A vanity project that is, above all, a mixed bag, Ryan Piers Williams has committed the sin of New York filmmakers of a certain status with access to crews and performers of a certain standing: he’s made an uninteresting film that’s ultimately about nothing. To blame it on Joe Swanberg would be disingenuous as Swanberg has shown he’s evolving; perhaps Williams will lick his wounds and evolve as well. Reflexive to a fault, writer-director Williams plays Mark, a filmmaker with dreams of making a much more interesting film: a quasi-sci-fi flick where three actors play the same evolving character. A producer shoots it down, trying to mold the film into something that would appeal to “more than just an audience of five hipsters in Williamsburg.” I agree, although my Williamsburg hipster friends have better taste and surely they’d much rather embrace Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior, made by a writer-director-star with something to say.
X/Y, not to be confused with Austin Chick’s insightful sex drama XX/XY wanes into a tide it doesn’t quite understand with little humor or original human insight. It disjointingly traces the lives of several New York city stereotypes including the women looking for love from unavailable men (Melonie Diaz and Dree Hemingway), the bisexual emotionally detached artist/DJ (Jon Paul Phillips), the screenwriter who breaks up with his girlfriend (America Ferrera) and sleeps with another man, and so forth. The last may be for revenge as Olivia (Ferrera) has taken been hooking up with her worker (Common). Captured with a narrative efficiency and at times emotional authenticity, certain scenes kind of, sort of work. However, as a whole, the picture is a narrative mess, despite some good performances. In Tyler Perry’s hands the whole affair would have been much more interesting, albeit lacking Williams’ restraint.
Connected to one another via technology, they simultaneously have grown disconnected with results that vary. The film veers into an exploration of detached heterosexuality, which leads to a homosexual encounter where much is left unspoken. The film’s most effective sequences are those that are silent. There’s something about Diaz wondering around the streets of New York on a rainy afternoon that held my interest in a way the critical scenes did not. Even the bubbly appearance of Hemingway, in a scene that appears without much of a payoff other than to make the point of disconnection, doesn’t satisfy. The experience of viewing X/Y is much like the interpersonal dynamic of its characters: I felt extreme disconnection and alienation from a screenplay that appears more as a series of acting exercises with the whole lacking the focus of some of its parts.
X/Y is now playing in limited release and on VOD.