Tribeca Reviews: ALL ABOUT NINA & STATE LIKE SLEEP

The 2018 Tribeca Film Festival slate features 44 films directed by women – 46% of the 96 titles – the highest percentage in the history of the festival. That the festival has almost achieved gender parity among its directors is one thing; that so many of these films directed by women are incredible explorations of the complexity of our emotions and the uniqueness of our experiences is another wonderful thing altogether.

Two such films celebrated their world premieres at the festival as part of this year’s U.S. Narrative Competition, All About Nina and State Like Sleep. Both films are the feature directorial debuts of talented women filmmakers and both center on complicated women trying to come to terms with tragedies in their pasts. Yet it is the drastically different ways in which these two stories are told that makes the films stand apart from one another – and from the majority of feature films currently in multiplexes.

All About Nina (Eva Vives)

The feature-length debut from writer-director Eva Vives, All About Nina is an incredibly timely look at one woman’s slow, stumbling journey to overcome a history littered with abuse. Nina Geld (a hilarious and heartbreaking Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a stand-up comedian whose racy routines involve jokes about everything from her demands that men be both strong and sensitive to her struggle with period-induced diarrhea. (Indeed.)

But her brash exterior actually hides a history of trauma; her outspoken dislike of dating, which fuels so many of her jokes, masks a deep-seated fear of intimacy as the result of the darkness in her past.

Desperate to escape her abusive, married-with-children cop boyfriend (Chace Crawford) and to finally break big on the comedy scene, Nina hightails it to Los Angeles and audition for the television show Comedy Prime, a lightly fictionalized, West Coast version of SNL. Her agent sets her up in the home of the delightfully dizzy Lake (a loony but lovable Kate del Castillo), a New Age-style author who regularly hosts fundraisers for a local cat sanctuary, and books her a few shows.

At one such show, Nina meets Rafe (a wonderfully sympathetic performance from Common), a divorcee who isn’t without his own baggage. Rafe’s unabashed honesty and open desire to get closer to Nina as a person starts to break down Nina’s emotional walls and forces her to ask herself if she’s finally ready to be happy.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s absolutely brilliant performance as Nina carries the film; whether she is onstage at a comedy club doing spot-on impressions of celebrities ordering smoothies or suffering from a panic attack while alone at Rafe’s house after a wonderful night, she is an absolute firecracker to watch. Even when Nina is engaging in self-destructive behavior, such as repeated binge-drinking or hooking up with an annoying fellow comedian, you cannot help but root for her. You may not have experienced the same extreme pain that Nina has, but you will likely be able to relate to her struggle with it nonetheless.

Nina is a woman who is damaged and hurt and flawed, but as Winstead shows us, she is no less worthy of love because of that. Vives’s script is savagely funny, with Nina’s stand-up routines being the standout sequences of the film; if Nina were a real comedian, I would be her biggest fan. The film makes your stomach hurt from laughter when it isn’t making your heart hurt from anger – a combination that might sound unpleasant but is really a mark of the highest praise.

All About Nina is a perfect companion film for another film that celebrated its world premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Karen Gillan’s The Party’s Just Beginning. Both Gillan and Vives have given us feature debuts that dig deep into their protagonists’ thick layers of emotional scarring and use comedy to explore the darkness of two young women. That these two films written, directed by, and starring women had such an emotional impact on this particular woman is no fluke. We need more stories like Nina’s to be told, and more women like Vives to tell them.

State Like Sleep (Meredith Danluck)

While All About Nina bounces along at the whipcrack pace of one of Nina’s routines, State Like Sleep is a much slower and slinkier story of a woman’s trying to come to terms with the trauma in her past – in this case, the apparent suicide of her famous actor husband. Writer-director Meredith Danluck’s background in music videos, concert tour visuals, and other innovative video projects shines through in every frame of her debut feature, which is heavy on hypnotic visuals and light on anything like a propulsive plot.

Katherine (played by the appropriately ethereal Katherine Waterston) is an American photographer who is forced to return to the Brussels flat where her husband, much-beloved Belgian actor Stefan (Michiel Huisman, who may be the most boring handsome man in the world), shot himself a year prior. Her mother (Mary Kay Place) went to Brussels to pick up the pieces in Katherine’s stead, but when she suffers a stroke, Katherine has no choice but to cross the pond and come face to face with Stefan’s coolly manipulative mother Anneke (Julie Kahner), who resents Katherine for usurping her prime place in her son’s heart, and the mess he left behind.

Before Stefan’s death, his marriage to Katherine was in the process of falling apart thanks to a scandal involving paparazzi photos of him with a mysterious woman and his heavy drug use. Katherine is determined to identify the woman in the photos and to learn whether or not she had any connection to Stefan’s suicide. Her quest leads her to an underground club run by Emile (a seductively sleazy Luke Evans), who claims to have been Stefan’s closest friend despite Katherine having never heard of him.

Katherine delves deeper into Stefan’s apparent double life in the Brussels underworld and starts to question whether or not he was truly responsible for his own death. She also finds herself inexplicably drawn to Edward (Michael Shannon, wonderfully cast against type here), a lonely American in the hotel room next door.

Thanks to truly engaging performances and Christopher Blauvelt’s darkly atmospheric cinematography, which drags the audience deep down the noir rabbit hole alongside Katherine, one is easily lulled into State Like Sleep despite the central mystery lacking interest. This is mainly because Stefan, as depicted through several flashbacks, doesn’t seem like anyone worth caring about as much as Katherine does.

Katherine herself, on the other hand, is a magnetic presence in a variety of impossibly stylish loose tops and long coats in shades of black, white and grey – I found myself lusting after every item of clothing the trendy photographer wore throughout the film. But it’s not just the cool wardrobe that makes Katherine worth watching; Waterston does a great deal with a script that doesn’t give her much. She and Shannon have delightfully surprising chemistry as two lonely Americans far from home and looking for comfort in each other. There are touches of Lost in Translation in their coupling, except both of them are far more likable and engaging that the two lonelyhearts at the center of Sofia Coppola’s acclaimed drama.

Danluck has great style as a filmmaker that harkens back to the best noir thrillers of yesteryear; she just needs to write a script with the substance to match. State Like Sleep doesn’t quite get there, but thanks to its numerous other standout qualities, one enjoys the journey nonetheless.