Joyful Girl * * * ½
Watching Joyful Girl is like leafing through a cinematic photo album of living, breathing snap-shots of a young couple's life. Each page turned brings with it captured moments plump with story and emotional resonance. A popular device (in its very function) utilized to glaze over depth and cast broad simple strokes to expedite a plot, the "movie montage" has never been purposed thus to extract the essence of unadulterated emotional truth from the core a narrative's detailed convolution. By quickly flashing unordered moments of truth over the course of a couple's hurts, joys, and love, director Chloe Domont elicits the contrasting realities pure and intrinsic to their story while bypassing the specificities of its plot. Through juxtaposing distant bullets on their relational timeline, Domont allows the "former" to inform the "latter" in much the same way Ryan Gosling's ukulele ballad for a tap-dancing Michelle Williams at the start of their romance in Blue Valentine is informed and even marred by their heart-wrenching fights from its non-chronologically earlier scenes. Capturing the melancholic beauty of that film and its quietly devastating cousin Like Crazy, Joyful Girl's scrap-book pictures only take 8 minutes to page through, but they linger far longer.
INTERVIEW:
ME:
Can you talk about your background in film, previous
projects worked on up until Joyful Girl? How did your body of work
lead you to this short? Basically: Why Joyful Girl?
Why now?
CHLOE:
I started out writing
short films towards the end of high school. When I got into [the] film/tv
program at Tisch, NYU, I began directing. My short film Hear Me Fall, which I made prior to Joyful Girl,
definitely influenced the story and the direction I wanted to take with Joyful Girl. Hear Me Fall is an experimental
short film that tracks the inner thoughts of a boy as he deals with rejection
and heartbreak. So for the next one, I wanted to make a film about a relationship that is on a downward spiral towards heartbreak. I also saw Husbands And Wives for the first time right around when I was developing the idea for the next one, and that definitely inspired the themes, style, and tone for the film. As far as the timing of Joyful Girl, it's based on previous personal relationships that left me with a lot of unresolved feelings about them. And at the time of writing them, I felt like I couldn't not make this story.
ME:
The short's non-linear format seems integral to its
emotional effective-ness. Can you talk about the chronology of the script and
how it and your editing process led to the final result?
CHLOE:
The story really begins on the harsh cut out of the opening
home video montage sequence, dropping us in the middle of a sex scene,
post-climax, where the female character is not happy with her boyfriend's
sexual performance. From there, the
chronology jumps around in time: from the couple arguing, to trying to have
sex, to being passive-aggressive with one another, back to having passionless
sex -where the overall arc is building towards a breakup that may or may not
happen. The editing process was a form
of rewriting -I had to cut down the scenes and re-order some in order to
clarify the arc, make sure that the pace was fluid, that the story was as tight
as possible, and overall, emotionally engaging.
 |
| A still-frame from Joyful Girl. |
ME:
Your actors superbly captured the vulnerability, fragility,
and fickle nature of young love. How did you come to find and cast them? And
what was your process of working with them as actors, your directorial style if
you will?
CHLOE:
I knew both Troian and Shane through some friends who went
to USC. I had worked with Shane in Hear Me Fall, and knew I wanted to work with Troian at some point in the
future. They also had both gone to
school together and worked together many times, so I knew that they were very
comfortable with each other and that building their chemistry wasn't going to [be] a
problem. I wanted long takes for most of
the film with occasional jump cuts here and there to really show the harsh
transitions from sweet to passive-aggressive to viscous, and how quickly a
relationship can become sour -so we really rehearsed the arc of those
transitions by working through/adjusting the dialogue, choreography, and beats
in order to make sure that those transitions were as honest and natural as
possible.
 |
| Shane Coffey (of Joyful Girl) in Chloe's previous short Hear Me Fall. |
ME:
When directors achieve quality in short-film-making, it
often acts as a springboard for future opportunities in feature-film-making. Do
you have a feature on the way? Can you speak as to any projects you have in the
works?
CHLOE:
I have two feature films I'm currently working on. The first one I've co-written with the
director of the film, Nathan Silver -it's called Gun Under My Pillow, which
will be in production next month. The
second script, I plan to direct next summer, which I am also co-writing with
Nathan.
ME:
Lastly, something I will always ask of every working
American director I interview: can you comment as to your thoughts on the state
of American cinema today?
CHLOE:
In my experience, you have to be extremely resourceful in
order to get your film off the ground. It seems like independent films are being produced for less and less
every year, and there is less and less money put into independent films. Micro-budget films have a whole new meaning,
and even though it may be easier to get a film made because of this, it's much
harder to get your film out there. I
think one of the most important things you can do is to make a film that only
you can make -to be able to create a story that possesses to you a point where
everything inside you needs to make it. Honesty is the most important thing, then you got to work on the
craft.
Take a few minutes to check out Chloe's short film Hear Me Fall linked below and don't forget to check back soon for my SFF review of Still Mine!
Watch Hear Me Fall: http://vimeo.com/58045416
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