Bujalski Redux

Sometime last year, I decided to take a trek to the Silver AFI in Silver Spring to catch Funny Ha-Ha. Director Andrew Bujalski was supposed to be in attendance. I didn't know much about either the film, nor the director, but the novelty of seeing a director peddle his own film, something that I rarely see, was enough of a draw for me.

I found the film fits and starts to be rather annoying. It tells the story of Marnie, whose the object of desire. She had had a falling out with a guy she was interested in, when she made a fool of herself. No longer interested in him, her friends have informed that he's single again, and maybe she should do something.

The director plays Mitchell, a temp who Marnie works with who falls for Marnie, but realizes that geeky guys like him are never going to be successful with girls like Marnie.

Bujalski's been compared to Cassevetes, though, being a cinematic novice, my filmwatching of the Cassevetes era is lacking (I haven't watched Fassbinder either), though I gather it has to do with pseudo-realistic drama in dysfunctional households.

I recall that I had wanted to ask a very odd question, though I was sure what answer I'd get, and that is, if he'd been given millions of dollars, would he continue to make films like he has. By that, I mean, if he were told to make blockbuster special effects films, would he do so? My feeling is directors like Bujalski would recoil at the thought, having put their heart and soul in a personal tale. The idea of making something Spielbergian when you've been compared to Cassavetes seems blasphemous.

This isn't to say that such things haven't occasionally happened. In music, Phil Collins was the drummer, then lead of Genesis, considered to be an exemplar of progressive rock of the 70s. Through the 80s, he leaned to a more pop sound, a sound that fans of Genesis felt was selling out. Collins would claim that he didn't wear the same clothes as he did ten years ago, so why should he play the same music. A new generation of fans grew up, only vaguely aware of Collins' role in the tumultous history of the strange English band.

Since I was barely familiar with his work and his inspirations, my sense of what the film was about was surely very distant to what the film meant to him. I remember reading an interview of Jonathan Coulton, where the interviewer notices certain musical influences, influences I was unfamiliar with, and thus, I became very aware that I didn't have the right context to understand the music as Coulton was thinking of it.

Now, to be fair, I see a lot of films and have seen a lot of directors, so I'm not the kind of person whose film choices are restricted to bawdy efforts like Wedding Crashers, nor to adventure films by Michael Bay. Indeed, I believe that weekend I went to see the very unusual Tropical Malady, a film that combines the mundane with the mythical, which some have called genius, but where the average viewer, unused to being pushed to think about a film would cry foul, decrying it as typical foreign art crap that no one gets, and that film critics only pretend to adore (they don't know any better either) to make the average moviegoer look like a philistine.

Indeed, Tropical Malady is about as different a film as you can imagine from Funny Ha-Ha, and comes from a worldview so decidedly foreign as to nearly be incomprehensible for the other to view.

Why am I blogging about Bujalski? No reason in particular. I had been reading a review of a later film, and it reminded me that I was in attendance on Bujalski's last tour with his film, a journey that had lasted some two years. He was somewhat relieved it was ending, the Q&A sessions, the travelling, and looking forward to talking about his new film.

When I think about that, I wonder about the nature of creativity. Some people lack enough creativity to work in any niche well. But even for those who do find something they want to say, it's interesting to see how narrowly confining it is. Could Bujalski make genre fare like Westerns, sci-fi, romantic comedies, horror? Does he even care?

Somehow I think not. And there's plenty of room for those who wish to tell their own stories.