Date Number One.

Few online evangelists for DIY filmmaking and distribution have been as zealous as Sujewa Ekanayake. Besides spreading the good word on MySpace and indieLOOP, he also blogs, naturally - DIY Filmmaker Sujewa, just as naturally - and hosts Indie Features 06, where around 20 indie filmmakers swap hard-earned tips. His campaigning skills, then, can hardly be called into question. But eventually, put-up-or-shut-up time rolls around: What about the film? Does Sujewa's first feature, Date Number One, warrant all the noise?

New Yorkers will be able to judge for themselves this Thursday, August 31, when DN1 screens at the Two Boots Pioneer. I don't doubt that verdicts will vary, but, after struggling with DN1 during its opening stretch, its clumsy but genuine charm eventually won me over.

A series of loosely interrelated vignettes that will likely draw more warm smiles than out-n-out laughs from the endless comic potential of an all but unavoidable ritual, the first date, DN1's appeal has something intangible to do with its no-budget aesthetic. Intangible, undefinable, because not all no-budget aesthetics are alike. Watching the work of Andrew Bujalski, for example, or Joe Swanberg, two filmmakers who also tell stories about relationships among 20-somethings, suspension of disbelief, forgetting the distance between the characters and the actors, is easier. The atmo of DN1 reminds me a bit of a few 60s-era underground films or post-punk works like Downtown 81 or Liquid Sky, though DN1's cast of characters are a lot friendlier and live a few stories higher on the under/above ground scale. But in all three films, you never forget for a moment that the actors are trying, that there's a camera in the room, that the lines were written before spoken. The resulting sense of reality is neither Brechtian nor Godardian; the spell of the stage or the screen never needs to be broken in DN1 because it's never convincingly established in the first place. Not necessarily a bad thing, of course.

There's a sentence in Jerry Brewington's review of DN1 for Hollywood Is Talking that I find rather telling: "Story 2, 'A Romantic Dinner for Three,' was my favorite because I have to admit, I found the characters and the premise sexy, sexy, sexy." They are, but would Brewington have made the same observation in quite the same way in a review of, say, Two Girls and a Guy? The relatively slick aesthetic (emphasis on "relatively") of James Toback's film keeps us on our side of the screen, Robert Downey, Jr, Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner on theirs. In DN1, we feel we're getting to know Kamal, Sunshine and Rupa and Shervin Boloorian, Jennifer Blakemore and Dele Williams, the actors who portray them, at the same time on two parallel tracks that never quite meet. We suspect that we could, any day of the week, run into any of the six - perhaps in that inviting Kensington, Maryland bookshop where most of the film's characters hang out.

As refreshing, intentionally or not, as this reality effect is, the edges of DN1 are so rough that - and this may sound harsh, but I mean it in the best possible way - watching, I couldn't help wonder here and there whether Sujewa is something of an Ed Wood of the handheld digital DIY era. Does a joyous love of movies and their making blind him to a shot in which the camera, barely keeping up with a dialogue for all its ping-pong pans, settles on a frame that slices off half a profile? Or are such choices made precisely with the aim of retaining what's real about the scene as it plays out?

Regardless, the screenplay is witty (I particularly like the recurring references to a band's unlikely popularity in Ohio), often inventive (the story in which the first date isn't really the first date at all is particularly well-written and performed) and, even better, airy: characters are given time and space to spell out their views on abortion, Buddhism, quantum physics or the ongoing war in Sri Lanka, views that never bear the artificial markings of a Hollywood screenwriter's compulsion to reduce them to sound-bites.

Chuck Tryon's pointed out another aspect I appreciate: "I think Sujewa Ekanayake's Date Number One offers an image of urban culture that might be understood as the anti-Crash depiction of life in the city. Instead of a city or community marked by distrust and hostility between racial and ethnic groups, Sujewa's film depicts a comfortably multi-ethnic community."

Don't let the touch of quirk (to which so many us who seek out indies have become downright allergic) put you off right from start. The ninja outfit, I mean. Mark, the guy inside it (played by John Stabb Schroeder), has his reasons for wearing it and, as you come to understand them, you learn not only that DN1 has its own rhythms worth shifting gears for, but also that the other characters pulling for him to get that first date right in this supportive community are way ahead of you.

Posted by dwhudson at August 28, 2006 12:35 PM