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Reviews: Quiet City by Aaron Katz
The New York Times says: Between the Mumbles, Images of Sorrowful Poetry By STEPHEN HOLDEN
"Aaron Katz' film Quiet City is punctuated with images of New York at twilight that cast a mood of reflective melancholy reminiscent of the loneliness at the heart of Edward Hopper paintings. Silhouettes of television aerials against a glowing orange and purple sky; yellow traffic lights on a nearly deserted avenue; a silvery subway train in the middle distance slipping through the dusky, blue-gray light; an industrial landscape at sunset: These and other beautiful images, photographed by Andrew Reed, resonate with the characters lives.
Quiet City belongs to the movie genre labeled mumblecore, so named partly because the young, nerdy characters in these films rarely address any subject outside their immediate social sphere. If they don' actually mumble their words, the tone of their conversations is restricted to various shades of chat, much of which seems trivial. It is a filmmaking sensibility, filtered through Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes and distantly related to punk, with the spirit of defiance replaced by resignation to the art of diminished expectations.
God, as they say, is in the details. And as the two main characters, Jamie (Erin Fisher), a visitor to New York from Atlanta, and Charlie (Cris Lankenau), a recently unemployed New York resident, make their way through Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, you are as likely to define them by who they're not as by who they are.
They're not the sort of sexed-up would-be celebutantes who overrun MTV, VH1 and tabloid television. Nor are they soulless, well-tailored M.B.A., or eccentric dot-com visionaries with billionaire agendas on whom the media also likes to dote.
Clean-cut bohemians might be the most accurate description, although there is nothing especially arty about their demeanor. Charlie confesses that his ideal job would be one in which he supported himself doing absolutely nothing. Jamie admits, with some embarrassment, that she works in an Applebee's restaurant. She is very pretty, while Charlie, who doesn't seem to have a vain bone in his body, epitomizes the word schlub.
For all its air of casualness and the actors unerring ability to deliver semi-improvised dialogue that sounds overheard, Quiet City is a formal movie, elegantly edited, whose images, both still and moving, are conjoined to a soundtrack that reduces the noise of the city to an evocative background hum, quiet but not silent. When music intrudes, it tends to be minimalist pop played on a toy keyboard.
Jamie and Charlie meet by chance in a nearly deserted subway station when Jamie, dragging a suitcase, approaches him to ask for directions to a diner where she is supposed to meet her New York friend Samantha. Charlie escorts her there and waits for Samantha to appear, but she never does.
He eventually invites Jamie to hang out at his apartment, and the two end up spending the next 24 hours drifting around New York. They drop in on a friend of Charlie's to retrieve a borrowed hat, and visit a Park Slope art opening and its after-party.
The mumblecore genre, with its minimalist aesthetics, minuscule budgets, home-movie casting of friends and acquaintances and its fly-on-the-wall, quasi-documentary spontaneity, is so wide-open for parody that it is a sitting duck for the most withering send-up. Quiet City is fortunate to arrive just before the inevitable demolition crews arrive to tear it to shreds. Tender and sad, it is a fully realized work of mumblecore poetry.
The Oregonian says: By Shawn Levy
"Boy meets girl; there is no simpler story. And yet for all the variations that Hollywood has churned out on that sweetest and plainest of narratives, the result usually resembles life on Earth about as much as Pamela Anderson does a human woman: distorted and overinflated and slathered with flourishes that are meant to signal the real thing but never really embody it.
What a joy, then, is Quiet City, the second film by Portland-born-and-bred writer-director Aaron Katz, whose "Dance Party USA" was another of this year's happiest surprises.
The film, co-written by Katz with stars Erin Fisher and Chris Lankenau, superficially resembles Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset a portrait of two people walking and talking and, maybe, falling in love. But it's sparer and more fragile and utterly free of guile -- even in comparison with Linklater's exemplarily homey films. Just as Dance Party transcended the influence of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, which hovered over its mood and cinematography, so does Quiet City stand as an instance of a young artist of robust gifts making something new of a master's example.
The story, as I say, is simplicity itself: Jamie is visiting New York and can't find her way around. In a subway station in Brooklyn, she asks Charlie for directions, and he escorts her to a diner where she's supposed to meet a friend. They have coffee and chat; the friend never shows, and Charlie invites Jamie to wait at his place nearby. They chat some more and have some wine and fall asleep (separately), and the next day they hang out: in the park, at various friends' houses, at an art show, at a party.
