The mellowly episodic comedy screens Sunday as part of the Micro-Wave Cinema Series
Following the first annual Asian-American Film Festival this weekend across several campus venues, the Micro-Wave Cinema Series will present the lightsome L for Leisure on Sunday, October 11, at 7:00p in 4070 Vilas Hall. Contrary to any accidental association in popular literature, the micro-budget feature does not share a kinship with Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone ‘alphabet’ series, as it’s coyly disconnected from the notion of conventional narrative.
The 74-minute film, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam last year, is billed as an “impressionistic, episodic comedy about laziness, wandering and wasting time,” setting its sights on being the ultimate slacker satire about a group of graduate students who jaunt around the world in synchronicity with their 1992-1993 academic calendars. Co-directors Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman channel the independent spirit and energy of Hal Hartley’s early work, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), and Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale (1996), preferring a loquaciousness that oscillates between a playful and ironic tone, capturing the clique’s restlessness and penchant for absurdity that inevitably carries them from familiar coastal settings in New Jersey and California to exotic intercontinental sights in Côte d’Azur, France, and even Iceland.
Shot on 16mm with significant color grading to mimic the texture of the independent cinema of its inspiration, L for Leisure is complemented by an infectiously original retro synth-pop soundtrack by composer John Atkinson. In a recent A.V. Club review, critic A.A. Dowd drops an idiosyncratic reference to the classic arcade racer Cruis’n USA (1994) with regard to the loose cursive font of each episode’s stamped date and location, establishing the entire escapade as a piece of amusingly mellow nostalgia. For those who responded to Micah Van Hove’s unflinching look at hedonism in the almost free-form structure of Menthol that screened during Micro-Wave Cinema’s calendar last November, the sketches of Horn and Kalman’s film should be right up one’s alley. The two filmmakers will join host and series curator Brandon Colvin via video chat immediately after the screening for a Q&A.
- L for Leisure plays FREE on Sun, Oct 11, in 4070 Vilas Hall at 7:00p. For more information on the Micro-Wave Cinema Series, please visit their Facebook community page. The film’s trailer can be viewed below: