“What are you going to do after graduation?” The question is asked of our often anxious and utterly directionless protagonist at least three, maybe four, times across the running time of Actual People, and for Riley (Kit Zauhar) it becomes something of a burden to carry. She does not know what she will do, even though this is her final week of college. The schooling experience has left her with no preparation for the harsh realities of the real world, and so she latches onto the quickly evaporating college-student things to do as if they are a life raft. Somewhere within this young woman is still the probably aimless high schooler, but the stakes for not keeping her eye off the ball are much greater here. She has no idea what to do, and surely there are some in the audience who can relate to that.
That feeling is the universal truth to which the film, which Zauhar also wrote and directed, is able to get, and on a specific level, the movie is pretty affecting, too. There is a sense of meandering to the story, but importantly, nothing here itself feels aimless. It is simply a reflection of the protagonist’s mindset that the picture eventually takes on as more and more things happen to Riley that make her (and us) wonder what could be next for this young woman. Part of the effect is that Zauhar has directed herself into a good, utterly naturalistic performance that must, in some way, come from a truthful place. The filmmaker is barely older than her onscreen counterpart, which means it is likely she only felt this aimlessness a few years ago – before, perhaps, the galvanization of a certain ongoing pandemic.
The point, then, is that the film meanders but that Zauhar’s vision for it does not. She starts the story in a place of uncertainty about, well, everything. A fling she had with her roommate has led to an act of pettiness on his part that might get her kicked out of their apartment with only days to go until graduation. Meanwhile, she missed the deadline on an important, graduation-defining assignment that puts her status to walk on a particularly special day in jeopardy, and even her school counselor reminds her that the arrangement is over as soon as they’ve run out of sessions – oh, and that day is today. Everything is transient and temporary in the terms of college life, and Riley answers this by attending as many parties and hooking up with as many hunks (such as a nice jock dude she beds, before opening up far too much about her personal life).
In other words, Riley is as shortsighted, insecure and fragile as we all are, masking all of it with a sense of overtly false cool that cannot fully hide how stressed she is. On top of all this, she’s dealing with a certain medical issue that she’d rather not disclose to anyone (a character jokes about eating too much bread, if that makes the total conflation of certain words clearer) and a mother who is aggravatingly over-protective of her daughter. The conflicts here are low-key and played as such, placing the film they’re in firmly within a framework once popularly known as “mumblecore.”
Some of those films wound up feeling self-important and too in love with their own laidback natures. There is barely a feeling of that in Actual People, which sets itself apart due to the decisive focus upon a single character. Riley is in nearly every frame here, and Zauhar is perceptive enough to allow her perspective to evolve over the course of such a small window of time. The end does not bring answers for Riley, but it does assure us that she might be ok.
Photo courtesy of Factory 25
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