This is Guy, and that's Madeline. Behind them is the park, and beneath them is the bench. Everything seems to be in order.
Discovering a good new filmmaker is always thrilling. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of a filmmaker having discovered his forebears, and making his appreciation irresistible to the rest of us.
Consider
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
, a jazz-inflected song-and-dance musical about the minor-key vicissitudes of urban romance. What a good idea for a movie, we might think at first, as if it were just a matter of originality. But of course, it’s all been done before—just not, until now, by writer and director Damien Chazelle. For his feature debut, Chazelle obviously understands that freshness is the thing—as is knowing how to swing.
His film is an unabashedly modest effort, shot with a mostly handheld camera on grainy black-and-white 16 mm stock, without a lot of characters, or dialogue, or plot. But the film is also slyly ambitious, with a little bit of John Cassavetes, a little bit of French new wave and a little bit of classic Hollywood musical—not to mention just enough verve to evoke our favorite scrappy indies of 10 or 20 years ago. Chazelle’s magpie frugality has paid off: Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench seems like a revelation, at least in part because it also seems like a throwback.
Sometimes, it takes an eager Harvard guy in his 20s to remind us that our nostalgia for the cinema-history highlight reel is justified. Like Andrew Bujalski before him, Chazelle operates with a sort of mumblecorean tension-building conceit: Even articulate people somehow can’t manage to voice their feelings in conversation. To avoid lapsing into a pose of inscrutable indie minimalism, he cleverly has them burst into song.
Those romantic vicissitudes pertain to a self-absorbed but courtly jazz trumpeter (Jason Palmer) and a listless, introverted waitress (Desiree Garcia). Their story is slight and highly nonverbal, revealed mostly through the saunter and drift of attraction and separation. (Other essential players include the streets of Boston and Sandha Khin as a rival for the trumpeter’s affections.) Chazelle wants less to spell things out schematically than to trust the chemistry between his two unusual but appealing leads. Maybe you could say doing this successfully involves phrasing and a grounding of certain fundamentals upon which improvisation occurs. In any case, there’s a lot to be said for Guy and Madeline’s easygoing musicianship.
The film has a few false notes, but Chazelle handles them like a practiced improviser rescuing a blown solo: by taking ownership. His close-looking camera is an active player in this intimate ensemble and, of course, the mood receives reinforcement from Justin Hurwitz’ score. You know it’s working when even the melancholy has buoyancy. This is how we expect musicals to function, even after we’ve become too cynical to let them.
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
Directed by Damien Chazelle
With Jason Palmer, Desiree Garcia and Sandha Khin
CCA
82 min.
NR
