TEXT BY WHITNEY MALLETT STILLS COURTESY OF SPECIAL AFFECTS FILMS
Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s 16mm feature L for Leisure subverts the language of an Urban Outfitters music video to make a campy class critique of graduate students busy doing nothing in the early ‘90s. Their idle hours are spent sipping mineral water, snapple, and white wine, and in addition to waterskiing, rollerblading, and laser tag, their hobbies include embarking on longwinded diatribes, sometimes about whatever idiotic things they’re doing their theses on and, at the film’s most biting moments, their opinions on race or Michael Jordan’s ball-playing style that makes the characters’ whiteness most glaringly evident.
The social satire is acrid. While the film’s been compared to Eric Rohmer movies, it’s actually quite different. Sure the class of the characters is the same, as is the setting of weekend homes set in beautiful natural environments, but you don’t emotionally map onto any of the characters and there is no grand moral dilemma at the movie’s heart. Instead, L for Leisure is structured as a series of episodes, each with a title card describing which holiday break it is “Thanksgiving” or “Rosh Hashanah.” While there’s a constellation of characters that crop up again and again in these little vignettes, they are two-dimensional caricatures, and there is little plot or pathos knitting these scenes together. Instead, it’s the formal pleasure of the repetitive structure that keeps you engaged. Each vignette turns into a sort of music video. The entertainment appeal comes from watching attractive people in attractive settings set to the mellow electronic score composed by John Atkinson. And, the pleasure you get watching these sequences makes you as the viewer all the more complicit in the leisure class which the film is critiquing.
On Saturday May 23rd, MDFF and The Seventh Art are presenting the Toronto premiere of L for Leisure at Stephen Bulger Gallery at 7 p.m. Director Lev Kalman will be there for a Q&A. The film is also in the middle of a New York run at IFP which continues until tomorrow May 21.
On L For Leisure
TEXT BY WHITNEY MALLETT
STILLS COURTESY OF SPECIAL AFFECTS FILMS
Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s 16mm feature L for Leisure subverts the language of an Urban Outfitters music video to make a campy class critique of graduate students busy doing nothing in the early ‘90s. Their idle hours are spent sipping mineral water, snapple, and white wine, and in addition to waterskiing, rollerblading, and laser tag, their hobbies include embarking on longwinded diatribes, sometimes about whatever idiotic things they’re doing their theses on and, at the film’s most biting moments, their opinions on race or Michael Jordan’s ball-playing style that makes the characters’ whiteness most glaringly evident.
The social satire is acrid. While the film’s been compared to Eric Rohmer movies, it’s actually quite different. Sure the class of the characters is the same, as is the setting of weekend homes set in beautiful natural environments, but you don’t emotionally map onto any of the characters and there is no grand moral dilemma at the movie’s heart. Instead, L for Leisure is structured as a series of episodes, each with a title card describing which holiday break it is “Thanksgiving” or “Rosh Hashanah.” While there’s a constellation of characters that crop up again and again in these little vignettes, they are two-dimensional caricatures, and there is little plot or pathos knitting these scenes together. Instead, it’s the formal pleasure of the repetitive structure that keeps you engaged. Each vignette turns into a sort of music video. The entertainment appeal comes from watching attractive people in attractive settings set to the mellow electronic score composed by John Atkinson. And, the pleasure you get watching these sequences makes you as the viewer all the more complicit in the leisure class which the film is critiquing.
On Saturday May 23rd, MDFF and The Seventh Art are presenting the Toronto premiere of L for Leisure at Stephen Bulger Gallery at 7 p.m. Director Lev Kalman will be there for a Q&A. The film is also in the middle of a New York run at IFP which continues until tomorrow May 21.