The Comedian, 2012.
Directed by Tom Shkolnik.
Starring Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Elisa Lasowski and Edward Hogg.
SYNOPSIS:
A struggling stand up comedian becomes entangled in a love triangle.
Maybe the most surprising feature of debut feature director Tom Shkolnik’s The Comedian is its title. Nominally the film is about thirtysomething comedian Ed (Edward Hogg). Living in London, a call-centre worker by day – selling female-specific cancer insurance – and struggling stand-up by night, we follow a few weeks in his life during which time he has a passionate relationship with young, hipster artist Nathan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) and his friendship with flatmate Elisa, (Elisa Lasowski) an acoustic-guitar-playing singer from France, is strained. But by the time you reach the 80th trudging, navel-gazing minute and remember that this character is ‘the comedian’, and this is apparently taking us behind the scenes of a man trying to laugh, and you have confirmation that the film is lazy and empty.
As someone trying to make films of my own, The Comedian felt like a slap in the face. Not the ‘wow-I-too-can-make-a-low-budget-gem’ which started the career of Kevin Smith for one, but rather a dispiriting slap which made one feel that the bar is being consciously lowered to make space for endless self-indulgence and a disregard for interesting storytelling. We’re told in the film’s synopsis, and on a few occasions during it, that this is a film about ‘choices and how not to make them’, and watching these terrified young people struggle to admit to themselves that they are lost and that all that they value needs re-evaluating (for the sake of their genuine happiness) and running from any obstacle doesn’t make for an involving film. Rather, it makes for a film mirroring (to paraphrase its director) its audience, the young, hip London community, a group of people so terrified of the ground underneath them disappearing that they won’t even admit that their hopes and expectations are self-medication.
It’s telling that one of Shkolnik’s ‘rules of the game’ – a series of Dogme 95-like regulations as to how The Comedian would be made – is that “we must not know what will happen next in the story and invent the film day by day”. Proof positive if more proof were needed that this generation is desperately running from its fears by making them hip, rather than facing them head-on and in doing so making a far more interesting film. (And while I’m on the point, I can’t help but find these ‘rules’ portentous and pointless. Just admit that your film is low-budget, you’re using natural light and real background extras because as well as being more realistic it’s cheaper and with the right visualist, satisfying to look at. Making a manifesto feels like lowering the bar to make necessity into a highbrow artistic statement and only makes the film feel all the more empty).
The film comes loaded with everything you might expect from a low-budget, youth-oriented (but mature) London film; a struggling everyman, an unsteady romance, mumbled, improvisational dialogue, natural light and handheld camerawork (leading to a constant lack of focus, which I’m sure is intended to bolster the raw, docu-realistic feel but by this point is irritating and pretentious, especially if what you’re trying to look at isn’t half as interesting as it thinks it is). Being generic is no problem at all so long as you’re interesting, but The Comedian almost entirely fails at doing so.
It’s a slice of life film, jettisoning a pulsing narrative for a spectatorial stance on a quiet, unhappy character’s day-to-day comings and goings. Again, no problem at all, just please be interesting. Here, nothing happens. Nothing. It feels like a film which is about seeing everything in the moments inbetween drama, in gestures and looks, a film for people who are interested in reading people. But when the film is about – and feels like it’s been made by – a group of uninteresting but self-important egotists it ends up being empty. The performers are solid and convincing across the board. It’s just unfortunate that they’re asking us to sympathise with characters who are telling us they’re at the end of their tether when they’re clearly far from it, and a sharp slap would be all the wake-up call they’d need to properly seek what would make them happy. On second thought I take this back. I can’t say whether these people are truly unhappy because no effort is made to give their minute, apparently interesting lives any context. How can I be expected to invest in the difficult relationship between Nathan and Ed when I have no idea what fear is stopping Ed from being comfortable?
In a key scene the increasingly irritating and self-absorbed Nathan tells Ed he’s indulgent, self-obsessed and he never thinks about anybody but himself. It’s one of two desperately frustrating moments in the film – the latter being an extended dialogue with an ‘author’s message’, wise, (contrived) cab driver in the film’s last moments – when I thought the filmmakers know what’s wrong with them and their on-screen personae. They know they’re flying, not fighting…but only insofar as self-referencing their self-indulgence adds another point to their hipster rating, alongside frameless glasses, a French flatmate, and let’s be honest – having made an semi-autobiographical low-budget film.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Stephen Glass
Originally published May 29, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
