Trust me, watch Funny Face. Watch it the way I watched it — knowing absolutely nothing. Let the story wash over and surprise you. Go on the journey writer/director Tim Sutton lays out and know it’s going to be a good one. Go, now.
I’ll be right here. I can wait.
I brought a book. It’s my favorite comedy, The Fountainhead.
(Reads for about 90 minutes while softly chuckling.)
Oh, you’re back. I KNOW, right?
To the rest of you, I guess you’re just not a trusting sort of person. So allow me to try and persuade you.
“…Saul creates a masked persona and seeks vengeance.”
Funny Face tells the story of Saul (Cosmo Jarvis), a young man whose grandparents are being evicted so The Developer (Johnny Lee Miller) can build a parking lot. Enraged by the injustice, Saul creates a masked persona and seeks vengeance.
That synopsis is what you’re going to read in a festival flyer or on your favorite streaming platform. And I mean, yeah, that happens, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface of the kind of movie this is.
The romantic-crime-drama answers the question of what would happen if Mean Streets and The Joker had a baby. Then that baby grows up and, after years of prodding and coaxing, it bucks family tradition, stands up at the dinner table, screaming, “I’m not like you, I’ll never be like you!” then storms off and strikes out on their own to start an organic grocery co-op but failed because of mismanagement… or something. Ok, that metaphor got away from me at the end, but you get the idea. In its, DNA is a grimy, violence-soaked, vigilante story. But what comes out is an art film meditation on the inevitability of change, the desperate loneliness of modern city life, the human need for connection, the emptiness of unfettered capitalism, and a whole bunch of other stuff I’m sure I missed on the first viewing.
"…Sutton believes in showing, not telling."
