Blue Jay opens with an aesthetic flourish, a montage of small-town life rendered in velvety black and white and scored to Julian Wass’ post-rock electronic squall. There’s an artiness to this sequence that reeks of overkill, particularly when the story takes over and introduces the quiet reunion of high-school sweethearts Jim (Mark Duplass) and Amanda (Sarah Paulson) at a supermarket. Each left town long ago but has returned for personal reasons (Jim for his mother’s funeral, Amanda to look after her pregnant sister), and the chance to reconnect clearly appeals to both, if for no other reason than to have something to do.
The meeting between the two is meant to have the naturally awkward cadence of relatable conversation between two people with a past, but the film gets in the way of itself, as it will for the remainder of the running time. This is the feature debut of Alex Lehmann, a cinematographer by trade, and the director falls back on his primary profession at every turn. As Jim and Amanda spend more time together and begin to circle around aspects of their shared past, the frame begins to blatantly lead the audience. The elegance of the images belies any off-the-cuff spontaneity; despite being shot in only a week, every single frame of the film looks excessively mannered to the point of being hermetically sealed.
This claustrophobic determinism extends to the narrative itself, which quickly reveals a rigid storyline between its seeming directionlessness. Jim and Amanda’s dissatisfaction with returning home is written on their faces, and when Jim suggests to Amanda that he accompany her, she is clearly relieved for something to do beyond ice cream delivery for her sister. Once they go back to Jim’s mother’s place, however, the story settles into a simplistic detour into mutual nostalgia, reliving shared memories with the help of madeleine-like objects that trigger related reminiscences.
This has a charming, laid-back vibe at first, with the two teasing each other over embarrassing teenage displays of love and self-consciousness. When they discover a recording of a tape they made as kids goofing around, though, the pair decide to reenact their 20-year-old pantomime with forced preciousness. As they play-act husband and wife, Jim and Amanda clearly simulate a second chance for their own relationship, and in their relaxed, effortless role-play is the blatant insinuation that this could well have been their lives. But if this multi-layered acting job initially recalls Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy in its blend of cheeky play and serious attempt at closure, it falls apart when the two begin dredging up what tore them apart, collapsing into blithe, melodramatic clichés. Kiarostami’s film sank into conflict almost immediately, and it also used the surface mystery or whether its two characters even knew each other as a reflection of the complex, often incomprehensible personality clashes that can tear couples apart. Here, the drama is direct and reductive, and the viciousness of the emotional turn merely exposes the fakery of the narrative, which completely buries any possible reference to their strife solely to set up a sucker-punch.
This isn’t helped by the transparency of the acting, particularly on the part of Duplass. There’s an argument that shooting a film on such a short schedule forces actors to go with their first instincts, but here Duplass appears to have compensated for the lack of thinking time by falling back on tics. Jim is little more than the latest in a line of dead-end slackers whose boyish charm quickly reveals arrested development. Only occasionally do his reactions contain any ambiguity, as in the wavering smiles that greet Amanda’s joking references to a past to which he still clings. Elsewhere, you can read too much of the longing on Jim’s face, something Amanda never seems to see until she begins to feel the same way. Paulson fares much better, at first portraying Amanda as someone filled with friendly sympathy for Jim’s loss, maybe even pity at his clear signs of stagnation, but after that she becomes impossible to read. In her smiles could be pain, genuine pleasure, or simply the desire to humor her own unhappiness as well as Jim’s, and as her ex dissolves into histrionics at the end, her weary, long-ago compartmentalized responses mark the only time that the film attains the believable, everyday regret that it seeks to embody.
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