I will give Chasing Summer this: there’s something inherently interesting about its unexpected union of two opposite forces. On one side there’s Josephine Decker, an unusual film-maker whose genre-challenging work spans experimental theater (2019’s Madeline’s Madeline), claustrophobic psychodrama (2020’s perversely thrilling, woefully underseen Shirley) and magical realism (the 2022 YA grief flick The Sky Is Everywhere). On the other, comedian Iliza Shlesinger, whose brand of fast-paced, ribald, sometimes hilarious (and sometimes too gender-essentialist) standup is both subverted and enhanced by her own white, blond conventional attractiveness. I can’t imagine many saw the former choosing to direct Chasing Summer, a Hallmark-esque comedy written by and starring the latter. Theoretically, the collision should generate sparks.
It does, though I can’t imagine in the way the odd couple intended. The 98-minute film, which premiered this week at Sundance, is one of the most bizarre combinations of director and material I’ve ever seen, more curious car crash than collaboration. It is almost worth it to watch a sensitive and surprising director, so attuned to inner turmoil and unreality, wrangle anything substantial out of razor-thin characters and a boilerplate set-up.
I’m not sure anyone could – Shlesinger’s Jamie is a dubious protagonist to begin with, a 38-year-old woman with no characterization other than “works in disaster relief” (as in: works, not cares about, disaster relief). Jamie’s opening thunder about being accepted to a prestigious disaster relief program in Jakarta (?) is quickly stolen by her boyfriend of five years, who unceremoniously dumps her in an absurd scene that belongs in a wellness culture satire – the first of many jarring tonal swings. Homeless and killing time until Jakarta – they really stay talking about “Jakarta” – Jamie sheepishly retreats to her childhood home in Texas, a place she has not visited for 20 years, owing to a cheating ex and a rumor involving pregnancy that is so nonsensical and convoluted it made me wish for a good old-fashioned abortion plot.
Decker is a dynamic enough film-maker to make even a montage of Texas iconography feel fresh, but the Dallas suburb she finds here is bland and unspecific (not Dallas’s fault, actually – it’s filmed in St Louis). It’s also full of stock characters: her twangy, vapid mother (Megan Mullally, overdoing it), who disapproves of Jamie’s choices; her fuck-up older sister Marisa (Cassidy Freeman, also overdoing it), who resents Jamie’s condescension yet hires her to repair her dinky roller rink; her former popular girl classmates (Aimee Garcia, Kristin Slaysman and Lauren Aboulafia), consumed by marriage and children; her 20-year-old co-worker Harper (Lola Tung), who helps her regress into beer pong, and 20-year-old hunk Colby (Garrett Wareing) who inexplicably imprints on Jamie immediately. And, of course, there’s Chase (Smallville’s Tom Welling), her former football star ex, whose disappearance in the summer of 2001 – yes, thankfully, there remained a mix CD – caused her to leave town and, in her telling, never trust men again.
This would strain credulity even if Jamie were a necessary 10 years younger; to have a woman pushing 40 remain this fixated on one rumor/person from high school requires a level of arch derangement perfected by Charlize Theron in the gloriously pitch-black Young Adult. Jamie possesses no such edge – she is hot, funny, likable; she magnetizes eminently attractive men; she works in disaster relief! Shlesinger is a capable comic performer, but she plays Jamie too straightly for sympathy. With barely a suggestion of interiority or life beyond this very narrow frame, Jamie is neither funny nor diabolical enough to root for, her charm as flat as her well-showcased abs.
All the while, Decker doggedly twirls and turns and flips the camera (cinematography by Eric Branco), as if she’s trying to steal the movie back from its vacant protagonist. It’s a volatile, incoherent, borderline provocative squabble; watching her florid, subversive sensibilities tear into the story’s cardboard parts is so strange that I began to wonder if the film’s tonal whiplash and basic continuity errors – such as Jamie’s mom reflected in the mirror one moment, and over her shoulder the next – were some kind of punk statement. I fear not. But there’s something morbidly fascinating about the battling forces, the film careening from, say, a Decker-standard sensuous, gauzy sex scene to straight-up farce with the delicacy of a bull.
I could go on about the baffling choices made on every level – why is each member of Jamie’s family styled to be from a different class? Why does Jamie seem baffled by a standard grocery store? Why did no one address the rumor for two whole decades? – but they’re almost beside the point. The real bafflement here is a series of late-stage scenes with swings so vertiginous and unhinged that I was simply left agape. I suppose that counts for something – it turns out I remember next to nothing about Decker’s prior film The Sky Is Everywhere, but I will not forget emerging from a theater in Park City cross-eyed and speechless. Chasing Summer at least outruns the charge of being boring, though at what cost.