Almost all of the film's brief running time is given over to the spectacle of two characters talking and meandering in the unprettified and unadorned ways people actually talk and doing the things that people do when they're tiptoeing around each other with the possibility that something more might result. Jamie is the bolder of the two, but never pushy; rather, she's a confident presence who sincerely appreciates Charlie's kindness. Charlie is a bit unformed in comparison, but his boyish sensitivity and openness are genuinely charming. From the get-go you know they're perfect for each other -- both as actors and characters.
Like Dance Party, Quiet City is photographed, cut and scored with remarkable art and skill. Katz may wish to feign an offhanded air, but he and his cinematographers (Andy Reed does the duties here) devise one beautifully lit and framed shot after another, imparting the whole thing with a rich, swoony air. Late in the film, traffic lights change beneath an elevated highway, and then we cut to a scene of four people dancing in an apartment; the beauty of the first shot -- as carefully composed as an oil painting -- is matched by the inspiration to score the dance not with whatever it is the dancers are hearing but with the atmospheric music written for the film by Keegan DeWitt (another Portland native). It's sheer poetry.
As impressive as what they do are all the things that Katz and company don't: There are no wacky sidekicks, contrived subplots, self-consciously clever speeches or cardboard back stories for the characters -- the very essence of the Hollywood version of the story, in short, has been distilled out. There's one speech -- one! -- that comes near the end and that almost encapsulates the film's themes, and it's played so naturally and subtly that it nearly slips by before you realize that it's the proverbial "aha!" moment.
Quiet City is a slight film, but it's so pure and precise and honest that it takes on stature beyond its actual size. As a work of art, it makes a big noise indeed. Grade: A-
The Boston International Film Festival says:
"The Independent Film Festival of Boston, now in its fifth year, is but one among many stops for Amerindie directors premiering their latest product, a slew of documentaries ranging from hot-button issues to lukewarm rock bands, and assorted foreign hits from last year's festival circuit. Despite the diversity, it's starting to feel like a cult of sorts, though that's no slight on the selection committee. It's startling enough that Hannah Takes the Stairs, the latest from Joe Swanberg, he of IFFB 2006 favorite LOL, should star Andrew Bujalski, he of Mutual Appreciation (IFFB 2005), but peer down the roster and you'll also find Mark Duplass, writer of The Puffy Chair (IFFB 2006) and Todd Rohal of IFFB 2006's infamous Guatemalan Handshake. Look at the cast list of Aaron Katz' Quiet City and gawk some more: Swanberg and Michael Tully of Cocaine Angel (IFFB 2006) are among the co-stars. Are our young filmmakers merely promoting solidarity lest one be left behind? Or does collaboration yield its weight in quality?"
"Depends on the filmmaker. Quiet City was the festival highlight, for me. I'm unfamiliar with Katz' previous work, but his stabs at naturalism, the movie is a meet-cute in the slow, awkward manner that meet-cutes actually happen, says its author, re distinctive, somber, and truthful. I knew I would like this movie before any humans appeared: Katz has an eye for imagery that favors mystery over prettiness, exemplified by a long take from inside a subway car in which the perspective only gradually becomes apparent. But thankfully, Katz is just as attentive to his characters, Jamie (Erin Fisher) and Charlie (Cris Lankenau), a couple of twenty-somethings who balance each other out: she's slightly more expressive than him, he's slightly more available than her, as she's in the process of emancipating herself from an unavailable boyfriend. Neither obvious about their affections nor distanced from each other, their mostly improvised chats are compulsively watchable due to the contrast between Charlie's casualness and Jamie's nervous insistence on introducing slightly difficult topics into the conversation: we watch her worrying, but know it's unnecessary."
"Again, Katz' images are economical and expressive; throughout an entire conversation between the two, he keeps the camera trained on Jamie, briefly planting us in her nervous shoes, oblivious to Charlie's reactions. Katz seems aware that flirtation alone can barely keep his movie afloat, but also that it must remain the focus, and thus subplots float by unobtrusively. Distractions like a visit to a snobby friend's house (the ubiquitous Swanberg) begin with a point, and end with the mocking announcement of its absence. Katz has the daring to lull his audience through unnecessary scenes only to point out their inanity, but his daring is justified, as Quiet City subtly courses through a crescendo beneath its slight surface. Katz proves less than satisfied with a slice of life for its own sake: his film is a wisp with a kick."
—IFF of Boston 2007