Pratfall
A little bit of John Cassavetes and a little bit of Whit Stilman mixed into a heady New York stew, Alex Andre’s Pratfall feels like an artifact of 80s and 90s independent cinema escaped into the now. A brief trip into a life, and back out again, Andre’s improv heavy style is light on detail and heavy on mood amid stolen moments and happy accidents which evoke the idea of a story rather than really delivering one. None of which matters, like the city it lives in, Pratfall is more of about vibes then content, intent on capturing a feeling rather than some structured narrative. Moments of importance come and go, leading to a peak, but between Andre’s characters float and flitter from place to place looking for some anchor to stop them and simultaneously dreading the coming of that moment. Like life, it’s between those peaks that life is lived.
They should be dreading it stopping, and so they never stop. That desire seems external for visitor Joelle (Groussard), a tourist or a refugee – it’s never quite clear which – desperate to see the reality of New York (or at least to not return home) but hopelessly lost in it. It’s far more internal for Eli (Burge), a potentially mentally ill man still grappling with a recent loss and seemingly without home or family, only a tenuous connection to local drug dealers and desire to keep moving. Perhaps if he moves fast enough he can keep ahead of the demons he continually argues with and which tempt him into bad decisions and hide the worse elements of life from him. When the two meet it’s not so much sparks that fly as annoyance, disinterest and sudden need.
Pratfall itself isn’t even a series of episodes even though it is extremely episodic. After Eli and Joelle miss each other a few times they finally find their paths entangled like a pair of particles passing in the night, yanked away from whatever their original path was and now on to something different. What that different is, is largely whatever occurs to Eli at any given moment. Speaking a mile a minute, trying to spin tenuous conversation starters or local topics into a coherent stream of thought, Eli leads his new companion into the depths of the city visiting coffee shops and art galleries while largely walking and talking in circles. What they say is less important than the fact they try so hard not to say anything, not to engage with the reasons pushing them to behave the way they do, until inevitably some sort of truth slips out.
Instead its left to Andre’s camera (a one man band writing, directing, shooting and editing his film) to fill in the truth between the things they will not say. Mostly he does so by staying out of the way, letting Burge and Groussard discover themselves even as they discover the city in gorgeous naturally lit film, letting the actors play with their scenes but never abandoning them. Through their all day / all night jaunt Andre’s lens ties them together, blending them into a unit to the point it is possible to forget how damaged they both are and how dangerous that could be. It hints and suggests. Perhaps Eli is the way he is because of his ex-girlfriends drug-addicted death, perhaps it was an addiction he even introduced her to – we’ll never know and we don’t need to.
Is it all a joke? Just a meaningless moment of noise and motion to distract us from misery around us? Andre’s certainly suggests so as the momentary connection his characters find is immediately threatened by the random danger of life and even if it wasn’t, it was never more than temporary because that’s all life ever is. Picking up the baton of classic independent film, Pratfall may not build on it to create something new but it’s a worthy addition to the canon. Cassavetes would be proud.
8 out of 10.
Starring Joshua Burge, Chloe Groussard and Xavier Reyes. Directed by Alex Andre.