Film Carew

Few genres are as conservative and formulaic as the romantic-comedy, with the only real wrinkles in this persistent and popular cinematic staple being around its edges. Sure, Judd Apatow has staged minor revelations by rendering films in which realism, actual human behaviour, and defiance of gender archetypes have eaten away at the form. But, in the end, even when Apatovian mischief-making is at play, the central man/woman couple still has their end-of-second-act falling out only to make up in grand public fashion on close, with plenty of passage-of-time montages in the mix to show the good times being good and the bad times being bad. Similarly, plenty of films under the Apatow umbrella have feigned subversion whilst delivering conservatism: John Hamburg's I Love You, Man may've put a bromance between Paul Rudd and Jason Segel at the centre of its story, but their budding platonic friendship was told with the exact same rhythms and tropes of the genre; just shuffling the gender cards doesn't upend the genre's conventions, only make the lack of daring in doing so seem meek. Two new American indie-ish films – Lee Toland Krieger's Celeste & Jesse Forever and Josh Radnor's Liberal Arts – try to put their own spin on the rom-com, each daring to suggest that romance is no cure-all nor happily-ever-after; each as interested in the angst that comes with lust, love, and the myriad of confused and confusing feelings that come therewith.

Liberal Arts

Liberal Arts may be sold as a romantic-comedy, but it's not about boy-meets-girl, not really; the film, instead, about the passage of time. Its setting is one of those picturebook, old American colleges – here Kenyon University, in rural Ohio – where the 200-year-old Gothic architecture and Greek fraternities may stay the same, but the constant flow of new students are like sands through the hourglass; the constant march of time and its attendant reminders of mortality as sure as the turning leaves and the first winter frosts. Radnor – on break from the unending (undead?) sitcom How I Met My Mother, and bringing plenty of televisual conventions with him – plays a former student who returns, after years away, to the old campus for the retirement ceremony of an influential professor (Richard Jenkins). Gladly, Radnor – who directed Jenkins in his Sundance-cliché, ensemble-movie debut, Happy Thankyou More Please – realises that this elder character is the key to his thematic interests, and realises what a gift he has in Jenkins. It's funny that Jenkins is known by that weird term 'character actor' (what acting isn't playing a character?), which is a way of saying he's not a star, I suppose. But he's clearly one of the great actors of the past three decades, adept at giving comic roles an aching emotional depth, portraying internal conflict and confusion and hitting those notes where his character is convulsing with frustration yet trying to remain restrained, refraining from outburst. Here, he gets the film's money speech: sitting down Radnor and telling him that the world's “dirty secret” is that everyone, everywhere is still 19 at heart; the world filled with scared teenagers merely pretending to be responsible adults. Facing imminent retirement, Jenkins is peering at his own mortality in a very big way; making him wise counsel for Radnor, mid-30s and directionless, who comes to the college single and depressed stumbled into a sustained flirtation with a sunny, funny, actual-19-year-old, Elizabeth Olsen.

Such a set-up should set your alarm bells ringing: yes, another middle-aged man has written a film in which he himself gets to make out with a hot young Hollywood starlet. Yet, just as Liberal Arts introduces this juicy possibility, it takes a weirdly conservative turn away from it; as if Radnor sensed the criticism of this dude-ish indulgence and wanted to wag his finger in defiance. Yet just because they don't ride off into the sunset, grindin' happily ever after like giddy rabbits, doesn't mean that this idea isn't at play; I mean, just because Kevin Spacey didn't actually fuck the slutty cheerleader in American Beauty didn't make it any less of a middle-aged-male masturbatory fantasy. What saves Liberal Arts from this isn't the weird moral superiority of Radnor's character – who is, at various points of this film, almost an unbearable dickwad, I'm guessing not intentionally – but the fact that its 19-year-old foil manages to skate away from Manic Pixie Dream Girl convenience, even if that is the net effect of her screenplay function. She is given her own agency, her own emotional vulnerability, her own desires and motivations, but, still, Olsen is around to be merely a choice for the man to make; our navel-gazing dipshit left to decide whether it's 'right' to break this particular horse, or leave her running wild and free. Like an MPDG, her chief role is to bring life back to our humdrum, hangdog main man; and, sure enough, mission accomplished.

Yet, Radnor's character is such a knob that this romantic foil is – just as Jenkins is the thematic soul – the emotional heart of proceedings; there a sense that she offering her heart to this older twat carries far more daring than him merely worrying about what the neighbours might think of him dipping his wick in the ol' collegiate wax. If Olsen's character had gotten more screen-time, and more self-directed motivation, perhaps Liberal Arts could've become something genuinely complex, not merely a film suggesting greater complexities. Radnor's greatest weakness, as writer, is of his determination to push the pace along; to refuse to hold on a scene or inhabit a conflict. Too many times it feels as if he cuts to the next scene just when things are getting interesting; every heated moment – be that heat ardour or argument – is interrupted or abandoned, there all too many scenes in which someone walks off, storms out, or is told to go away right at the moment that a more (and actual) daring filmmaker would've persisted. It speaks of his real limits as storyteller: Radnor happier when indulging in convenient montages and tedious B-story caricatures (Zach Efron as hilarious hippy bro, etc) and than getting down to the real desperation and dirt of human emotion; an exploration of which would truly subvert the rom-com form.

