Okay, so I watched Actual People, again, because I just posted my take on The Closeness, and Kit Zauhar made Actual People before The Closeness.
I think MUBI classed Actual People in the Millenial Meltdown category. The Closeness wasn’t on it, when I think about it. So I am now freshly filled with The Closeness and Actual People, and one of them I’ve watched twice, and I have filled myself with good food, so it means I am ready to tackle(?) Actual People.
One of the first things, by way of classification, is that Actual People recognises itself as a Millenial movie. One of the characters accuses (suggests?) another that she is “such a millenial.” The struggles are quite relatable: relationships, post-graduate drift, adult life, friendship, being scared of the future etc. The movie tells me that these are problems that are not unique to particular situations; at least as long as these are problems which are structurally similar. So this could be your meltdown, just as well as it is Riley’s.
What is the one thing that struck a chord with me?
Riley is a philosophy major who is on her final semester in a college in New York, and she parties quite a bit, drinks often, and have recurring yeast infections. (I wonder why.) Perhaps due to the constant partying, she often forgets deadlines, and in a scene, takes a 25mg does of Adderall so that she can finish writing an assignment in four hours. Her professor, who happens to be Asian just like Riley, asks Riley to meet her. The professor is afraid Riley might have to retake the course, as she is barely passing the course with all the late and low-quality assignments she had been turning in. The professor says, “I remember you as a freshman. You were vibrant and talkative.”
That hurts.
I don’t think I’ve watched enough movies to qualify them into categories, but once I heard about a genre called mumblecore, and watched a few of those, I think Actual People is a little like them. Slice-of-life—okay, I checked—Actual People is not on the list, but it checks most of the boxes: low budget, focuses more on dialogue than on plot, white characters in their twenties and thirties who are quite clueless about their personal and professional lives.
Dialogues are really important to Actual People. The characters speak the way actual people do (whew!). They are, um, interspersed with what you might call, uh, these small bits and pieces of, you know, fillers. There are no ideas expressed as ideas and opinions expressed as opinions; instead, they are expressed as fragments of thoughts which are dropped like water onto a hot skillet where they sizzle for a moment and just evaporate. And the characters, whenever there is a man and woman in screen, are often thinking about hooking up and kissing and dating. Maybe that is true. Maybe people do think about sex a lot. I surely do. Riley does too. (There is a scene in which Riley tries to take off her panties in a bout of rage and shame, and she twists and pulls at it, and I was feeling uncomfortable because, well, think of the wedgie a granny-panty would make: ouch and painful.)
Then there is the “making sense of life” part. Now, surely, a twenty-two year old should write about this. Because that is when you think about making sense of life, right? Surely, a twenty-seven year old grad student should have better things to think about. But well, maybe you have a underdeveloped grad student here, who is still capable of thinking about “life and other stuff.” I think movies such as Actual People are about thinking about these things, perhaps over a glass of beer and a smoke, maybe in the post-coital glow (I think this is a wrong term. Post-coitus is usually debilitating no?), and talking to your friends in a scarcely furnished apartment, sitting on the floor, in a t-shirt and underwear. Movies such as Murina, or say, Perfect Days, or Dreamers, or Fallen Leaves or Winter Sleep—they are about concrete situations and dialogues and things and people, and by making these nodes vibrate in their position in the chain which connects them all, they are illustrating this hazy, nebulous thing called life. In a sense, then, you see where Winter Sleep meets Actual People.
Here is what I think is the perfect comparison I can come up with: Actual People is like a surgical drain, while Winter Sleep is like a valve implanted inside you. Both are helping the body work, both are essential, both belong to the same kind; the only difference is one of them can be seen from the outside, while the other is seen only symptomatically.
I am a little miffed because Normal People and Actual People sound similar and mean similar(ish) stuff, while they are absolutely dissimilar to each other.
That is my only grippe.