AFI Fest 2009 review: Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench

by Matthew Groves

There are some films that attempt so much and while doing many things write can sometimes be only partially successful in their goals.  One such film is the indie musical, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench.

With an engaging and masterful score, this film is about Guy (Jason Palmer) and a girl he’s in a relationship with Madeline (Desiree Garcia), a relationship that ends in the opening credits.  Guy then jumps quickly to another relationship with Elena (Sandha Khin).  The rest of the story through jazz, dance, and random bursts of singing tell the story of Guy and Madeline and where they go relationally in their lives.  Guy being looser, carefree, and less serious about relationships and more wrapped up in music, whereas Madeline is more focused on having a lasting connection with men.

Shot in black and white and in a number of close-ups with random bursts of music and song, this is special and interesting exercise in a non-traditional musical, but by no means, is this 100% original.  Particularly the cinematic ghosts of Jacques Demy, John Cassavetes, and Jean-Luc Godard are alive and well in the film.  At Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench’s best moments it seems to really be alive and drive by really fun spontaneous action.  Yet more often then not these ghosts also haunt this piece that is so indebted to those cinematic geniuses from before that it comes off merely as style more than something substantively new and interesting and it’s kind of stale.  When you see films like Cassavetes’ Faces or Godard’s A Woman Is A Woman, this seems wholly apparent and almost looks like a carbon copy with a more modern Boston rather than Los Angeles or Paris being the backdrop.

It’s shame because honestly for the moments the actors get, they really try to make something of this story, but whereas Faces or A Woman Is A Woman had a dramatic or emotional thread to lock onto, Guy and Madeleine is kind of just meanders never strikes the match and does something more than films that have come before. I hate to play the what-if game with this one, but it could have been a really interesting study of cross cultural relationships in the Millenial Age with a jazz cultural background for its backdrop, but it kind hopes to be that and never fully accomplishes it.  Despite it’s shortcomings though the film still is trying something interesting and worth a watch even if it doesn’t go too deep or as far as it could and built upon its influences.  If you love jazz and musicals it is a great watch, but it would have been nice if the filmmaker, Damien Chazzelle had decided to take it in a new direction whereas he kind of just hits the mark and nothing more.

Picture Source:

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1730317056/tt1337193

~ by Matthew Groves on November 2, 2009.