SFJFF 30: 'You Won't Miss Me'

I haven't seen New York writer-director Ry Russo Young's award-winning short Marion and first feature Orphans, but her second feature You Won't Miss Me (showing at the Castro in next week's Jewish Film Festival) is such a jewel I can't wait to see everything else she's done. The film stars Stella Schnabel (daughter of artist Julian) as the troubled, complex, provocative Shelly Brown, adrift in contemporary New York, lurching between one-night-stands, failed indie-film and theatre auditions, seedy parties, local gigs and a disastrous weekend in Atlantic City, after a spell in the local mental health facility, where she was taken by her (terminally absent) mother after a violent outburst. It's familiar territory, but Russo Young's perspective is brilliantly original, intimate, and contemporary, with taped voiceovers looping between scenes shot variously in HD, Super 8, DV, or 16mm which correspond to Shelly's different states of mind; the style ranges from romantic, grainy, slow-motion footage which conjures an imaginal realm she struggles (and fails) to realize, to hand-held video scenes (of coke sniffing, or arguing in a hotel room, or drunken conversation with dull, disheveled boys) which look like something you might see on YouTube. Schnabel's improvisational acting techniques dovetail elegantly with this approach, as do themes of interiority, personal identity expanding and contracting according to inconsistent dreams, moods, drug-states, etc. Schnabel and Russo Young together have achieved something which is stylistically gritty and immediate and thematically quite sophisticated, something to do with fantasy and reality and their intersection, the way in which we all conspire to act, stage, or otherwise create a reality we can live with, a kind of home movie in which we are, finally, seen and heard and fully expressed. Shelly Brown's home movie is a mash-up derby of fights and dreams of normal love and tawdry collisions with reality - she is so sensitized to failure that her rage pre-empts all her opportunities - but she is consistently real and interesting, and I think this has a lot to do with the way in which she was created and imagined by women. In an exchange last year with Interview's Lena Dunham, the 27 year-old Russo Young described the genesis of the character as a collaboration between her and co-writer Schnabel; together they wrote a biography of Shelly and then proceeded to explore her character in a series of taped interviews in which Schnabel would improvise responses to questions about self-expression, love, ambition, drug-use, identity, etc. These tapes are then used as a foundation for the film itself, and are heard intermittently throughout, a plaintive, flawed, wistful, defiant monologue which echoes in a personal register the interviews between Shelly and her psychiatric advisor, scenes which open and close the film and attempt to define the character from without, or from the system or society's perspective, which we could paraphrase as not belonging. Shelly both accepts and rejects this definition, and she is severely conflicted in other ways as well, but we cleave to her perspective as real, despite its mistakes, its deflections and inflations - perhaps because of them.

It's so exciting to contemplate female characters from this angle, from within. After watching Amber Sealey's brilliant A+D earlier this year, and Andrea Arnold's stunning film Fish Tank, it feels like a new generation of female actors and directors is about to change the way we experience women on screen altogether. It's revolutionary. You Won't Miss Me plays just once in this festival: 7/24 at The Castro. See SFJFF for details. Here's the trailer;