Chasing Summer Review: A Baffling Sundance Car Crash
Chasing Summer, the new comedy film starring and written by comedian Iliza Shlesinger and directed by the unconventional film-maker Josephine Decker, has premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to bewildered reactions. This ninety-eight minute feature represents one of the most peculiar director-material pairings in recent memory, resulting in what can only be described as a cinematic car crash rather than a coherent collaboration.
An Unexpected and Unsuccessful Union
The film presents an inherently interesting premise through its unexpected union of two opposing creative forces. On one side stands Josephine Decker, an unusual film-maker whose genre-challenging work spans experimental theatre, claustrophobic psychodrama, and magical realism. On the other side is comedian Iliza Shlesinger, whose brand of fast-paced, ribald stand-up comedy is both subverted and enhanced by her conventional attractiveness. The theoretical collision of these two sensibilities should generate creative sparks, but the resulting film delivers confusion rather than coherence.
Thin Characters and Tonal Whiplash
The film follows Jamie, a thirty-eight-year-old woman working in disaster relief who finds herself abruptly dumped by her boyfriend of five years. Homeless and killing time before a prestigious program in Jakarta, Jamie sheepishly retreats to her childhood home in Texas, a place she has not visited for twenty years due to a convoluted rumor involving pregnancy and a cheating ex. The character possesses minimal characterization beyond her profession and physical attractiveness, creating a dubious protagonist from the outset.
Decker attempts to inject life into the material through dynamic camerawork by cinematographer Eric Branco, with the camera constantly twirling, turning, and flipping in what appears to be an effort to steal the movie back from its vacant protagonist. This creates a volatile, incoherent viewing experience that careens from sensuous, gauzy sex scenes to straight-up farce with the delicacy of a bull.
Stock Characters and Bizarre Direction
The Texas suburb setting, actually filmed in St Louis rather than Dallas, is populated by an array of stock characters that feel lifted from countless small-town comedies. These include Jamie's twangy, vapid mother played by Megan Mullally, her resentful older sister Marisa portrayed by Cassidy Freeman, former popular girl classmates consumed by marriage and children, and various love interests including her twenty-year-old co-worker Harper and former football star ex Chase.
What makes the film particularly baffling is the series of late-stage scenes featuring such vertiginous and unhinged tonal swings that viewers are left genuinely agape. Basic continuity errors, such as Jamie's mother appearing reflected in a mirror one moment and over her shoulder the next, add to the overall sense of incoherence.
A Morbidly Fascinating Failure
While Chasing Summer certainly outruns the charge of being boring, it does so at significant cost to coherence and viewer comprehension. The film represents a morbidly fascinating battle between Decker's florid, subversive sensibilities and Shlesinger's Hallmark-esque comedy framework, with neither emerging victorious. The result is a film that will likely be remembered more for its bewildering creative choices than for any genuine emotional or comedic impact.
As the film screens at Sundance and seeks distribution, it stands as a testament to what happens when dramatically opposing creative visions collide without clear direction or purpose. While not forgettable, Chasing Summer leaves audiences more confused than entertained, questioning how such a promising creative union could result in such a baffling final product.
