A self-reflexive origin story about creation, growth, and the myth of the lone artist, “My First Film” announces a bold, disruptive new talent in American cinema. But if the film’s release is anything like Zia Anger’s experience in the film world thus far, it will elicit a maddening whimper where it should have made a bang.
That’s because Anger, who writes and directs with fierce emotion and sincerity, has had terrible luck (if you want to call it that) on the film scene. Despite directing evocative music videos for artists like Mitski and Angel Olsen, Anger has been consistently overlooked by Hollywood, and has struggled to secure financing. Her first feature, shot on a shoestring budget with support from family and friends, was rejected from every film festival.
A caveat: even Anger looks back on that first film as “bad.” At least she implies as much in “My First Film,” an aching work in which Anger reckons with her uneasy career history by reenacting her doomed first production. Produced by MUBI, the film takes a complex form that involves time jumps, fractured images, and a fusion of fiction and real memories. Its plot, about a 25-year-old getting an abortion and directing her first feature, is direct, as are its ideas about being a woman in an unkind industry. But as the film unfolds, it evolves into a moving meditation on what it means to make something that never comes into being.
The film opens with lines of typeface on a blank screen. “I’m not sure how to start this,” part of it reads. The words are intercut with jaunty, gestural iPhone videos of Anger dancing, miming, and mooning the camera. The sequence culminates by cutting to Anger’s proxy, Vita (Odessa Young, bursting with feeling), sitting by a computer. Her fingers flutter across the keyboard. “I am really happy you are watching,” she types out, “happier than you could ever know.”
That joy soon gives way to bitterness. Narrating in voiceover, Vita recalls pitching a roomful of executives on a short film concept. Sweating in front of them, she rambles, flailing out the moves before prostrating herself on the carpet. The money people laugh and whisper to each other. “Are you married to this idea, or are you open to something more narrative?” one of them asks.
You could read “My First Film” as an ambivalent response to that question. As it excavates Anger’s early career, it is at once passionately, even fanatically, narrative — it opens, after all, with Anger/Vita dithering over where to begin, and goes on to follow a production from beginning to end — but it is also an inquiry into what cinematic narrative entails. Calling to mind modern masters like Josephine Decker, Joanna Hogg and Mia Hansen-Love, Anger pulls liberally from her own life while opening up a new mode of cinematic storytelling. Viewed through her lens, time is circuitous and the boundary between art and life is permeable, with real life always leaking in.
We meet Vita in earnest on the first day of production for her feature: a cloying movie about a small-town girl called “Always Always.” On a deserted road in upstate New York, Vita introduces Dina (Devon Ross), who will be playing her protagonist, to her small crew, made up of a jumble of friends and acquaintances. As the team prepares for their first shot, Dustin (Philip Ettinger), Vita’s manic boyfriend, takes a photo of the group. We study the picture: a bunch of kids grinning wildly, drunk on the thrill of collective creation. Their reckless enthusiasm, Anger knows, is both electrifying and a tad worrying: It forebodes a smattering of clashes that await them, as well as errors in judgment that range from minor to nearly fatal.
As the production scenes escalate, Vita periodically reflects on the experiences in voiceover. Speaking in retrospect, she analyzes what we’re seeing, offering context for the events or drawing lessons from the mistakes. The biggest one comes after an especially boisterous night of shooting and partying. “I remember thinking I was brilliant,” Vita says glumly, putting words to how, when one is young enough and hungry enough, creative ambition clouds out everything else.
These production traumas ultimately meld with more intimately distressing moments, including an abortion scene so expressively conceived and executed that it actually feels like a break from the world Anger has so far built. For although it tells of a production gone ostensibly wrong, “My First Film” is, at its core, a movie not about upheaval but about yearning — and about how, sometimes, giving that yearning up can be a beautiful, generous act of creation all its own.
Grade: A-
“My First Film” will be available to stream on MUBI starting Friday, September 6.
