SXSW: Hannah Takes the Stairs

If you've been following the film component of SXSW 2007 at all over the past week, you've probably read more about Hannah Takes the Stairs than any other narrative film at the Festival. If you're reading this blog, chances are you've already read profiles and reviews in much larger outlets (although I must note that I received no response to any of the three pitches I sent out several weeks ago to various print publications, suggesting a feature on the Amerindie revolution that continues to grow at SXSW, which Joe Swanberg and his collaborators have been instrumental in stoking, and which Hannah now sits comfortably at the center of). So although there's really no need for me to chime in here, I feel compelled to anyway. Two years ago at SXSW, I was one of the first people to write about Swanberg's first film, Kissing on the Mouth, and sitting in the back row at the Paramount the other night, I got a little teary over how far he's come.

I don't think the film is an unqualified success. For one thing, in pursuing narrative coherence and overall polish, Swanberg has cut back on the formal experimentation that made his first two features so uniquely exciting. Hannah Takes the Stairs is not quite as pop as Swanberg's Nerve.com soap opera, Young American Bodies, but like that series and in contrast to his previous features, Hannah is fairly incident-driven. There's enough room in the timeline for a few extreme close-ups and a couple of longish makeout sessions, but Swanberg has otherwise subsumed his usual visual expressionism into the story to an as-yet unprecedented degree.

Which is not to say that Hannah Takes the Stairs feels like a film directed by anyone but Joe Swanberg. In partnership with his various collaborators, Swanberg has always displayed a virtuosic knack for capturing the way young people actually speak to one another, and talking about Hannah with other festival goers this week, the one thing that seems to stand out for everyone is the film's interest in ordinary language. As usual, Swanberg is particularly fearless in exposing the destructive potential of words -- whether that means direct verbal cruelty, or even worse, the inarticulate stammers we employ and silly conversational tangents that we take in order to passive-aggressively avoid saying what we actually mean. We think of pop culture as being obstinately youth-oriented, but there's absolutely nothing in mainstream media that reflects the attitudes and lifestyle of the average white urban 20-something as accurately as these new American indie films (here I'm lumping together the work of Andrew Bujalski, Aaron Katz, the Duplass brothers, the Four Eyed Monsters kids, and surely a handful of other filmmakers who I haven't yet heard of). There's a single, improvised speech towards the end of Hannah that says more about the way young people mis-manage sex and romance than 25 seasons of The Real World combined.

Swanberg's films, like those of many of his peers in the so-called Mumblecore movement, seem to be supremely unconcerned with social class, and that seems to bother some (see the comments on this post). He tells stories about kids who apparently aren't lacking for cash -- they have decent apartments, nice clothes, and just about everyone is gainfully employed. Though many of his characters are artists, no one seems to struggle with societal pressures or maintaining creative inspiration. This is all, no doubt, intentional: wanting for nothing, the characters in Swanberg's films have virtually nothing to do but psychologically torture one another. Watching them do it is almost always fascinating, even when repellent. Even more fascinating, if only on an inside baseball level, is the fact that the films themselves are produced in a climate of abject poverty compared to that of most films. As far as I can tell, no one is going hungry in order to afford tape stock, but Hannah is still a film made with pro-sumer tools by a two man crew. The actress who plays Hannah, Greta Gerwig, accidentally arrived at the film's premiere wearing the same belt her character wore in the film; as she put it at the post-screening Q & A, "I just don't have a lot of clothes."

When I first met Joe two years ago, during Kissing's premiere at SXSW, Swanberg professed a desire to make films that divorced sex and nudity from the association with pornography, that displayed flesh and intercourse as mundanely as they deserve. I was not the only person who felt that Kissing didn't quite get there; though on repeat viewings, the comedy shines through, the sex in that film never stops feeling like a deliberate provocation. Hannah may feel less risky that his previous efforts in a lot of ways, but when it comes to normalizing nudity, Swanberg has finally truly succeeded. It's only March, but right now I'm going to go on a limb and say that Hannah's final shot, which features full-frontal nudity from two of the film's protagonists, will stand out as one of the most memorable cinematic images of the year. He may be an old pro at emotional verisimilitude, but for the first time, Swanberg has managed to put together images of real beauty and resonance.