Since his debut feature, Tower, 12 years ago, Kazik Radwanski’s tendency to foreground his characters’ inner turmoil has been matched, and perhaps maintained, by his camera’s almost magnetic attraction to their bodies. These cerebral and visceral interests meld once again In Radwanski’s latest, Matt and Mara. Radwanski’s frequent collaborator, Deragh Campbell, stars as Mara, a contract lecturer in literature (a title with little narrative significance but is nonetheless a pointed distinction), whose blissfully normal life is unmoored by the sudden reappearance of an old friend, Matt (Matt Johnson). Campbell has one of cinema’s most quietly expressive faces, a useful tool for working with a director whose mode of operation is to trace all manner of desperation underneath placid surfaces.
Matt and Mara catch up over coffee after he appears outside one of her classes. Their conversation elides the pleasantries one might expect from old friends catching up after years apart; instead, we enter the scene long into a conversation about work. Mara admits almost shyly that she is working on something, about someone whose innermost desires are unknown to themselves and who’s life could be radically transformed without them seeing it coming. Matt, the successful, published writer loves this idea, while Mara, who hasn’t been published in a long time, meekly agrees. Their dialogue steps lightly on the inherent awkwardness of an imbalance of accomplishment between people, but it’s a pointed observation on the unstable and financially unrewarding worlds of art and academia they both straddle. The sincerity of the scene is given humorous release when the rude barista passive-aggressively closes the cafe and tells them to get real jobs.
From here on, Matt and Mara’s lives intertwine almost seamlessly. She doesn’t like the new passport photos she took for an upcoming work trip across the border in Ithaca, New York, so before the reshoot Matt makes her practice smiling at strangers on the street. It’s a silly exercise, almost in the vein of a TikTok challenge; but in a sweetly awkward way it grabs the attention of passers-by, and suggests a blurring between the lines of the film and the real world. At the studio the photographer even mistakes Matt and Mara for husband and wife, which Mara goes along with unquestioningly. Their chemistry is charming, even believable at times, but there’s an unavoidable performativity to it. At times, Mara threatens to betray her own doubts about this rekindled relationship, though Campbell’s control never wavers, making her face the site of the film’s most compelling conflict.
It doesn’t take a genius to connect the subtextual dots to their textual narrative strains. Matt’s appearance is an immediately destabilizing force in Mara’s seemingly unperturbed life. Her handsome, younger, musician husband, Samir, and young daughter, Avery, make an enviable domestic setup, but we quickly see the ways Matt’s bombastic, charismatic presence trickles into Mara’s psyche. Matt is equal parts charm and smarm, an immediately recognizable type whose presence ignites passion and frustrates sensibilities in equal, often simultaneous, measure.
There’s pleasure in a kind of cause and effect pattern between characters’ seemingly banal conversations and the film’s broader themes, one that involves the viewer, makes them feel smart, and rewards them for paying attention. We see this in scenes such as a dinner party where Mara’s admission that she doesn’t like music reads as the film’s gesture toward her and Samir’s growing distance; and when Mara’s friend warns her about bringing Matt to her class because of the chaotic effect he might have, it really translates as the film’s acknowledgement of his entire thematic role. But in such a narratively spare and fleet-footed film, the transmutation of dialogue into thematic development can sometimes feel like unnecessary hand-holding.
These complaints are small, though, and as the film enters its final act, during which Matt drives Mara to the conference and proves himself to Mara in ways she didn’t want but maybe expected, the slippery nature it established at the beginning reasserts itself. Rather than suggesting, then depicting, the rocking of a relationship’s foundation, it raises questions about desire and expectation, and the disappointment when faced with the gap between the two. Matt and Mara’s finely tuned drama, breezily natural dialogue, and complimentary performers make for one of the best films of the year. It’s a refreshing change of pace from Radwanski, whose previous features delved deep into the headspaces of characters with much less enviable lives and more anxious sensibilities. Matt and Mara’s low-key register is its strength, and loosens up a filmmaker’s style so as to embrace the quotidian without sacrificing his distinct vision.
DIRECTOR: Kazik Radwanski; CAST: Deragh Campbell, Matt Johnson, Simon Reynolds; DISTRIBUTOR: The Cinema Guild; IN THEATERS: September 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 20 min.
Originally published as part if TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 2.
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