Joe Swanberg and Adam Wingard’s Autoerotic reaches new heights in depravity, especially in its closing moments. A skillful director with comedic chops such as Will Gluck might have pulled it off. Unfortunately, this film is just a few awkward scenes tonally out of place, making up what is a narrative tsunami.
Swanberg (the film’s co-writer and co-star) has made a name for himself based on sheer volume. He’s been the most active of the “Mumblecore” filmmakers, a movement that sprung up organically throughout the country from Boston to Austin and beyond to Portland, OR. As the legend goes, all met up at South by Southwest where the term was coined likely after a few beers and some great indie rock on 6th Street. Nevertheless, the name “Mumblecore” stuck. The filmmaker’s career spans at least 7 films now with two more on the way, not forgetting 3 films that per IMDB have a “2011” copyright date. And herein lies the problem: volume is one thing, every city has a 48-hour film challenge. Just because technology allows you to make a film on a cell phone with your friends doesn’t mean you should. Terrence Malick took a 20-year break. Swanberg, only 31, can afford six months at least. After all, his films aren’t really saying anything interesting or pressing anyway.
Autoerotic, with a cast in their late 20’s and early 30’s is about the perils of monogamy; when you’re in your late 20’s sex looses the mystery (and fun). Even more so when you’ve settled down with a partner and bodily changes occur including impotency and pregnancy to name just two tackled here. I understand this, in fact the film is useful if not at times rather sad. The characters in this film are sexually frustrated. Autoeroticism (as defined as both the “practice of stimulating oneself sexually” and “sexual feelings occurring without external stimulation”) here isn’t a means of escape. After an orgasm, no matter how hard its labored for there is no happiness, as there was in the far superior comic treatment Young People Fucking.
Nor is sex used as revenge, at least until the film’s immature last act. Lives are complex; sex is only one part of life and no one seems truly happy in the other facets of their lives although we never learn what anyone does for a living. We do see various apartments suggesting the characters here are of different income levels in Chicago, although they all are at similar points in their lives. The city is also less of a character than it might have been; the film breaks up vignettes with highways and streetscapes underscored by atmospheric indie rock.
The problem isn’t so much the content as it is the execution. Excellent films have been made about couples in the bedroom (the post-yuppies, only a few years older than Swanberg’s characters, of Neil Labute’s Your Friends and Neighbors come to mind). The problem is Swanberg and Wingard’s lack the precision to steer the tone of the film properly. Many of the flaws in individual sequences come down to mixing the basic ingredients, including choices in framing. Consider a scene where a man sneaks back in to observe his pregnant wife having a session with her best friend who is acting as a sex surrogate, helping her achieve orgasm when both her husband and vibrator cannot.
The scene is a mess: what could be touching turns into something creepy and over-the-top, all due to how it is framed (long shots and extreme close-ups) and over-acted. It these flaws in the film’s plotting, scripting (although mostly improvised) and direction that allows what could have felt honest to feel false and immature. While the actors are comfortable taking off their clothes, there is a level of true intimacy achieved by great films that is missing here.
The cast includes Swanberg, his wife Kris Swanberg, Kae Lyn Shiel, Amy Seimetz, and Frank V. Ross. Autoerotic opens Friday in New York and is currently available on IFC Video on Demand.