Robespierre: Obvious Child (2014)

Gillian Robespierre’s debut film stars Jenny Slate as Donna Stern, a comedian trying to make it big in New York’s indie stand-up circuit. We're introduced to Donna by way of one of her sets, during the opening credits, and it’s so painfully confessional and self-deprecating that you feel as if you know her almost uncomfortably well within a matter of moments. Like so many stand-ups, her comedy seems to be a way of keeping tragedy at bay, a mechanism for containing the spikiest, nerviest parts of her life, which makes it pretty dramatic when a pair of crises - being dumped by her long-term boyfriend and getting pregnant after a one-night stand – suddenly exceeds her ability to translate them into stand-up. Following Donna as she tries to get over her boyfriend, contemplates what to do about her pregnancy, and searches for a way to get her comic mojo back, Robespierre’s loose ambience is not dissimilar to Louie in the way in which it suggests a world beyond stand-up, or at least a world in which stand-up no longer has the powers of catharsis and containment it might once have had. For all that Slate is given several opportunities to exercise her considerable stage presence, most of the film takes place in the lonely hours after all the stand-up venues shut down, and confession starts to seep back into conversation, suddenly bereft of its powers to contain the depressive substrate of New York that Robespierre evokes so beautifully. That’s not to say that it’s not funny – Gaby Hoffmann, Jack Lacy, Gabe Liedman and David Cross all play supporting roles – but that there’s something oddly and powerfully aborted about Robespierre’s screenplay, which tends to feel either like a series of observational riffs that aren’t quite allowed to gel into a full set, or a sequence of wacky, eccentric incidents and encounters that would work perfectly as stand-up anecdotes, if only Donna could just find a way to pull them together. As it stands, there’s a sense that stand-up has become part of everyday life in a new way – again, not unlike Louie – as every character has painful anecdotes to brand, advertise and circulate as never before, but also a new kind of comic attention to just how unremarkable that actually makes them. And against that backdrop, the film manages, remarkably, to find the right comic register for abortion, if only because it's a sit-down comedy, a comedy that can’t stand apart from its subject any longer than Donna can stand apart from her pregnancy, as Slate and Robespierre feel their way though a world in which comedy no longer seems to exist in the way we once knew it.