A year after my graduation, my cinema teacher (mentor) taught a class about the American independent cinema movement. Since friends of mine were still slumming it in the lecture hall, word came about concerning his screening choices. There were the usual suspects: Fuller's Shock Corridor, Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, a couplet of Altman films, and a few rogue picks that no one had heard of or no one expected. What was most fascinating was that he ended the course with Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha, a film absolutely no one had ever even gotten a whiff of.

As it turns out, a course chronicling the history and turmoil of American indie film couldn't end anywhere else but with Bujalski (or perhaps Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy). Bujalski's films blend the scrappy, off-the-cuff drama of Cassavetes with the social rhetoric and shambling humor of Eric Rohmer. Both Funny Ha Ha and its follow-up, Mutual Appreciation, concern a loose group of friends who kiss people they shouldn't and spend their days in a long state of lollygagging. Where Appreciation was inescapably based in Williamsburg, Funny is based in a small community in Massachusetts where Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer) finds herself in perpetual temp-job hell.

One of these temp-jobs leads her to Mitchell (Bujalski himself), a nervy obsessive with designs on Marnie and an inability to get it together. Bujalski's creepy crawler is a passive aggressive nightmare, realistically prodding the expectations and yearnings that he has for Marnie. Marnie's a nice girl, so she cordially hangs out with him and tries not to get too angry with him. This is not to say the girl doesn't have other guys on the hook or in mind. The man of her dreams (Christian Rudder of the indie rock band Bishop Allen) slouches into her life every once in awhile, bedhead, jeans, and grungy t-shirt intact.

The post-college demographic are a shifty bunch, and with every awkward kiss in a car and every hung-over misstep, they plummet deeper into the bunny hole. Bujalski's camera holds on for dear life in these moments of goalless existence, where accidentally bumping into someone at a grocery store becomes an emotional touchstone (not to mention the most painful moment in your life). Like few other films, Funny Ha Ha feels like that long bus ride that Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson once took; both sure of a future and uncertain of its worthiness at the same time.

As one might pick up on, the funniest thing about Funny Ha Ha is how ghastly unfunny it is. The romance pool has traces of mercury, the relationships are twiddled thumbs and every word that pours out of these twenty-somethings has the faint odor of a manure farm. The last moment of the film, with Marnie and her dreamboat lazing in the sun, deduces that there might be hope for the future, for love. However, isn't that what Bujalski's world is predicated on? The maybes and what-ifs, the possibilities and the chances-of; these are the moments that make up Bujalski's characters existence. If anything, Funny Ha Ha has a tight grasp on our temporarily-separated, seeing-other-people culture and as much as it wants to laugh at it, can't help but choke on it also.

The new DVD includes a very strange commentary track from a "Russian scholar," and a radio play from Bujalski.