New DVD: The Exploding Girl

September 8, 2010 in Film | Permalink

Yes, she is the granddaughter of director Elia Kazan.

A slack yet lovely film, Bradley Rust Gray’s minimalist movie follows a college student named Ivy (Zoe Kazan) as she arrives at her mother’s Brooklyn home for spring break. The work is slyly titled, referring to the epileptic Ivy’s ever-present threat of convulsions, but it’s also an ironic label for a young woman so given to a pensive stillness.

Very little action occurs in The Exploding Girl: Ivy visits her doctor, teaches a dance class for grade schoolers and half-heartedly goes to parties. Her boyfriend from college can’t join her at the last minute, and their halting phone conversations and missed connections don’t bode well for the relationship. Ivy’s timid childhood friend Al (Mark Rendall) is without a place to stay over the break, so he sleeps on her couch, and the two slowly fumble closer together.

Gray’s muted romantic drama has more in common with the alienated hush of a lot of contemporary Asian cinema than it does with tribal loquaciousness of Mumblecore. Kazan has received a good deal of credit for the film’s appeal, and rightly so: She fills nearly every frame with a contemplative center, makes every pause evocative. But director Gray’s contributions shouldn’t be undervalued. When a movie this slight, this tenuous ends up cohering, it isn’t by accident or providence. (Available via Netflix and other outlets.)

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