Watching a low-budget, under-the-radar independent film such as Funny Face, one may be struck by the odd political idea not necessarily embedded in the film’s text. After all, cut loose from the studio shackles, indie filmmakers have the freedom to explore further, push harder, court controversy a little bolder. Tim Sutton’s tirade against the corporate appropriation of New York City and its cultural and human collateral damage is a subdued but impassioned cry of anger and frustration both thematically – in its narrative content – and, perhaps, allegorically. For it’s only an independent film such as Funny Face that could ever appreciate the destructive impact of unchecked capitalism on the communities it subsumes in its rampant expansion. And as major Hollywood studios similarly consolidate their power ever further, with entities like Disney now arguably more powerful than any other studio in history, what hope do the solitary few indie voices have to protest this alarming cultural shift?
Yet if those indie voices want their cries to be heeded, they’ll need to do better than this. Funny Face is an earnest, artful, incisive film but it’s also heavy-handed, trite and simplistic. Sutton’s technique is solid and his eye strong – he has the material here for a most powerful film but he’s too eager to squander the potential for detail and nuance on lazy aestheticism and some galling subtextual overemphasis. The plot concerns Saul (Cosmo Jarvis) and Zama (Dela Meskienyar), two young, despondent New Yorkers whose chance meeting sparks a curious friendship. They drift through the city, sleeping in a stolen car, sporadically learning a little more about one another and pensively reckoning with how to deal with those responsible for damages done to them. Saul’s grandparents, with whom he lives, have been evicted from their home to make way for a parking lot; he has the developer in his crosshairs, apparently poised to strike at any given moment.
Only striking isn’t in Saul’s nature. As played by Jarvis, who’s always suggested he had the depth to render a leading character in full, exquisite detail but has only rarely had the chance, he’s a louche, nervy, introverted outcast, seemingly only capable of taking decisive action when his face is concealed behind a garish, Anonymous-style mask. He’s less likely to strike with clinical precision than he is to blow up in a blaze of fury, likelier still to let that fury simmer dangerously below the surface. And what a surface – Jarvis’ face is pure expression, chiselled and striated, alternately angular and supple; his body is muscular and imposing yet weary and flaccid. Sutton typically overworks the good thing he’s got in Jarvis, bluntly framing him as a modern-day James Dean, but in truth he’s the far superior performer to Dean and certainly much more modern – his way is not the conscious posing nor the vaguely self-congratulatory anguished self-expression of the 1950s Method actors. His is the simple, unrefined self-expression of someone willing to give their entire self to their part, something Jarvis does here with an appealing lack of vanity.
Would that the rest of Funny Face could live up to his efforts. Meskienyar’s role is inadequately developed – when she’s not regarded in relation to some other character, Sutton writes Zama as a rather banal young-woman-against-the-world, only largely silent and sporting a hijab. One queries whether it was wise for Sutton to leave the intricacies of multicultural coexistence in present day NYC to develop themselves (as a white man with Armenian and Iranian-American leads playing Jewish and Muslim characters respectively), or not; one may conclude the former when confronted with how Sutton develops his white antagonists. As the developer (unnamed in both film and credits), Jonny Lee Miller is saddled with some of the film’s clunkiest dialogue and most painfully forced moments, including a wretched scene where three nude or nearly-nude women make out on the floor for his (dis)pleasure. Sutton struggles poorly to drive home the cruelty and debauchery of his film’s villains and belabors the issue horribly, turning them into cartoon villains when the topics he’s raising are anything but cartoonish – they’re very real indeed.
It’s shot, scored and designed admirably, each technical department collaborating and coordinating well in pursuit of a portrait of a lesser-seen New York that’s about to become invisible entirely. Even on the artistic front, however, Sutton can’t resist hammering the point home – he relies heavily on cinematography and score to conjure up atmosphere and tone, then throws in a few ornamental stylistic indulgences, such as a shot of Saul and Zama in their car panning up to red neon lights hazily spelling out ‘Nirvana.’ As occasional as they are, it’s features like these that make the clearest point why Funny Face doesn’t work as well as it ought to. There’s a smart, subtly stylish film in here but it’s smothered by its filmmaker’s reluctance to trust his audience to understand it.
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