Mutual Appreciation. Andrew Bujalski. 2005

‘Mutual Appreciation’ (Andrew Bujalski, 2005)


Having only just received UK distribution, this may be your first encounter with the work of Bujalski; if so, you have a treat coming to you. ‘Mutual Appreciation’ represents the director’s second foray into the world of filmmaking after his impressive and critically lauded debut, ‘Funny Ha Ha’. Bujalski returns to similar subject matter here: the liminal, disaffected youth of thinking America. All the big existential questions are posed here but, unlike Richard Linklater’s affected and self-conscious philosophising, Bujalski places the quiet, unassuming and sometimes downright inarticulate thinker at the centre of this funny, engaging and unpredictable ménage a trois. It is Bujalski’s penchant for dead time, the sentence that trails off, drunken ramblings, seemingly improvised dialogue and simmering emotion that marks him out as a filmmaker of considerable merit with an aesthetic that hangs somewhere between the French New Wave and the sublime work of John Cassavetes. If you are in any doubt over the state of American independent cinema, you must go and see this film!