Genre is a boon for marketers, for whom it provides a label, and for critics and scholars, for whom it provides an outlet for knowledge. But for directors it’s more or less irrelevant. The substance and the style of a film represent the makers’ ideas and inner world whether the film belongs to a popular genre or to none, and no amount of hand-waving about an element belonging to a genre’s conventions justifies it. Conventions are everywhere, in all aspects of storytelling (and even in that very notion of filmmaking as storytelling). A filmmaker’s art largely involves creating something new in the already convention-clotted audiovisual circuitry, and no amount of intention or exertion can actually bring about that innovation (if it could, “Birdman” would be a masterwork).
On the other hand, there are filmmakers who refer conspicuously to other movies as a part of their inner landscape—they’re movie-goers whose own psychic identity is inflected by the cinema, and who reflect that experience back into their work. That is, of course, the basic spark of the French New Wave, and it’s also seen, to this day, in some of the best independent films around. By happy coincidence, two such films are opening here this week—Lawrence Michael Levine’s “Wild Canaries,” which opened on Wednesday, and Andrew T. Betzer’s “Young Bodies Heal Quickly,” which opens today.
In “Wild Canaries,” Levine casts himself and his wife, the filmmaker Sophia Takal, in a current-day version of a screwball comedy that owes much to Woody Allen’s “Manhattan Murder Mystery.” He and Takal (who frequently act in other people’s movies as well) are accomplished but unpolished performers, and their inescapable cinematic bedhead is essential to the movie’s ideas as well as to its charm.
Noah (Levine) and Barri (Takal)—he’s a partner in a small film-production company, and she’s a general creative type who’s currently unemployed but looking to renovate a decrepit upstate resort—live in Brooklyn, where their way of life revolves around good real-estate fortune. They’ve got a relatively low-cost month-to-month rental in a building where the landlord is a young guy who lives downstairs and is hoping to sell it—though they still need to have a roommate, Jean (Alia Shawkat), in order to stay afloat.
For starters, Levine’s film holds a mirror up to independent-film life; the story runs on its infrastructure, and the ingenuity of his intricate script is proved in large part by its graceful foregrounding of the background, his dramatic unfolding of the static framework of practical life, of money and of ambition. The personable, impulsively energetic Barri befriends an elderly neighbor and gives her chess lessons. When the woman dies, Barri suspects her son, Anthony (Kevin Corrigan, an independent-film luminary since the mid-nineties), a real-estate developer who’s deep in debt, of killing her for the insurance money—and, with a comically homemade sort of sleuthing, Barri begins to investigate and ropes Noah into her madcap plans.
Levine builds the film on three axes of tension—the first is the deforming stress of financial need on intimate relationships; the second, the self-conscious psychological and narrative frame of Barri and Noah’s relationship, their cinematic self-awareness of being inside a story that seems like a movie; and the third, Levine and Takal putting themselves in the position of Barri and Noah. Which is to say that Levine is an impressively tight writer and director who keeps the acting loose, a division that’s at the core of the story itself.
Just as classic screwball comedies depend on sharp timing and exact framing of physical comedy, Levine borrows these tropes for an investigation that depends on quasi-professional detective skills that Barri and Noah don’t have but that they improvise in midstream. “Wild Canaries” features many scenes of an exquisitely meticulous comic precision—several involving cell phones in remarkably practical and unforced contexts, another that features a tilting car seat in an inspiration reminiscent of Jacques Tati.
At the same time, the couple’s relationship is no mere witty banter, their union no mere suave winking—this is a screaming couple who, well into adulthood (Noah says he’s thirty-six; Barri seems nearly a decade younger), behave toward each other with a shambling, belated adolescence that is, at its core, sexual. As in classic screwball comedy—as in the best of the genre, such as Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby” and “Monkey Business”—the insurmountable magnetism of sexual compatibility is the force that rules or ruins the world.
With “Young Bodies Heal Quickly,” Betzer has made a war film. It takes a little while for the movie to reveal its range of references, but when they appear the construction and its import seem all the more wondrous. The movie starts as a twist on another subgenre, wild boys on the road, beginning with a young man (Gabriel Croft) escaping from an institution and finding his way home. There, he reunites with his not quite adolescent brother (Hale Lytle) and, wreaking havoc together with an air rifle and a baseball bat, they reveal their mutually reinforcing sociopathy. During a knockdown, drag-out fight with girls they’ve hassled, they kill someone; their mother (Sandra L. Hale), alerted by the authorities, takes them on the run and helps them to escape.
After a series of misadventures—a disastrous visit to their sister (Kate Lyn Sheil), an encounter with a sympathetic French woman (Julie Sokolowski) who is dominated by another psychopath (Alexandre Marouani)—they find their father (Daniel P. Jones). He’s a seeming survivalist, a hard-nosed, rough-hewn outdoorsman working as a caretaker at a posh waterfront estate, and he’s still living in a fantasy world centered on his service as a medic in the Vietnam War.
Betzer films a man’s world unabashedly but without pride or preening. His pugnacious, confrontational style is aided by the urgent, physically pressing cinematography of Sean Price Williams, which gets unsqueamishly close to the sweaty, earthy men while enfolding them in a landscape to match. The woods and the sea, the sunlight and the forest exude the brusque romanticism of a seething, violent mystery.
The core of the film is a Vietnam War reënactment in which the father (he and his sons go unnamed throughout) plays an American soldier and forces his boys to portray Viet Cong fighters. As the ruggedly earnest war games play out, their splendid East Coast rural setting of rocks and forest, grasslands and a gentle river, is crudely sexualized as well. This man’s world is ugly; its glimmers of pleasure are crude and menaced, its tenderness scantly redeems the inner and outer wreckage of physical and emotional violence.
In Betzer’s view, young bodies may heal quickly, but old souls stay scarred forever and inflict their sufferings on anyone with the misfortune to come under their sway. Here, too, “Young Bodies” strangely echoes Levine’s film: the softly middle-class Noah, once lured into a world of physical action, takes his lumps in a comical yet peculiar series of injuries that compound throughout, leaving the romantic hero a barely escaped, albeit triumphant, wreck. Love, too, is a classical battlefield (and the Hitchcock winks in “Wild Canaries” tie the knot of love and death a little tighter).
What Betzer and Levine have done is substantial, and substantially different from the familiar run of low-budget genre films that come out, sometimes to acclaim (I’m thinking, for instance, of “Blue Ruin” and the forthcoming teen horror film “It Follows”), films that have their merits but that fit into genre without reflecting on or transforming it. This is an age of cinematic selves. These directors’ self-conscious but freestyle classicism, reflected not in their play with genre conventions but in their own self-image as movie-made men, remains—more than half a century after the New Wave got rolling—at the forefront of modernity.
