The festival’s three major spotlight films each focus on love blossoming between outsiders.
Dinner In America (2020 | USA | 106 minutes | Adam Rehmeier)
Reel Love Fest’s opening night film is a stylish and raucous blast about two punk outcasts who fall in love. Simon (Kyle Gallner of Veronica Mars fame) is on the lam from the authorities, and while making his mad dash he chaotically picks up and subsequently can’t seem to shake Patty (Emily Skeggs, best known for her role in Fun Home on Broadway), until the concentric circles they’re running around each other tighten and congeal into something like mutual self-acceptance and genuine affection – and really sweet songwriting. This is a dark comedy – heavy on the dark – but doesn’t lean so far into nihilism as to ignore opportunities for catharis, joy, and steamy kisses alongside the menace and discomfort.
This film’s first act is pretty heavily front-loaded with objectionable content, including a lot of the kind of slurs I wouldn’t even reproduce with censor asterisks here. For some, that’s enough to stay away from a movie like this altogether, which is a reasonable position to take. My only defense is that you’re not supposed to LIKE those characters when they’re using that kind of gross language, and that they grow and evolve a bit (just a little bit) by the end of the film – in order to build themselves up, they’ve got to start out pretty low. It’ll be divisive and not for everybody, but for those who appreciate a caustic sense of humor while still needing a warm beating heart to hang onto, this film hits the bullseye.
Funny Face (2020 | USA | 95 minutes | Tim Sutton)
The fest’s centerpiece film is another story of misfits on the run: this time it’s Saul (Cosmo Jarvis), a resident of a Coney Island apartment building that’s due to be knocked down, who encounters Zama (Dela Meskienyar), a young woman in a niqab, when she enters the bodega where he’s working. Gracefully, he prevents her from shoplifting by slipping her a $5 bill, and an unlikely partnership is born: Zama’s run away from home, where she’s not getting what she needs from her apparently-loving aunt and uncle, and from this moment onward the two become joined at the hip.
The film’s striking cover image of a mask that seems to float down from the heavens functions as an ambiguous symbol, although most of the rest of the film is more grounded and literal than that – but Jonny Lee Miller, with his permanent sneer as the over-the-top evil developer taking over Saul’s apartment building, does leave an indelible mark.
A romance plays out between our two leads, but it’s a very slow bloom, as Zama figures out what level of religious expression actually feels right for her, and Saul, who seems to present as non-neurotypical although no diagnosis is mentioned, figures out how he can fit in. They’re both struggling to engage with a world that’s changing in ways they don’t want, where the places and people they love are taken away from them, but perhaps they can find belonging in each other…while committing a couple crimes along the way.
Shiva Baby (2020 | USA | 77 minutes | Emma Seligman)
Reel Love Fest’s closing night film completes a loose spotlight-film trilogy of outsiders finding love. This one takes place almost entirely in one location: a shiva for some loosely-connected family friend which listless college student Dani (Rachel Sennott) attends out of obligation. While there, she’s beset on all sides and must try to maintain her composure: by her ex-girlfriend Maya (Molly Gordon) shooting daggers with her eyes, by her relatives all remarking about her weight and eating habits, by an errant nail poking out of a cabinet right at thigh-height, and by her sugar daddy Max (Danny Deferrari), from whose apartment she’d just come without realizing he had a connection to the deceased as well. Fred Melamed shows up as Dani’s cluelessly cheerful father, and Dianna Agron is Max’s slowly-becoming-suspicious shiksa wife who has also, somewhat inappropriately, brought along their young child (hence the film’s title).
As Dani navigates this emotional mine field, she comes to some realizations about herself, her goals, and who she wants to spend her time with. A strings-based score by Ariel Marx ratchets up the tension until things become nearly overwhelming, with very little relief until the very final moments – but at only 77 minutes long, expanded from an original 8-minute short, it’s more like a dabble in discomfort rather than a full dive into waking nightmare.
Dinner In America won the lion’s share of Reel Love Fest’s jury awards: Best Feature Film, Best Actor (Kyle Gallner), and Best Original Song.
Shiva Baby’s Emma Seligman won the Best Director jury award.
Dinner In America and Shiva Baby are still available to begin watching via Reel Love Fest until midnight PST tonight (Sunday, Feb 14th). Funny Face was the only feature of the fest to have a shorter, specifically timed window for its screening.