Chasing Amy

In its first twenty-five minutes, Chasing Amy unfolds like a standard romantic comedy: a single guy meets a seemingly single girl, they like each other and start seeing each other. Except this girl isn’t quite so single and other girls are more interested in her than guys are. Or not? ___ Smith does not adhere to genre conventions in hardly any respect. The humour is more profane and the characters are hornier, more adept in pulp culture and not too sure about their sexual orientation. The traditional formula of getting together and breaking up does not lead to a predictable conclusion and, furthermore, is made unique from the beginning by the fact that three interdependent characters are involved. Instead of full-fledged protagonists, however, the film offers only slightly better drawn caricatures, particularly in the case of Alyssa, a sinful, emotionally unstable and somewhat hysterical woman, whom to a significant extent Smith treats as if she is nothing more than the manifestation of every nerd’s dream. As an exemplary manic pixie dream girl, she lacks a more authentic personality, and as a being from another world, her purpose is particularly to force the young, emotionally immature young protagonist to grow up (only once does the film take her perspective, in order to show us how her friends react to the relationship). The director is not interested in her story and does not try to find the logic in her behaviour. ___ Holden’s fear of loss and irreversible life decisions is best expressed by the final confrontation of all three characters. He does not want to lose anyone, nor does he want to see a vacant place on the couch. It is only after this experience that he realises he can’t always have his way, that life, like comic books, is not the fulfilment of his fantasies. So that he can take the next step in his life, he must first kill one of the characters from his comic book and thus symbolically his dependence on his current way of existence. The message that Smith attempts to put across to us certainly contains a bit of truth about life, but it is weightier than his microcosm of comic-book characters and dialogue about pop culture and penetration can bear. ___ Though I perceive realism in the depiction of interpersonal relationships and sensitivity to the characters differently, that doesn’t mean that Chasing Amy is not a first-class comedy. As a matter of fact, it is a very good comedy, thanks especially to how improbably the characters reason and act. Smith knows where to set up the camera and how to place characters in space so that a scene is funny simply due to where someone is sitting/standing and how they look. A static camera and a few alternating environments suffice for most of the film. Without such stylistic mastery and perfect timing (the crash of thunder after the proclamation of “I love you”, a hurtful conversation interspersed with a fight between hockey players), the dialogue that forms the foundation of the film would not stand out. From the midpoint of the film, Holden’s loss of balance and the increasingly dense atmosphere are more frequently expressed using a “nervous” hand-held camera and, at least in terms of the shooting method, the film moves away from the realm of farce with carefully thought-out compositions toward a more realistic recording of spontaneous emotional scenes. Even though the screenplay fails in its effort to reach maturity, I would not hesitate to call Smith’s directing mature. 75% (12/05/2018) (less) (more)