ND/NF. "Harmony and Me"

By David Hudson on 04/02/2009

[Updated]

Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog: "Written and directed by Bob Byington (his 'RSO: Registered Sex Offender' premiered at SXSW last year and then played around the country on the Range Life tour) and edited by Frank V Ross ('Hohokam,' 'Present Company'), ['Harmony and Me'; site] was shot in Austin and features a number of faces that will be familiar to devotees of SXSW cinema and its descendants: Justin Rice as Harmony, a 'loser' who we meet mid-heartbreak at the hands of a brunette succubus (Kristen Tucker); Alex Karpovsky as a friend whose verbal abuse of his sweetly nerdy wife is played for uncomfortable laughs - and serves as a reminder to Harmony that relationships are inevitably sad and cruel as often as they're legitimately romantic; Pat Healy as the dickish boss at Harmony's cubicle job; Allison Latta as an outlandishly outgoing neighbor who sets her sights, against his wishes, on our retiring hero.... It's unquestionably a film of its time, but it plays out in a key that's less like something by Joe Swanberg than something, like, by Savage Steve Holland. And while there's no question it lacks polish, its comic voice is fresh, surprisingly nuanced and full of surprises."

"The aimless Harmony may ostensibly be searching for his 'rhythm,' but his story is merely a series of sketches whose tossed-off quality--with regard to both the functional-at-best DV cinematography and casual, scruffy dialogue--would be far more exasperating if the bits weren't often so drolly funny," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "'Harmony and Me' unexpectedly sneaks clever, cutting, and/or absurd one-liners into most of its seemingly ad-libbed scenarios, its consistent ability to amuse bolstering what in effect amounts to a cinematic doodle."

Writing for Tribeca Film, though, Marisa Meltzer finds the film "o excruciatingly mean-spirited, it's difficult to care about any of the characters."

Tomorrow and Sunday. For more on this year's New Directors / New Films, click the tag: ND/NF 2009.

Update: "A mumblecore film without the mumble, "Harmony and Me" eschews the fits and starts, tensions and complexities of present-tense immediacy in favor of sly, absurdist one-liners, paring everything down to comic essentials," writes Ronnie Scheib in Variety. "Rice, mumblecore's answer to Jean-Pierre Leaud (but without the edge), steers the pic successfully through shallow shoals of snarky humor, greatly aided by Frank Ross' to-the-bone editing but done no favors by lenser Jim Eastburn's total disregard for compositional niceties."

[Photo: "Harmony and Me," Film Science, 2009]

Tags: Alex Karpovsky, Allison Latta, Bob Byington, Justin Rice, Kristen Tucker, ND/NF 2009, Pat Healy