SHIVA BABY (A-minus) - This claustrophobic and compelling debut feature from Emma Seligman follows a college senior facing a meltdown amid family, friends and lovers at a post-funeral shiva. It's facile to suggest that this young woman is grappling with her sexuality, but -- refreshingly -- this is a much more nuanced comic drama about a person coming to terms with the consequences of the sexual choices she has made as she blazes her own path forward.
Rachel Sennott is captivating as Danielle, who is hectored by her worried and overprotective parents (Fred Melamed and Polly Draper) while being confronted with the presence at the deceased's home of her childhood friend (and recent slam), Maya (Molly Gordon), as well as the sugar daddy whom Danielle has been secretly banging while claiming to have been earning money baby-sitting. (Turns out he worked with her father.)
This production has the manic energy of a bottle episode of a TV series (here more of a tightly packed ketchup bottle) and at times unfolds like a flat-out horror movie. Danielle is frequently cornered by her parents' friends and other nosy yentas, and she believably seems trapped in a nightmare scenario. Things spill, glass breaks, Danielle alternately binge-eats and shuns food, the baby wails, and the intrigue slowly heats to a boil, with not only the presence of sugar daddy, Max (a Jay Duplass-like Danny Deferrari), but the appearance of his gorgeous, super-successful shiksa wife (Diana Agron) and their baby.
Seligman wisely makes this less about binary concepts of sexuality and more about a budding young woman's confusion and frustration with relationships and what it means to be a successful, happy person. Sennott flawlessly imbues Danielle with a complex mix of thoughts and feelings -- sometimes sensibly challenging convention, and other times acting out like an impetuous child still on mommy and daddy's payroll. All along the way, this is both bitingly funny and disturbingly real and jangling to the nerves, as if we, too, are battling for oxygen in that very same cloistered house of horrors. (A half point off for the only flaw here: the caricature of the mom, whose lines are overstuffed with hoary signifying yiddishisms borrowed from the Borscht Belt era.)
KEEP AN EYE OUT (C+) - It's difficult to recommend this beyond-absurd exercise in silliness, though it does have its moments. This nonsensical police-interrogation film from Quentin Dupieux ("Rubber," "Deerskin") pits gruff police detective Buron (Benoit Poelvoorde) against Louis Fugain (Gregoire Ludig), an ordinary Joe who found a dead body and called it in -- and now finds himself trapped in police-procedural hell.
It's pointless to explain most of the gags. The title comes from a police colleague who is missing an eye (in a "wink" to the audience, the missing eye is obviously rendered through cheap CGI) and who at some point is called on to ... keep an eye on Fugain, only to fall victim to a freak accident, ratcheting up the pressure on the seemingly innocent man.
Fugain tells his story through flashbacks, but these flashbacks are infiltrated by his own present self-awareness of them and at times by the detective himself. The dialogue is oxygenated by non-sequiturs and babble. Tropes are nodded to (there is a hokey scene of a clueless character opening a locker that contains a dead body only to not notice the stiff, though later, a lifeless arm will spill out of that locker like in an old movie or a modern spoof). Dupieux bails out of his whole scenario with a Pythonesque deus ex machina theater trick. And speaking of Monty Python's shtick, the writer-director begins the film with an unrelated scene of a conductor in his underwear eventually fleeing police, Keystone Kops-style -- which might be equal parts Benny Hill, come to think of it.
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