Kissing on the Mouth

Joe Swanberg was bold to make Kissing on the Mouth his directorial debut. Everything about it is a risk, and in 2005, do-it- yourself filmmaking had not gained the incredible momentum it has in recent time. This is the kind of film you make your fifth or sixth film, after you've established a name for yourself and your work and have created your own style of filmmaking.

This is an uncommonly ambitious directorial debut from a man I admire quite heavily and have made an effort to pay attention to for the last couple of years. Since Kissing on the Mouth, Swanberg has predicated his film career off of making extremely low- budget films that often explore the themes of sexual exploration, technology, communication, the filmmaking process, and post-college life and his entry into the film world is one that steadily prepared us for what was to come. Ever since Swanberg entered film, he has been met with a sizable fire-storm of criticism for his low-budget style, which is often billed as mumblecore, a subgenre of film that is heavily defined by character, cheap production values, and excessive amounts of naturalistic dialog.

The film follows Ellen (Kate Winterich), a twentysomething who has just had sex with an ex-boyfriend while currently seeing Patrick (Joe Swanberg), a fellow twentysomething currently invested in a personal project he's constructing that includes commentary on modern relationships and personal feelings on love. Patrick is the jealous type, while Ellen is the type of girl who possesses an "I don't care, you shouldn't care" attitude when it comes to issues in her life, and when the possibility of her cheating comes into question by Patrick, she increasingly becomes more closeted and alienating in her attempt to try to piece together what she wants without her entire love-life crumbling.

A large part of this already short film (seventy-eight minutes) is sex, and by a large part, I mean roughly forty percent. However, the sex here is unconventional. It has an unpolished, imperfection to the way it is filmed, with Swanberg using extreme closeups on pubic hair, nipples, and unclear parts of the body. This style provoked intrigue as well as frustration for me because while I get a subversively shot sex scene I am also greeted with a shot that doesn't have accurate placement nor clear distinction of what exactly is occurring. Some will undoubtedly find this annoying and irritating, and, for that, it's almost too easy to dismiss everything the film has housed in it.

Admittedly, Swanberg relies too heavily on these sex scenes, which scarcely come off as erotic more-so than as an anarchic attempt at creating style. Where Swanberg shines is in filming heavily-improvised dialog between the cast members, which is always a great time in my book. Because of the naturalism and inherent authenticity to the material based on its lack of gloss and polish, the actors could very well be expressing their own opinions to us and with that we naturally take away what we want from their monologues and discard whatever we don't want.

While forty percent of the picture is made up of extended sex scenes shot with varying uses of the closeup camera shot, the remaining sixty is dialog or music montage. Obviously, the dialog takes prominence here because then we really can get a sense of what these characters are about and what their opinions on love are. The film's most revealing attribute is Patrick's audio montage of several different unseen people weighing in on subjects from marriage to hookups to relationships. This provides for a pleasantly relativistic look on other people's opinions of popular subjects. If sex/ relationships were political topics, Kissing on the Mouth would be the ultimate debate film.

Just a few days ago I viewed Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless for the first time, a film that fundamentally and aesthetically changed the ideas of cinema by shamelessly bending the rules and toying with conventions that were long carried out by new as well as veteran directors. When Godard's directorial debut hit the scene in 1960, a breakthrough movement in cinema history was born. To compare Swanberg's Kissing on the Mouth to Godard's Breathless, to some, would seem like comparing trash and art but if one looks at how they fearlessly shatter all preconceived judgments and convention, one could view them as birds of a feather. It just so happens that one feather went on to leave an irrevocable watermark while the other left something of a lesser marking. For one of the pioneering films of the mumblecore subgenre in cinema - a subgenre I adore and simply can't get enough of - it's still quite fascinating and, at times, moving in its insights.

Starring: Kate Winterich and Joe Swanberg. Directed by: Joe Swanberg.

I spend a lot of time with the films of young filmmakers. Sometimes I'm completely blown away, because of all the ordinary values and risk that youth carries. A life with film needs this, it really does.

But its an investment that along the way brings a whole lot of disappointment. This is one such.

