Obvious Child

Obvious Child is the legitimate bouncing daughter of Sarah Silverman and Girls. Like Silverman, heroine Donna is a standup comedian whose schtick is the female genitalia and other bodily functions normal and irregular. Onstage Donna pours out what previous generations were trained to suppress. She carries embarrassing candour to the max. 

From Girls comes the graphic exploration of the contemporary single woman’s anxieties, sexual, personal and social. Only when she’s dumped, drunk and broken-hearted does her performance lose her audience. Otherwise her comic candour endears her to the crowd. The closing of the classic Leftie bookstore is an emblem for the new cultural climate, which replaces the old progressive and collectivist values and securities -- e.g., gender roles, manners -- with the hookup culture. There a guy breaks up with his girlfriend in the bar toilet. Beyond friendships there is no sense of communal responsibility. In a parody of community, Max's new game machine  turns the phone into a video game competition. Girls has supplanted Little Women.

Donna and her one-night stand manage to develop an intimate relationship despite having drunken premature sex, mutual misunderstandings and his unwittingly (How can I put this delicately?) knocking her up. Later they claim to dislike romantic comedies but this is a romantic comedy — with grit, like the coffee/boyfriends the gay MC Sam claims to prefer. The film stretches the classic sterilized comic form to include farts, belches, diarrhea, co-ed urinating al fresco and abortion. Pillow Talk this ain’t. But like Gone With the Wind, which the couple watches for the first time at the end, it traces the independent young woman’s growth from young flippancy into an indomitable survivor. 

Max and Donna may seem like an odd match but they work. He’s a bright, earnest business exec — who shows unusual heft by having read Robert Botero’s The Savage Detectives — but he’s open to sharing her zaniness. He’s smart enough not to be put off by her embarrassing drunken performance — and sensitive enough to deny having seen it. Donna may seem flighty but she is extremely earnest about making her theatre an honest personal expression. The serious guy and playful gal are a reversal of Donna’s separated parents. Her father is a manchild puppet-maker, mom the no-frills business professor.
     This superb film has a remarkably frank script, uniform quality in performance and an honesty and candour about modern “romance” that is most bracing. Writer/director Gillian Robespierre is a new talent to watch.