Swanberg: Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007)

One of the key films in what's come to be known as the mumblecore movement, Hannah Takes the Stairs features Greta Gerwig as Hannah, an intern at a television office who has romantic liasons with two of her co-workers, Mike (Mike Duplass) and Paul (Andrew Bujalski), as much to distract herself from work as for any other reason. As that might suggest, nothing much happens – the film’s set in a kind of empty time and space, the times between times and the spaces between spaces. Perpetually slouched in the same inchoate huddle, trapped by the same dead, drab corners, the characters feel torqued by WASP torpor, not quite depressed enough to be depressed – just “chronically dissatisfied” with their inability to do anything more than waste time. As a result, the film itself feels like something of a time-wasting exercise, not that different from the endless conversational scribbles that it rehearses, as if the cast were searching for a way to improvise themselves out of the same dead space-time as the characters, slaves to the same odd, quivering body language, blocking that never quite gels into customary or continuous postures. Even the camera feels like it’s perpetually slumped and suspended in a tepid, lukewarm bath– the digital film quality’s so poor that you can almost see the humidity in the air, accrued over minutes, hours, days of exhaling. Certainly, as some critics of mumblecore have pointed out, it’s bleached with whiteness, obsessed with the leisure class – but it’s not the splendidly isolated leisure class of, say, Whit Stillman or Noah Baumbach. Instead, it’s a leisure class whose aspirations have been incorporated and integrated into the professional workplace, leisure remediated as down-time, meaning there’s no real difference between being at work and being at home, between quitting your job and slacking off on your job - just an interminable waiting seeping into everything