"I should have done it a long time ago." © Hoover The debut of Noah Baumbak as a director of full-length films was just marked by the film “Forget and Remember”, which in all its manifestation resembles not so much the work of at least a little bit of an experienced director, as the test of the director’s pen, just embarking on this creative path.
Too quickly revealed to the viewer, encouraging the incident and disclosure of the relationships of the main characters through the acupuncture inclusion of memories of their acquaintance in the harmonious course of life, which takes place after their physical separation, is a rather bold move and at the same time, in the case of this film, unfounded. Why? It's pretty simple. When the author does this, the second most important storyline is usually cultivated in the background, which occupies the viewer and makes him feel, if not history, then the atmosphere and characters of the characters, at the same time making and worrying for them, these third-party characters who will always remind of the main conflict of the film. Thus, the viewer will remain involved in what is happening on the screen and receive the initial information, in order to ultimately understand what the finale, which will unleash the main conflict, the main drama of the film, will mean for him, despite the fact that the series of vicissitudes will be presented in an irregular suite, within which this drama will develop. Baumbak here acts in a similar way, with the only omission that he overloads the information background of the tape with a large number of characters and little focus on their characters and type. At the same time, in the end, not leading the viewer to catharsis by the end of the film, competently not ending the history of relationships, but only floating in an awkward situation in which the hero fell: it was possible to develop his impulse, show his aspiration as holistic and invincible, but instead, fleeting weakness turns into exhaust and another flashback, lying about how dear the main characters were to each other. And, of course, we lie to the viewer, which is even sadder.
However, Noah Baumbuck is now known as a true virtuoso of dialogue in cinema. As a person who knows how to form interesting stories based on simple, life, everyday situations. And these qualities of his as a creator are traced as effective ways of storytelling already in this picture. With a touch of Jim Jarmusch’s style, cameraman Stephen Bernsteen visualizes a story written and staged by Baumback clearly in honor of his own generation, in honor of the time in which he became a person, and in honor of the peculiarities of this time. The portrait of Generation X, which, anticipating that it will soon be displaced by new people on the principles of forming the actual worldview, that is, by Generation Y, undergoes an existential crisis, expressing it in an eternally depressed mood, frequent lack of initiative and refusal of reality in terms of perceiving it as something that exists. It seems that this sense of rapid displacement never left them, as if only having appeared as a common mass of people, this stratum of people already felt that it was only a transshipment mechanism: from the era of revolutionaries militaristic and/or peaceful, to the era of people completely absorbed in Internet technologies and portable systems of communication, communication, interaction between people. They want to do something, do something. They understand that they are dissatisfied with something and seem to even know what, but they really cannot resist this, realizing on a purely personal level their own, perhaps, imaginary individuality and the same individual problems, which do not touch anyone else but them, as it seems to these people. Every scene in the pub, at the next party, in the dining room or in the shared home of Hoover (Josh Hamilton) and his companions reports it, clearly shaping the portrait of these extraordinary people who seem so familiar. Why not? Everything is simple again: because of their birth at the junction of time, they contain the principles of society of those distant upheavals of the 60s/70s, as well as people who have now come to the construction sites of their personal reality, who were born in a computerized, sociable and quite alien to what was literally a generation ago.
This film is an artistic study on the subject of perhaps an unusual number of people. The attempt to survey their qualities, principles and essence of their nature through their friendship, their way of life, their conversations and, most importantly, the relationship of the sexes. Forming his film on the basis of events documented in his personal experience, Noah Baumbak shot the tape, albeit rather sloppy in terms of staging the composition of the frame, editing and the principles of storytelling, but unusually atmospheric and, most importantly, trusting. You believe her as much as you can believe in what is happening behind the scenes of your own house or apartment. And the only regret in this case is that, in the end, this juxtaposition of oneself with the realities of the characters, this clear involvement in the world of the characters, in the end, does not turn out to be anything but the very exhaust that I talked about earlier. But then you can simply enjoy the flow of history, within which you feel like a time traveler. Perhaps, but this is not for everyone.
P.S. Thank you very much.