You may take my view with qualification because one value I hold dear is the "long form," the ability to not just present a world but have something happens therein that matters. It isn't enough to merely display, you have to engage, transform, penetrate.

These kids have some promising intuitions about this: there are within the story two guys: one is a photographer and the other apparently a sound editor. Also, the film alternates between interviews — ostensibly for the sound guy's project — and an ordinary watching of a certain young woman. We learn a few things about her, and along the way see a couple things not often seen in films. So there is structural folding in the thing.

And the performances are natural. But that's not saying much because these characters are only half-people. We learn through DVD extras that this is who they actually are. There's some sex and nudity here. Commentors note that this also is natural. It didn't seem so to me, instead as artificially posed as usual. Yes, I presume that sex we see is "real," at least once. And the camera seems to be casual and lingers on odd trash as much as on bodies, something that mirrors the offhand Gen Y sense of awareness.

But there's nothing done with this at all. One wonders why it was made at all, other than the four involved were bored.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

This film was absolutely awful, I even feel uncomfortable calling it a film. Its the typical "mumblecore" movie, with zero plot and a bunch of aimless whiny twenty somethings stumbling around trying to "figure stuff out". I have tried to give mumblecore a chance, but lets be honest its just horrible.

I am not out of sync with cinema, I appreciate Dogme95 films, Idioterne is one of my all time favorite films. So I do not mind if a film is cheaply made so long as there is some (ANY) substance.

Everything in this film is horrid, the acting, the writing (or was it all improvised?), the direction, but MOST of all, above everything else, the camera work was just plain and simple nonsense. The camera was never anywhere logical, there was no consistency. I got to admit being a guy I had heard there was nudity in this film so I thought to myself well even if its horrible at least there's nudity (yea I know, I'm a jerk). Well thanks to the uber crappy camera-work you never really get to see anything, and the things you do see, TRUST ME - YOU DO NOT WANT TO SEE. This film made me want to vomit on numerous levels.

The dialogue made me want to vomit, the camera-work made me want to vomit, but mostly the idea that this film was praised by some legit critics, well now that more than anything makes me want to vomit.

You can only do so much with little or no budget. This movie does what it must, I guess, following two or three, very ordinary young folks around, listening to their Hopes And Dreams, capturing plenty of their nudity, doing for their sex lives what Margaret Mead did for the Samoans', listening to them ramble on.

It's in some ways a novel venture. I'd always wondered how women shaved their pubic hair. Now I know, but I still don't know WHY they do it. I can understand a man's trimming his mustache. If you let it go, after a while you can't eat donuts anymore.

I also know something about male masturbation in the shower. I read it about it somewhere, once. But it does absolutely nothing for me to watch a close up of some guy whacking off amid the soap suds.

But then the entire movie, aside from being -- perhaps necessarily -- a little dull in conception, is maddening in execution. Or, let me put it this way: whatever happened to the medium shot? It's a brave movie but not an especially interesting one. If it's a movie, it ought to have a coherent plot somewhere. If we want a slice of humdrum life we can always find somebody tape of the old PBS program, "Family." Somebody compared this to "Brown Bunny," but that's an inept comparison. This one lacks the raw sex and the arrant male narcissism of "Brown Bunny." This one could have been much better if there had been some effort put into the writing, assuming any effort at all was put into it. You can do stuff successfully without having ten million bucks. Has anyone seen "The Little Fugitive"?

I think that often people who write these comments have never attempted to make anything more than a video of their kid's birthday parties or their cat playing with a koosh. It's not as easy as it looks. Just look at You Tube and you will find plenty of people who don't know the first thing about making a film let alone making something worth watching. Joe Swanberg is not one of them. He is a talented filmmaker with a knack for telling a story in a new and innovative way, and his work so far proves his abilities. Joe's films and web show are some of the most well made, inventive, do it yourself film-making to come along in years. If you don't get it, do yourself a favor and take a course in film history. Film-making is more than just creating something that appeals to a broad audience, or even a small one. It's about making art and telling your story. And if this is Joe's story, then props to him for getting it out there for others to enjoy. If you like Altman, then go watch Altman and stop complaining. Let the rest of us enjoy the good stuff out there... ALL of it.