L.A. Tea Time (2019)

(On TV, September 2022) I was immediately hooked by L.A. Tea Time’s premise, as a young woman and her friend go on a cross-continental road trip from Montréal to Los Angeles. I not-so-secretly have that itinerary on my tourism bucket list, and I was curious to see how writer-director Sophie Bédard Marcotte would depict the experience, especially in a semi-documentary fashion. The result, alas, will not appeal to everyone, and certainly not at all times. Executed on what feels like a micro-budget (something good for a joke, as the sound blanks out during a sequence where the car radio plays a song whose rights the filmmaker can’t afford), it feels a lot like a few YouTube travelogues stitched together. To the best of my knowledge, most of the “semi” in this semi-documentary comes from the quixotic quest to meet Los Angeles-based filmmaker Miranda July. It propels the plot (and leads to a few running gags), while the episodes along the way feel like found footage of real encounters and experiences. The result is a thoroughly mixed bag that’s not for every viewer. Copious references to July and Chantal Akerman (who’s hilariously listed as first lead cast in the film’s scarce IMDB page) clearly associate L.A. Tea Time to a very specific kind of filmmaking, more admired as a filmmaker’s statement than an entertaining experience for the viewer. It’s an intensely self-gazing film and if you’re not OK with interminable sequences belabouring the same points, well… you’ve been warned. While I have some admiration for how a plucky no-budget filmmaker can transform a road trip into a film, there’s a 50/50 chance at this point that my eventual Ottawa-to-Los Angeles travelogue will be more thrilling than L.A. Tea Time.