Celeste & Jesse Forever

Celeste & Jesse Forever's individualist spin on the ol' genre is to make it a film about a pair of separate ex-spouses – played by Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg – who're trying to remain friends. The screenplay – written by Jones and another of the film's stars, Will McCormick – dredges up the worst possible iteration of this set-up early, suggesting that maybe they're secretly meant to be together forever (or, at least, by the final credits) before gladly discarding the idea as fantasy; the screenplay realising that two characters who've arrived at the point of divorce had a flawed partnership to begin with. This is the film's singular subversion: this no thing of meet-cute moments signposting an eventual happily-ever-after, but instead a film about navigating changing lives. Of course, it wouldn't be some mildly-interesting American indie-film if it didn't endless pat itself on the back about its own daring; something all too embodied in the form of Elijah Wood's slightly-odd boss, who is so uncomfortable with a role as Jones' gay confidante that he speaks aloud of his non-resemblance to the 'sassy gay best friend character'. Though the film is built on an essential transgression – the lie of its title, in which both eternity and the joining ampersand are revealed to be lies; this very much Jones' story, and her star vehicle – so much of what comes around hews towards conservatism. Or, moreso, just cheap and easy writing; there a familiar parade of comic caricatures mugging wildly in the margins, and there all too many scenes in which Jones character is humiliated and beaten down (this is the standard lot of the rom-com heroine, which suggests something about society's need to see women as vulnerable). There's even a sense of concession in the way that the central divorce, and return to the vagaries of singledom, is contrasted by the marriage of longtime best pals Eric Christian Olsen and Ari Graynor (and, with Graynor and Jones in the one film, Celeste & Jesse Forever features a glorious smattering of freckles; the pancake patina of most starlets' visages gladly abandoned for the human irregularity of sweetly-spotted skin). Even if our main couple are headed to the inevitability of divorce, at least someone herein gets to have a storybook wedding; and at least those in the audience who're there to witness some woman in a princess frock pissing away thousands of dollars staged some sickly pantomime of storybook fantasy get to see just that. That the wedding involves yet another drunken, embarrassing toast is another instance of Celeste & Jesse Forever doing less rewriting of the rom-com book, more wholesale cribbing of its most persistent tropes.

Love Story looks, on a meta level, at the influence of the romantic-comedy on the lives of actual real-life people; it a minor riff on a major subject —mass-media's complete reshaping of the human psyche – that is less interested in thematic depth than in breezy, pleasing shaggy-dog-ness. It's the work of oddball Kiwi filmmaker Florian Habicht, who went off to New York – that city of Manhattan and Moonstruck and When Harry Met Sally – to chase his cinematic dreams. Pressed into action with no script written and no idea what he's doing, Habicht goes vox-poppin' on street and subway, soliciting ad-hoc advice on matters of the heart and matters of filmmaking. The suggestions suggested suggest that people tend towards regurgitating clichés – especially when a camera is pointed at them – yet Habicht treats their every utterance with an unabashed sincerity and an infectious enthusiasm; so throwing himself into this crowdsourced making-the-film-as-we-go-along shtick that he makes its gonzo, student-film-ish aspirations feel spontaneous, inspired, and alive with genuine life. Of course, it's the filmmaker himself who makes things interesting: happily blurring the lines between fiction and reality as he casts a hot Russian actress as his pretend love-interest, then suggests maybe he's trying to bed her in 'real life' too; Skyping with his dad, a stern and strange German who plays like some mixture between Werner Herzog and Torben Ulrich; and, in the film's signature moment, staging a sexy-time scene around a girl eating milk and cereal out of a cavity in his sunken chest. Compared to that, the 'moving' philosophies espoused by regular shmoes on the street seem like the least interesting part of the picture.

Paris/Manhattan is, unlike the film's above, not trying to subvert any rom-com stereotypes; instead happily existing within the genre. In one long homage to Woody Allen – and his typically-torturous Play It Again Sam – debutante director Sophie Lellouche tells the story of a 30-something dame who has lived a life of loneliness thanks to her debilitating neuroses, which manifest in the form of a giant Woody Allen poster in her house that talks to her, offering advice (cribbed entirely from Allen films) on her existential aches and romantic failures. From there, the film spirals out into a weird family saga filled with mistrust, suspicion, and a constant parade of scenes where someone secretly stalks someone else. It's shitty sit-com set-ups, tired contrivances, and unfunny anxiousness all the way: a true film in the Woody spirit.