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Ivy (Zoe Kazan) is coming home from college for break. She catches a ride home from a classmate. She meets up with a friend from high school, Al (Mark Rendell). She greets her mother, she goes to see her cousin. She calls her boyfriend from school. She visits her doctor; she reports a seizure from a few months ago. Ivy has epilepsy.
Written and directed by Bradley Rust Gray, The Exploding Girl isn't an issue movie; it doesn't have much interest in epilepsy awareness. It's more like a mumblecore after-school special. Ivy and Al take walks, go to house parties, exchange meaningful glances, give each other relationship advice. The unseen boyfriend, on the other end of many abbreviated cell phone calls, does not, it must be said, bode well for Ivy. If nothing else, The Exploding Girl is scrupulous in its depiction of spring breaks as they occur in real life: no road trips, little excitement, mild comfort, and debauchery that is mild and restless at best.
There is more to the movie, though, than evoking a week spent in your childhood bed. Kazan, outfitted in springy dresses and squashed pigtails, gives a natural and ingratiating performance. Ivy acts blasé about her epilepsy, but Kazan's quiet antsiness keeps the condition lurking in the background. Rendell, in matching unkempt reddish hair, is less distinctive, more a type -- boyish, agreeable, a little flaky -- than a fully felt character.
It almost doesn't matter, though; the movie has only a handful of onscreen characters, and much of it is anchored by Kazan alone. Gray keeps his focus tight, shooting her through doorways, over foregrounded shoulders, through windows, maintaining a claustrophobic frame -- though obviously shot on location in New York, the film has so few wide shots that I never got a bead on where exactly in the city the movie takes place. To this spatial haziness Gray adds an acute awareness of how a city sounds, with unusual attention paid to the whooshes and rumbles of traffic and trains, the thin layers of static that come through the phone lines.
In its sense of disoriented place and mood, the movie recalls not the most (relatively) famous mumblecore movies with their handheld aesthetic and rambling conversations, but rather the prettier, more atmospheric cityscapes of Aaron Katz, who made the lovely Quiet City. In one of the film's most expansive shots, Kazan and Rendell sit on a roof while a flock of birds flies back and forth in the sky, looking like wind-swept crumpled papers.
Good small-scale movies are often compared to rich, satisfying short stories, and sometimes actually adapted from them; stories are often a more compatible fit for the screen, really, than many novels. The Exploding Girl so resembles a short story that it could probably accomplish most of its goals in fourteen or fifteen pages on paper -- even at eighty minutes, it feels a little thin. As a feature, it's slight; as a mood sustained by Kazan and Gray, it's impressive and occasionally spellbinding.
Written and directed by Bradley Rust Gray, The Exploding Girl isn't an issue movie; it doesn't have much interest in epilepsy awareness. It's more like a mumblecore after-school special. Ivy and Al take walks, go to house parties, exchange meaningful glances, give each other relationship advice. The unseen boyfriend, on the other end of many abbreviated cell phone calls, does not, it must be said, bode well for Ivy. If nothing else, The Exploding Girl is scrupulous in its depiction of spring breaks as they occur in real life: no road trips, little excitement, mild comfort, and debauchery that is mild and restless at best.
There is more to the movie, though, than evoking a week spent in your childhood bed. Kazan, outfitted in springy dresses and squashed pigtails, gives a natural and ingratiating performance. Ivy acts blasé about her epilepsy, but Kazan's quiet antsiness keeps the condition lurking in the background. Rendell, in matching unkempt reddish hair, is less distinctive, more a type -- boyish, agreeable, a little flaky -- than a fully felt character.
It almost doesn't matter, though; the movie has only a handful of onscreen characters, and much of it is anchored by Kazan alone. Gray keeps his focus tight, shooting her through doorways, over foregrounded shoulders, through windows, maintaining a claustrophobic frame -- though obviously shot on location in New York, the film has so few wide shots that I never got a bead on where exactly in the city the movie takes place. To this spatial haziness Gray adds an acute awareness of how a city sounds, with unusual attention paid to the whooshes and rumbles of traffic and trains, the thin layers of static that come through the phone lines.
In its sense of disoriented place and mood, the movie recalls not the most (relatively) famous mumblecore movies with their handheld aesthetic and rambling conversations, but rather the prettier, more atmospheric cityscapes of Aaron Katz, who made the lovely Quiet City. In one of the film's most expansive shots, Kazan and Rendell sit on a roof while a flock of birds flies back and forth in the sky, looking like wind-swept crumpled papers.
Good small-scale movies are often compared to rich, satisfying short stories, and sometimes actually adapted from them; stories are often a more compatible fit for the screen, really, than many novels. The Exploding Girl so resembles a short story that it could probably accomplish most of its goals in fourteen or fifteen pages on paper -- even at eighty minutes, it feels a little thin. As a feature, it's slight; as a mood sustained by Kazan and Gray, it's impressive and occasionally spellbinding.
