That was absolutely fantastic.
Someone finally made a movie about all the 'mundane' aspects of being in a band: the hard work, the difficulties of learning material, the rehearsals where nothing is coming together, the equipment problems, the problems that beset you on the way to the show (forgotten things, weather, transport)... and the relationships with the other band members, their lives outside the band, the other things that have to be done on the way to the show. There's no manufactured crisis, no bolting the narrative onto something to make it any more than what it is.
The entire story is told through finding four brilliant actors, pointing a camera at them and allowing them to make every single moment magic. No tricks, no frills, no attempts to be arty. Linda Linda Linda hits the same fragile note as Azumanga Daioh, it's about those 'nothing' moments that characterise school life, sitting around with your friends, the empty spaces between the narrative moments upon which almost any other story would choose to focus. It's a storytelling technique that can depict friendship in a very different light to how we're used to seeing it in film and television, in which we typically only see friendship under duress, moments that are magnified and caricatured and have to fit in with a story, often to the extent to which both the stories and characters are done an injustice as the whole thing feels slightly too manufactured, too separated from what people's life is actually like. One of the things that people said when Brick came out was how perfectly the two genres (film noir and high school movie) fitted together, how easily and ingeniously the tropes of both locked together. While I agree to an extent, and while I think that film is generally excellent, there's something much more accurate to my experience in the way Linda Linda Linda works. My school memories are largely the time spent arsing around between lessons and in lunch times, sitting around with friends playing games on the field, sitting up in music practise rooms while Mike played Bon Jovi songs on the piano. We had a few little moments that resembled things you might find as the starting point for high school narratives, we were starting to drink, share porn around, work out what our genitals were for, a few of us took or dealt drugs... but it was mostly wasting time with your friends.
Linda Linda Linda and Azumanga Daioh both conjure this sense of killing time with your friends in an environment that cannot last, and in both there's that sense of the ephemeral nature of life and imminent adulthood, told not through major life moments but the gradual slipping away of time. As such both texts have a deep, sweet sadness that couldn't come about any other way.
Highly, highly recommended. |
