Yapping is so back.
That was my takeaway at least, watching three talkies in quick succession at last week’s Berlin International Film Festival. Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon and Korean auteur Hong Sang-Soo’s What Does That Nature Say, as well as Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day (a Sundance hit that screened as part of the Berlinale’s Panorama section) made a convincing case that we’re experiencing the return of the hangout movie, a sub-genre coined by Quentin Tarantino to describe films where characters and dialogue take precedence over plot.
The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar paraphrases the director expounding on the subject in this classic 2003 New Yorker profile: “[These are] movies whose plot and camerawork you may admire but whose primary attraction is the characters. A hangout movie is one that you watch over and over again, just to spend time with them.”
(Pulp Fiction, for example, is not a hangout movie. But Jackie Brown, Tarantino’s underrated 1997 joint starring Pam Grier and filled with dive bars and characters one puff away from resignation? That’s a candidate. “Every two or three years, put in Jackie Brown again, and you’re drinking white wine with Jackie, and drinking screwdrivers with Ordell, and taking bong hits with Melanie and Louis,” Tarantino says.)
By that standard, Linklater is perhaps the master of the form. He’s made a whole career out of the hangout, from Dazed and Confused to the Before trilogy to Boyhood. His latest film, a character sketch of Lorenz Hart—one-half of Rodgers and Hart, the storied songwriting duo behind classics like “My Funny Valentine”—is no different, a melancholic ode to the songwriter that once again proves Linklater’s fluency with the form.
Blue Moon finds the bisexual, alcoholic Hart, played by Ethan Hawke, in ruins, reeling from the triumphant opening night of Oklahoma!, the first great success of Rodgers and Hammerstein—his former collaborator Richard Rodgers’ new partnership. Still, he makes his way to Sardi’s anyway, to join Rodgers, Hammerstein and their various supporters, to toast the show’s success.
Sabrina Lantos/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
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