Mutual Appreciation
Contemporary Cinema
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1h 48m
Directed by Andrew Bujalski | 109 mins | 2005
Bujalski’s second feature stars Bishop Allen vocalist Justin Rice as a Boston transplant musician freshly arrived in New York, looking for new bandmates while drifting between a noncommittal affair with a radio station DJ (Seung-Min Lee), boozy sessions of philosophizing with his pal, Lawrence (Bujalski), and bouts of quietly pining after Lawrence’s girlfriend, Ellie (Rachel Clift). Shot in high-grain black-and-white 16mm, Bujalski’s scruffy comic character study is a wincingly familiar, deceptively disheveled—but quite artfully constructed—evocation of post-collegiate drift and twentysomething anomie. “Wonderful… Has the kind of artfully artless, low-fi vibe that brings to mind the French New Wave of the late 1950s and the East Village film scene of the late 1970s… Modest and true.” —The New York Times
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