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| Mary Bronstein in Yeast |
Cast: Mary Bronstein, Greta Gerwig, Amy Judd, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, Sean Price Williams, Ignacio Carballo, David Sandholm. Screenplay: Mary Bronstein. Cinematography: Michael Tully, Sean Price Williams. Film editing: Ronald Bronstein.
Rachel (Mary Bronstein) is wound a little too tight, but her friends Alice (Amy Judd) and Gen (Greta Gerwig) are barely wound up at all: They are the very definition of "slackers." And that's the relationship that plays out through Bronstein's itchy movie Yeast. The more Rachel tries to get Alice and Gen to straighten up their lives, the more passively aggressive they become. Yeast runs for a mercifully brief 78 minutes -- I say "mercifully" because I don't know how much longer I could take having my nose rubbed, via hand-held camerawork and extreme closeups, in the lives of these dysfunctional young women. Which is not to say that Bronstein didn't succeed, maybe just short of brilliantly, at giving a portrait of millennials uncertain where they fit in the scheme of things they were thrust into. It's easy to dismiss Yeast as just another "mumblecore" movie, proudly low-budget, improvised, and unstructured, and the presence of Gerwig and the Safdie brothers (in a loopy cameo) reinforces that. But there's a real poignancy at the film's end, when Rachel, irritating as she can be, finds herself alone.
