You Are Alone

Picture that friend of yours who hates “indy” film and music. You know the one. Puts porn on his computer background. Pops his collar. Moves his lips when he reads. The guy who thinks Donnie Darko and Army of Darkness are “underground,” and he’s the only one who’s seen them. The guy you’re really not even sure why you still hang out with, come to think of it, other than you’ve known him since you were kids and that it would be more trouble than it’s worth at this point to tell him to fuck off.

Okay, now think of all the things he looks for in a movie. Improbable explosions, improbable breast sizes, improbable pistol clip capacities.

Where am I going with this? You Are Alone is the kind of movie where, if this friend watched it with you, he’d comment endlessly on actress Jessica Bohl’s “sweet bod,” but if he watched it at home by himself, he’d cry into his pink shirt.

Gorman Berchard’s newest effort is the quintessential independent film. Shot almost entirely in one hotel room and consisting of just two characters, it attempts to do what has become the most difficult task of the contemporary director: keep the modern moviegoer’s attention through dialogue alone.

In fact, it has pretty much every characteristic that people tend to associate with the “artsy film” - no famous names, no production values, no big budget, no action and all talking - the only things missing are a foreign language and subtitles. Yet it’s completely engrossing from fade in to out.

It’s about sex, but doesn’t even show any. Of course, if we learned anything from Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs, it was that an art film with almost nothing but sex can end up rivaling NyQuil for deep quick-acting sleep. You Are Alone’s plot, which is revealed piecemeal through the dialogue and quick flashbacks, goes like this: Buddy, a reclusive middle-aged neighbor who never got over the early death of his wife, ventures out one night for a nephew’s bachelor party, where he happens to recognize one of the “escorts” as an underage family friend named Daphne. He looks her up online and finds her ad on a kind of internet classified page for high-class call girls (most of whom are high-schoolers slumming it for extra cash) and requests to meet with her. The remainder of the film is their conversation, where they learn about and question each other’s lonely existences.

While the material might sound better suited for theater, this is most certainly a film. Like Linklater’s Tape, it makes the most of its limited resources by exploring the psychology of that uniquely American form of sexual repression which our Puritanical forefathers amazingly still wreak upon us from beyond the grave. The film broaches many tough questions about the morality of fantasies, prostitution, role-playing and promiscuity. If topics like these make you blush, this film makes you ask yourself why. After all, nothing’s more natural than sex.

You Are Alone is superbly written, with each line naturalistic and true to character. Even the awkward pauses and slips are realistically awkward. Judging by their speech and mannerisms, most people would probably think that Daphne and Buddy couldn’t be more different. But the film shows the way people use speech as a smokescreen to obscure their own fear-based prejudices and insecurities, and the exchanges between these characters range from painful honesty to child-like curiosity. We slowly realize that the two only really differ in the ways in which they cope with being lonesome in these alienating times.

And this film really belongs to the actors, who are both perfectly cast. Jessica Bohl is heartbreaking; you just want to wrap a blanket around her and buy her a house in the Bahamas. And Richard Brundage’s equally wounded portrayal of sadsack Buddy makes you want to give him a hug, then shake the shit out of him.

Both are so close to being completely ruined on love forever, you begin to hope that one of them will finally catch a glimpse of redemption in the other. But as the title suggests, life rarely ends so happily. Without giving too much away, the ending is one of the year’s best. And like most good art, it can be read a number of ways. The film is perhaps a plea for understanding, compassion, and dialogue on the one hand, or a nihilistic commentary on the isolated state of interpersonal relationships in our society on the other. And it’s never as boring as that makes it sound. Despite the potentially depressing nature of the film, it achieved that weird opposite effect on me, where at the end I happily thought, “At least my life isn’t that bad!” These characters make your nine-to-fiver at Soul Crushers, Inc. look like a tropical vacation.

-Andy Gately

NOTE: Both Kenneth Wilson’s exemplary camerawork and the memorable score by Matthew Ryan, Tywanna Jo Baskette, and Crooked Fingers also deserve special mention. Bravo!