid of situation - all of its drama comes straight from its characters. Bujalski’s ear is trained to hear the things that people don’t say, and his camera knows exactly how to capture what we’re doing while we’re waiting for words that probably aren't going to come out. At one crucial point, Alex describes the “conversation I would like to have,” but then concludes that “instead, I should probably be going.” He’d be daring Marnie here to step out of her comfort zone - if she was the kind of girl that had one to begin with. Instead her best move is a well-timed retreat. Otherwise, all circuits are set to flail.

Bujalski's films feel familiar in a lot of ways, but may not have a simple ancestor; comparisons to Shadows or Slacker or even Antonioni are not inapt, but still not quite right. Ultimately, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation bring something entirely new to those tables: a full-on embrace of a very zeitgeisty kind of awkwardness. It's the age of flail, and Andrew Bujalski's all over it.