“L for Leisure,” the debut feature of Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman, comedically embraces the lives of graduate-student wanderers buzzed on critical theory and conspicuous consumption. By way of a series of interlocking episodes, the film, shot in
16mm, follows a loose group of characters (played mostly by friends of Horn and Kalman, including filmmakers Benjamin Crotty and Mati Diop) through their various holiday vacations during the 1992–93 school year. The plot, or what little of it there is, wends through deadpan discussions of everything from Francis Fukuyama’s essay on the end of history to the word mellow as an acceptable and even radical lifestyle choice. Think Warhol’s superstars if they all had comparative-lit degrees.“I think we’re trying to do a satire where the filmmaker and the viewer are implicated in the satire,” Kalman says. “The film fluctuates between this being an identifiable way to behave and exist in the world and then suddenly having the viewer feel totally distant from it. We don’t simply keep the characters at a mocking distance.”Horn and Kalman met in 2002 while undergrads at Columbia University
and started making films after Horn’s uncle gave her a 16 mm camera. “Neither of us had made films before that,” Kalman says, explaining their lo-fi aesthetic. “We weren’t film majors. We learned everything by working together.” The tone of their films was developed over a number of years, Kalman explains, during which time the duo produced a web series called “Halloween Face” and a short narrative feature, about college-age kids ridiculously searching for the Fountain of Youth, called “Blondes in the Jungle.” The latter’s screening at
the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2010 gave them their first exposure, and indirectly influenced “L for Leisure.”“Sometimes we felt that people misunderstood “Blondes in the Jungle,” as if it were making fun of how stupid the characters were,” Kalman says. “So we thought, What if we do the same kind of satire, but this time make the characters unimpeachably smart. Here, there’s no question that they’re supposed to be functioning smart people in the world.” The laughs in “L for Leisure” are more reminiscent of sketch-comedy showcases such as MTV’s “The State” and “Kids in the Hall,” which skewered the absurdity of contemporary tropes through a highly specific play with language and not-so- secret love for what they were making fun of. The jokes in “L for Leisure” don’t have punch lines. Instead, the film finds its comedy in the banality and sincerity of its subjects, who are equally serious about debating the merits of race as a social construct as they are in declaring their love for Snapple and staging an impromptu fashion show with leftover denim samples.While the film’s approach is out of
step with current fashions — “L for Leisure” is devoid of contemporary independent cinema’s acceptance of naturalism as a virtue — Kalman rejects the idea that it
is nostalgic for the period they depict. “I think it’s nostalgic, if anything, for the cinema of the early ’90s, when there was an enthusiasm for a more DIY aesthetic,” he says. The setting is a vehicle to explore certain ideas floating through academia and specific character types existing in popular culture in the ’90s. “Those are elements that are fun to work with, more than it being about wanting to go back
to that time,” Kalman says.Fun is the operative word here. “L for Leisure” places an importance on entertainment in a world of low-budget film- making that is dominated by clichéd narratives of millennial heartbreak and self-realization. The bizarre stylistic
clash that Horn and Kalman create is difficult to categorize, and their films are better for it. When asked about future projects, Kalman affirms they’re continuing to explore a similar tone, but with one caveat: “Things might get weirder.” A version of this article appears in the May 2015 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
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