It’s clunky, stiff and quite awkward, even for Solondz. But you can see his vision bleeding through. It plays like a sketchbook, a draft of the neurosis and humiliation he masterfully weaponised in Dollhouse and mainly Happiness. The characters are caricatures but they’re also painfully real in their insecurity, artists competing for scraps of validation, friendships that feel transactional, relationships fuelled by desperation. It’s like watching Solondz confess through satire, testing how far he can go mocking pretentiousness while exposing his own, almost an accidental self portrait of his own anxieties.
It’s clunky, stiff and quite awkward, even for Solondz. But you can see his vision bleeding through. It plays like a sketchbook, a draft of the neurosis and humiliation he masterfully weaponised in Dollhouse and mainly Happiness. The characters are caricatures but they’re also painfully real in their insecurity, artists competing for scraps of validation, friendships that feel transactional, relationships fuelled by desperation. It’s like watching Solondz confess through satire, testing how far he can go mocking pretentiousness while exposing his own, almost an accidental self portrait of his own anxieties.
