**½/****
starring Eleanor Hutchins, Larry Fessenden, Holly Ramos
written and directed by Ilya Chaiken
by Walter Chaw If a song by Maggie Estep, the original riot grrl, were ever made into a film, it would probably turn out like Ilya Chaiken's Margarita Happy Hour. Profane and invested in the underground scene of late-Eighties Greenwich Village and Brooklyn, the film carries on a certain gritty slice-of-street life storytelling tradition with an appropriately grim ethic, though its resolution is curiously upbeat. Margarita Happy Hour's tagline says a lot: "Hipsters, Single Moms, and the Cycles of Life." Essentially about being trapped in a miserable existence with few prospects for improvement, the film spends altogether too much time on extended metaphors concerning the ephemeral knot of existence and broken symbolism involving being isolated and adrift in a sea of sharks.
Zelda (Courtney Cox look-alike Eleanor Hutchins) lives in a house with seven roommates, including shiftless, aspiring-writer boyfriend Max (Larry Fessenden). The sole caretaker for her 14-month-old daughter, as her decision not to abort somehow absolves Max from responsibility, Zelda makes some extra money drawing dirty pictures for a stag magazine (whose sleazebag publisher is played by Steve Buscemi's brother, Michael). For fun, Zelda hangs out with her similarly young and encumbered gal pals for the titular margarita happy hour: two cheap hours a day spent dishing, reminiscing, and regretting the choices that have led them all to the overpopulated land of destitute single-momdom. When Natali (Holly Ramos), an old friend recovering from a heroin overdose, moves into the house/commune, however, she proves to be the catalyst for all the margarita happy hour-ites to re-examine the dreams and aspirations of their youth that have fallen by the wayside.
Margarita Happy Hour looks so awful in that trés vérité way that it could, save for a tacked-on dream sequence at the end, qualify as a dogme95 film. The grimy image compliments the performances, each of which successfully conveys the slack-jawed burnout patois of the lower class bohemian counterculture smothering in the heart of the Big Apple. Unfortunately, the often incisive script (also by director Chaiken) tries too hard to make a statement with an interminable, exhausted finale. The film's apocalyptic urban setting and unrelentingly icy zeitgeist is message enough without a triumphant closing shot of Zelda defiant, staring pensively into an unknown, but hopeful, future. Bleh.
