The We and the I (2013)

**½/****
starring Michael Brodie, Teresa Lynn, Raymond Delgado, Jonathan Ortiz
screenplay by Michel Gondry, Paul Proch, Jeff Grimshaw
directed by Michel Gondry


Weandthei

by Angelo Muredda The We and the I opens with a throwback, an image that wouldn't be out of place in
Michel Gondry's distinctive music videos from the late-1990s, which were
themselves full of backward glances to the more rough-hewn early days of MTV
and old-school hip hop. Over the credits, a boombox modified into a miniature
bus rolls along the streets of the Bronx pulsing out Young MC's "Bust A
Move," until it's crushed by what's ostensibly the real thing, a city bus
packed with urban teens who make up Gondry's boisterous, gossiping, and
privately wounded nonprofessional cast. That's an interesting start, insofar as
it suggests that Gondry's obsession with whimsical props tinged with nostalgia
are about to be traded in for something more authentic, even as it implies a
bit cheekily that the "real" bus, taking a bunch of high-schoolers
home on the last day of school, is itself a roaming set on which to stage
semi-scripted exchanges between proper teens doubling as actors
and artistic partners.

Both intimations turn out to be true, in a way. There's a refreshing verve to
some of the teens' interactions that would be difficult to rig, and the cast is
certainly more game at playing dramatically punched-up versions of themselves
than, say, Joe Swanberg's collaborators seem to be. (It probably helps that
they don't have to disrobe in front of their director.) But this conceit of
authenticity, a fruitful paradox if ever there was one, is surrounded by the
most contrived of frames: a bus ride that conveniently gathers the entire cast
for nearly two hours of conversation and catharsis. Affecting as such
breakthrough moments can be in theatrical workshops–like Block Party, the film originated as a collaborative project with a
South Bronx community art centre–they're at odds with the frank energy the
actors bring to their best moments, like a performatively noisy chat between a
trio of mean girls, pitched just loud enough for a neighbouring passenger to
hear them mocking him. That tension between the captured and the staged makes The We and the I engaging, as both docudramas and community art projects go, but the
gear shifts between the two modes are often painfully awkward, with the more
elaborately-scripted exchanges in the final third coming off as a dutiful plate
of vegetables after dessert.

As for the actual conversations that keep the bus from reaching
its destination for so long, there's a lot of good material for Gondry to mine,
most of it safely within his wheelhouse. He's always been attentive to prickly,
romantically-wronged artists with slightly off-kilter sensibilities, and Teresa
(Teresa Lynn), a sensitive Latina portrait-sketcher in a blonde wig, is a
good avatar. The moody artist for whom the world is too much is a role Gondry
usually reserves for men like Jim Carrey and Gael Garcia Bernal, but there's
real affection and empathy for Teresa's gendered version of that experience.
The fallout from a compromised moment where she was drunk at a party is
especially painful in light of the masculinist culture of exploitative cell-phone videos exposed in the Steubenville rape case.

Like a number of the major
players, Teresa's story is poignant, though Gondry doesn't put enough trust in
it, leaving the bus for a number of flashbacks–also presented as cell-phone
videography–that are obviously meant to serve as escape hatches, formal
timeouts from the conceptual space of the bus without having to drop the
conceit. The most fanciful of these feel like relics as much as the Young
MC-mobile from the credits, and ought to have been dispatched as unceremoniously.
As the two-headed title suggests, The We and the I is a film in conflict with its own instincts;
it doesn't all hang together, yet that's arguably part of its charm.

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