PoB

It’s been a while since I posted on the blog. But here goes a hopefully standard note in the blog. Nemi’s Reviews. First up is:

Like “Raising Victor Vargas” before it, director Peter Sollett’s infinitely charming “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” captures the fleeting nature of the modern hipster youth subculture in Lower Manhattan credibly and sincerely. Casually based on the novel of the same title by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, Sollett’s deceivingly familiar love letter to the upside of adolescence takes place over the course of one brightly lit night where the stars aberrantly align to attract two very unlike individuals coming from different backgrounds whose only link is their passion for music-fuelled nights on the town in search for a good time, and their favourite [fictional] band, “Where’s Fluffy?” With music as the catalyst, alcohol as the hindrance and the idea of love taken seriously, this relatively tame teen romance is as honest and culturally in-tune as they come these days.

Nick (Michael Cera) is the forlorn, completely hetero bassist for the queercore band “The Jerk-Offs,” who all too willingly spends his days burning grade-A mix-CDs for his shallow one-time girlfriend Tris (Alexis Dziena), who disposes of them just as quickly as she seemingly did him. Playing straight into the hands of fate, or perhaps just for the sake of being otherwise, the self-doubting Norah (Kat Dennings) rescues Nick’s musical equivalent of whatever it is one uses to mend a broken heart, leading her to consider the possibility of this unknown playlist-connoisseur being her musical soul mate.

Only when the aforementioned night gets underway do Nick and Norah finally meet, just after Nick’s band’s performance of their idiosyncratic “(I Want To) Screw That Man” comes to an end, and refreshingly, it isn’t love at first sight. Their interest in one another is forged out of an act of desperation in the face of frenemy-induced adversity.

A series of misunderstandings send the pair and their colourful friends on a somewhat contrived but entertaining all-night wild goose chase to find Where’s Fluffy?’s secret show and Norah’s freakishly drunk friend Caroline (Ari Graynor, fearlessly hilarious), overcome the past, ignore the thought of the future and live solely on the rush of the unpredictable in the here and now. All that and more can be witnessed in one of this year’s most endearing comedies, guided by fate and scored by the skill of Mark Mothersbaugh and it’s perfectly fine-tuned indie soundtrack which says it all when the characters find themselves speechless.

The plot of “Infinite Playlist” is just about as thin as the skinniest iPod available, with little conflict or evidence of risk taking, but the awkward and intense chemistry of Cera and Dennings amplifies what could have been an ambient fairytale of the love-struck innocence of the otherwise precocious into something more meaningful in this day and age where sincerity is a sign of weakness, and crassness a near guarantee of a motion picture’s financial success. Both actors play roles that they have before, Cera in “Juno” and Dennings in “Charlie Bartlett,” but this time their grainy close-ups render them a little more nuanced and mature.

Instead of relying heavily on verbal fireworks, the pair’s attraction is most vividly noticeable in their eyes; his dazed gaze and her wide-eyed stare, as their interactions shift from short-lived collision-provoked introversion to admirably bold attempts to take their affections up a notch. Its title oddly alludes to the romantic screwball antics of Nick and Nora Charles of the detective comedy “The Thin Man,” but the back and forth banter between Nick and Norah as played by Cera and Dennings rings far truer in terms of it being relatable.

“Infinite Playlist” is a film that’s all about the atmosphere in which its characters, easy to sympathise with in the same way they all care about each other, are encouraged to be as candid as possible about everything from warm and gooey love to unsentimental sexual encounters without becoming righteous or didactic but that’s not to say it’s unsubstantial. It’s a snapshot that captures one night in the lives of ostensibly different young adults as they dip their toes into the uncharted waters of stimulant free mutual affection, seemingly unaffected by the harsh and insensitive city they treat as their playground.

In that regard, “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” works because of the clearly contrived, risk-free atmosphere that encapsulates its good intentions, and not despite of it. Its unforced, charming milieu becomes blurred after a short time, making a play-by-play remembrance of each scene in the film difficult. What does remain, however, are certain moments of understated, underplayed epiphanies of the teenage soul which reiterate as the soundtrack lingers, and the sweet aftertaste of a teenage-centric romance hitting almost all the right notes only getting sweeter by the minute in retrospect.