Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! Hey IFC First Take, I really like the majority of your movies, but will you please give me the last 83 minutes of my life back? My time could have been better spent alphabetizing my refrigerator or counting my leg hairs.
OK, now that I’ve vented my frustration a bit I can get into why I’m so frustrated. Before I start, though, I just want to point out that there are at least two other movies I was planning on reviewing before I even thought of starting this one, but I feel compelled to write this now.
Hannah Takes the Stairs focuses on the awkward, dysfunctional relationships of the film’s title character. Hannah is a 20 something living in the city and working as a writer for a TV network. Hannah, by her own admission, suffers from “chronic dissatisfaction,” which basically means that she gets intrigued by someone and draws them in with her shy, self-conscious, and artsy mystique then dates them until the first issue in the relationship and moves on to the next guy who shows any interest in her. She moves from one guy to the next while showing only the absolute minimum amount of basic human compassion.
The most likable character in the entire movie is her first boyfriend of the film, played by Mark Duplass (who was very good in the similarly filmed, but much more watchable film, The Puffy Chair), but he’s out of the movie after the first 20 minutes. The rest of the film’s tiny cast is, with very few exceptions, almost completely unlikable. One other part of this film that I wasn’t expecting was all the nudity. It opens with a shower scene and also features scenes of both male and female full frontal. Greta Gerwig, who plays Hannah, isn’t nearly good-looking enough for me to put up with there being a penis in the middle of screen for almost a full minute (and it wasn’t even a sex screen, they were playing the 1812 Overture on trumpets naked in a bath tub). Gross.
Hannah’s cinematography barely resembles a moderately capable amateur’s home movie, but that indie sensibility does lend an interesting type of realism to the film. The dialogue seems almost completely unscripted, but the extended pauses and overwhelming amount of awkward moments suck almost every iota of the entertainment factor out of the work.
Do yourself a favor and don’t bother with this one.
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