I knew that I needed to keep things small, I was probably going to keep the locations minimal, and the number of people in the cast really small,” he explains. “You have different limitations, in terms of budget and stuff like that. Capturing in “Black Bear” experiences he’d had firsthand as a filmmaker as well as toxic creativity tales of yore about the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Jean-Luc Godard, Levine shares that the passion project was a desired break from the more lucrative work he’d been doing, where he felt “constrained by those limitations.” He admits, too, of course, that indie film comes with limitations all its own. After several years working in a more commercial space following his “Wild Canaries” feature film directorial debut in 2014, Levine shares he had “enough money saved up that I could take some time and just do something for myself”-something more “adventurous” that harkened to influences like John Cassavetes and other forebearers of early American independent film and European art cinema. It turns out, that was in part the point. Related Aubrey Plaza Is Redefining Her Career-Here’s How She Did It Throw in a spot-on satirical look at contemporary low-budget filmmaking, and this unexpectedly ambitious two-parter from writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine will almost certainly have you reflecting on your own craft and the creative practices therein. Here, the central trio are at the heart of their own indie film set, recreating similar circumstances of Part 1 with reversed roles, meta-style as the film-within-a-film’s troubled star, it’s now Plaza’s turn to unravel for the sake of another’s creative inspiration. The film then flips on its head at the midway point and becomes an entirely new narrative. Intrigued by the unhappy couple, Allison toys with their dwindling fire for the rest of her stay, antagonizing deep-seated jealousies and resentments and stoking ideological differences-to devastating ends.
The home’s owners, Gabe and Blair (Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon), are also there to accompany Allison in her stay, despite the clear-as-day fissures in their unraveling partnership.
Levine and his wife, Sophia Takal-who is also a filmmaker-starred together in his two previous features, and he dedicates this film to her the drama’s rapt focus on Allison, along with its depiction of high-risk cinematic adventures, is its hot emotional core, and only an excess narrative wink or two dampen its energies.“Imposing vision is what I try to avoid doing and try and stay open to what the actors are bringing, because their own ideas may be more exciting or interesting than the ones that I have.”īuoyed by a reliably stellar, often winking performance by Aubrey Plaza (most recently seen breaking hearts in Hulu’s holiday hit, “Happiest Season” ), the film begins by following Allison (Plaza), a writers’ block–addled screenwriter who escapes to a remote lake house in hopes of reirrigating her creative juices. Levine writes lacerating dialogue for the trio and ramps up their tension into metafictional games that lay bare the emotional dangers of filmmaking. But Allison’s presence is an irritant she sparks the couple’s scathing squabbles and Blair’s fierce jealousy. The filmmaker, a former actress named Allison (Aubrey Plaza), goes on an informal retreat at the sumptuous lakeside villa of a Brooklyn couple who are lucky in real estate, Blair (Sarah Gadon), a dancer, who’s pregnant, and Gabe (Christopher Abbott), a musician whose mother owns the house.
The drastic measures taken by a filmmaker who’s struggling to write a script give rise to wild complications in Lawrence Michael Levine’s tricky yet passionate drama.
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