The time has come to go find a TV dial and not touch it again in the retro sit-com binging oddity Life At Sandy’s, the excellent feature debut by writer/director Aleksandra Hansen. Evelyn (Heather Cunningham) is an American who has been living for the last year in Norway, taking care of her dying mother. After her mother’s funeral, Evelyn is visited by her Aunt Marit (Marianne Loge), who had skipped the service, as she never got along with her sister that much. Aunt Marit points out that Evelyn hasn’t bothered to learn Norwegian or get a job, so she needs to get on her feet. That is when Evelyn finds out her aunt owns the house her mother was living in, so she can do what she is told or jump in a fjord. Aunt Marit then takes over the bedroom while Evelyn gets the couch. Miserable Evelyn gets a part-time job at a thrift store, just Tuesday afternoons only. Her co-worker, Hanne (Thea Green Lundberg), is always hungover from going out, which Evelyn does not do.
Evelyn (Heather Cunningham) takes a phone call beside a reflective fjord in Life At Sandy’s.
“Evelyn is an American who has been living for the last year in Norway, taking care of her dying mother.”
Tired of the couch, Evelyn discovers beneath a trap door a secret room that her mother would hide in and eat chocolates. Down in the comfy quarters, she finds an old cathode ray television, along with all the episodes of a 90s American sitcom called Life At Sandy’s. Evelyn has never heard of the show and cannot find any information online for it. However, she soon becomes addicted to the old show, binging episodes day and night, watching Sandy (Amy Biedel) serve up hot cups of coffee in her coffee shop. Evelyn starts to feel like all Sandy’s customers, like the ultra-friendly Jen (Rachel Thundat), jolly muffin munching Charles (Stuart McLean), and the cutie-pie Vincent (Andrew Gabriel) are her only real friends. Then one day, after drifting off, Evelyn comes to and notices that everyone on the screen in the show was watching her sleep. They suddenly snap back to what they were doing, all the while looking at Evelyn out of the corners of their eyes…
Life At Sandy’s starts off in the weird lane right away, and stays there, jetting further into the realm of the bizarre. Hansen immediately rolls out a Lynchian soundscape of machinery behind curtains. Also, there is an ultra-creepy tone that rises from fake sitcom footage that hangs over the proceedings like a plastic fog. There are also these odd locals that keep cropping up, giving the audience another smack with the strange stick. It is this cacophony of everyday lunacy that drives Cunningham to the glass-faced narcotic of comfort television. The overdone normalcy on the sitcom characters is so soothing, compared with the constant awkwardness of actual human behavior. The constant air of quirkiness keeps the ambivalence up as to whether Cunningham is so out of place that ordinary is weird for her, or maybe everyone around her is completely f****d.
"…one of those perfect moments that justifies film as an art form."
