Holofcener: Walking and Talking (1996)

The debut film from Nicole Holofcener, Walking and Talking is slight and casual enough to be almost proto-mumblecore – it doesn’t feel like it’s really courting an audience beyond the director’s personal circle of friends, or the actors themselves. What little narrative occurs revolves around a pair of friends, Amelia (Catherine Keener) and Laura (Anne Heche), who find their friendship tested by Laura’s engagement to Frank (Todd Field) and Amelia’s brief affair with Bill (Kevin Corrigan), a video store clerk. In that sense, it fits into a time-worn tradition of insular New York films about relationships, reflecting Holofcener’s production work and apprenticeship on Woody Allen’s comedies of the 80s and early 90s. However, it’s insular in a different way from Allen – a more literal way, since it often feels as if vast segments of the film are missing, or reserved for the actual people who inspired these characters, meaning that what the average audience member gets is closer to neorealism than romantic comedy, a vision of average, middle-class New Yorkers, with average, middle-class anxieties, going about their day in a fairly unremarkable, quotidian way. More than anything else, it suggests that being a single New Yorker, and being compelled to endlessly talk about being a single New Yorker, is boring – and the film’s often strongest when it replaces the ennui of Allen with a franker, more dispersed boredom, the boredom that, sooner or later, drives everyone to the video store, where the most vibrant moments and encounters tend to constellate. In that sense, it perhaps makes most sense as a feminist corrective to Allen, or a feminist counterpart to Tom DiCillo’s indie New York, which was also starting to launch Keener’s career around this time, since, above all, Holofcener’s women are bored with being endless objects of scrutiny and observation, endless epicentres of romantic and conversational minutiae. Perhaps that’s why it often feels like it’s about to leave conversation behind altogether, and just drift into the way Amelia drifts through her surroundings, or drifts in and out of her unspoken, instinctive connection with Laura – a connection that feels more and more lesbian as the film goes on, or at least more and more like a lesbian cult movie in the making, as Heche transitions into denim, and friendship edges into romance.