Black Bear (2020)

(On Cable TV, April 2021) There are two very intentionally different films in Black Bear (or maybe even three) — a first half that’s a comedy playing as a drama, and a second half that’s a drama playing as comedy. Or maybe the reverse. The point being: don’t expect a tidy result, especially when the framing device is a screenwriter looking pensively at a blank page. The first story is about a writer-director going at a remote bed-and-breakfast retreat in order to gather inspiration for her next film, not knowing that she’s landing right in the middle of a warring couple that’s having trouble reconciling the woman’s pregnancy with their moving out of New York City to the backwoods and the effect that a young and attractive newcomer has on their couple dynamics. (It’s blindingly obvious from their first moments that these two shouldn’t be married.) It’s an excruciatingly awkward situation that plays off in constant arguments, marital sniping, unfolding adultery and an almost-inevitable downbeat ending, at which point we reset with the same actors in the same setting, playing a very different story — the shooting of a low-budget film in that remote cabin, with an entire crew dealing with the elaborate head-games of a director trying to coax a performance out of his capricious leading actress/wife. While Black Bear’s first half does have its occasionally amusing dialogues, the second half is more obviously humorous, what with coffee-spilling slapstick and the smouldering tension of a crew trying to wrap up a shoot. Despite the plot and character realignment, it plays along familiar themes of creative process labour, warring couples and a final conflagration. The result is certainly… odd. It zig-zags between comedy and tragedy and plays metatextual tricks between its two halves. I didn’t spend much time thinking about how all the parts related to each other: In my disappointingly simple head-canon, the film is about the screenwriter staring into space and digesting her ideas into two different possibilities before staring to write. The result isn’t meant to be tidy or satisfying. Still, there are a few things to like in the corners of the film. Audrey Plaza gets a very solid role here playing two or three different people and hitting many different emotional high notes along the way, from her usually detached awkward dialogue to some very high-pitched dramatic moments toward the end. There are hints of Bergman here in futzing with the filmmaking process and identity — writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine is not going for simple entertainment here, but it’s not clear how successful he is at what he’s trying to do, so scattered is the result. Black Bear is one of those films that works better in writing its review (with some reflection on the result, after some reading regarding the film’s production and intentions) rather than in the moment where we’re never too sure if the next scene will be a joke of full-scale slaughter of the entire cast. It certainly hit my fondness for movies about the moviemaking process, and I think I may enjoy seeing it again sometime.