Life Upside Down Review: A Lockdown Comedy That Takes Half-Hearted Aim at Privilege - slantmagazine

“It’s boring everywhere,” Clarissa (Radha Mitchell) complains successful the second portion of Cecilia Miniucchi’s Life Upside Down, which is acceptable successful the aboriginal months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Minucchi’s airy satire of bourgeois illusions mines the boredom of the aboriginal weeks of lockdown for observational comedy. Quite virtually observational, arsenic the information that Life Upside Down was changeable mostly remotely, with the actors liable for their ain mobile device-based camera rigs, lends the movie a surveillant aesthetic each excessively suited to its setting.

That beingness during the lockdown took connected the drab, static prime of an representation produced by an iPhone strapped to a tripod would look to beryllium the point. Miniucchi emphasizes the quality betwixt beingness earlier and aft March 2020 by opening her movie with a roving oner, forcefully changeable by a camera that produces a considerably warmer, much cinematic representation than the aboriginal mobile-device footage. This clever opposition of ocular styles corresponds to the drollness of Miniucchi’s script, namely successful its reasonably satisfying, if not peculiarly pointed, objection of however the façades of mundane societal relations crumbled nether pandemic conditions.

In that extended changeable that comprises the prologue, we roam astir the opening of an creation show, gathering assemblage proprietor Jonathan (Bob Odenkirk), who sneaks disconnected for a quickie with Clarissa conscionable arsenic his woman (Jeanie Lim) arrives astatine the show. When he’s not successful flagrante with Clarissa, he’s courting the attraction and pocketbook of her person Paul (Danny Huston), a palmy writer and imaginable creation buyer, kowtowing to the latter’s arbitrary interpretations of abstract art.

Cut to a fewer days later, and this much oregon little mean authorities of upper-middle-class things gets turned connected its head—almost literally, arsenic the film’s rubric is introduced implicit drone footage of the L.A. skyline that rotates until up is down—when lockdowns are ordered. The illicit lovers soon find their matter impeded and unequal, with the azygous Clarissa perpetually disposable to sext and coo implicit FaceTime, and the joined Jonathan lone nabbing snippets of clip portion his woman is occupied. He’s besides increasing progressively distant from Clarissa, arsenic good arsenic anxious for the endurance of the gallery, arsenic Paul has backed disconnected from his proposition that he’d acquisition a painting.

Touch and carnal proximity whitethorn beryllium captious to the continuation of a torrid emotion affair, but it whitethorn beryllium toxic to the passionless May-December matrimony of Paul and Rita (Rosie Fellner). The pedantic pseudo-intellectual spends his days proudly boasting to his hardly tolerant woman astir his forthcoming publication of what sounds similar the astir banal of each imaginable governmental commentary: The Dangerous Stupidity of Those successful Power. Huston turns his earthy affability into oblivious smugness, arsenic a antheral truthful brimming implicit with complacent self-satisfaction that helium doesn’t look to announcement that his woman either doesn’t attraction oregon doesn’t recognize his facile governmental tracts.

Huston’s overconfident Paul nicely complements Odenkirk’s crook arsenic the harried assemblage owner. Jonathan, a somewhat toned-down mentation of Odenkirk’s smarmy Saul Goodman, tries to food the neglected Clarissa up connected speedy trips to instrumentality retired the trash, retired of the show of his wife, whom we lone drawback glimpses of successful the background. Clarissa, arsenic the reasonably sane quality who knows some men, serves arsenic the implicit point-of-view quality connected these 2 outsized masculine egos. And portion waiting done Jonathan’s hollow reassurances, she besides notices, seemingly for the archetypal time, her eccentric but attractive-enough tenant, Darius (Cyrus Pahlavi), successful the yard.

Minucchi toggles betwixt these 3 stories similar she’s selecting antithetic Zoom windows, giving america peeks astatine however L.A. bougies went astir losing and reconstructing their comforts successful the aboriginal days of the pandemic. Tucking the wide class’s demonstrably liable information measures and coping mechanisms into the margins of these fly-on-the-wall shots, Minucchi brings america backmost to the days of going for runs successful cloth masks. And the movie has a prescient oculus toward however silly specified concisely lived practices would look 3 years later; a gag involving a pasta shaper arsenic a supremely meaningless day contiguous earns its chuckle/groan of recognition.

Sometimes, though, it’s evident that this vulnerability of the pettiness of these affluent characters’ motivations comes from a spot of privilege itself. Life Upside Down takes spot successful an ensconced beingness wherever everyone has the latest iPad, but nary 1 appears to usage theirs to interface with the catastrophe unfolding successful the conception of the satellite wherever radical can’t spend caller pasta makers for their estranged lovers. The characters’ solipsistic absorption connected their ain middle-age ennui portion the satellite burns astir them doesn’t itself go an entity of critique.

While it offers a bemusing and intelligently constructed look astatine the ways beingness was altered for a prime fewer whose beingness was already based connected smoke, mirrors, and forced readings of abstract art, Life Upside Down could purpose with a spot much precision astatine the terms of its characters’ evident comfort. Its ending suggesting the cyclical quality of the presumption quo is hardly delivered arsenic the people critique it astir apt should be, and this makes immoderate of its easygoing wit work retrospectively arsenic glibness. Though possibly this depiction of an fundamentally unperturbed ruling people dusting itself disconnected aft a flimsy pandemic ends up suggesting, if inadvertently, that lone the gyration could truly crook their heavy fortified lives upside down.