So Pretty (Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, 2019)

A film so hybridized as to at times feel amorphous, So Pretty is nonetheless a singular, often hypnotic artifact. It is a highly formalized cinematic examination of a tight-knit group of friends and their daily experience of the permeability between art and life, research and the simple act of existing. At times resembling a documentary about an artists' collective that is spilling over into a parallel, diegetic-fictional universe, So Pretty is above all an act of translation and reclamation, a performance of text that is simultaneously giving shape to the lives of the performers themselves.

At the center of the group, and the film, are Tonia (writer / director Dunn Rovinelli), a German artist, and her boyfriend Franz (Thomas Love), an American academic. They are working on a translation of the German novella So Schön by queer cult writer Ronald M. Schernikau, which will be read and performed in Central Park. But they and their friends also seem to be adapting their identities, to some extent, both to and from the Schernikau text, as though the relationship between ordinary life and textual representation was one of dual exchange. Within their shared apartment and through their time spent together, Tonia, Franz, and their friends Paul (Edem Dela-Seshie), Erika (Rachika Samarth), and Helmut (Phoebe DeGroot) perform, compose music, protest encroaching American fascism, go dancing, and fall into each others' arms in twos and threes, all the while allowing Schernikau's text to serve as a guiding refrain.

It its treatment of the material facticity of bodies, So Pretty is both casual and striking, both paying close attention to the beauty and uniqueness of trans embodiment and making no special claims for it. As Dunn Rovinelli has noted, she does not use the words "queer" or trans" in the film, and So Pretty invites us into a small enclave of radicals without feeling any need to make accommodation for a hypothetical cis viewer. At the same time, near the end of the film (after Franz and Tonia have taken up with other lovers), Tonia speaks frankly to Helmut about how being alone has prompted her to see her own body in the mirror and feel a disconnection, as of she were no longer sure who she was looking at. Although the words Tonia chooses bear the echoes of dysphoria, they also seem to align with the Lacanian mirror stage. And this is one of the dualities that makes So Pretty such a remarkable film. The absolute specificity of trans* experience is asserted, while at the same time that experience is shown, time and again, to be contiguous with the basic human condition. 

In terms of Dunn Rovinelli's aesthetic project, I feel as though I can identify a number of possible antecedents and family resemblances. There is a basic tension between the relaxed vibe of the apartment and the highly deliberate, formalist camera moves -- slow lateral pans and, most often, 360º circular maneuvers. It is as though languor is being given a shape and a container. Chantal Akerman's cinema comes to mind, as well as other filmmakers inspired by her work, such as Helena Wittmann. And in her frank examination of free-flowing sexuality, Dunn Rovinelli seems to be tapping into the energies of Jack Smith.

But above all, So Pretty draws its raison d'être from Schernikau. As the critics Ben Miller and Nicholas Courtman discuss in the LA Review of Books, So Schön is a work characterized by the description of a vivid gay demimonde in simple, almost incantatory terms:

[So Schön is] striking in its reduction of syntactical and lexical complexity and its  frequent use of childlike, tautological repetitions. Taken together,  these stylistic features help create an atmosphere of warmth,  familiarity, enclosure, even gentleness. The narrative focuses on the  minute details of the four protagonists’ relationships: the way two  lovers speak in a crowded bar, the beautiful moment of hesitation one  shows when drying himself after the shower, the vulnerability one shows  in a post-coital embrace. Schernikau wishes to affirm these moments of  care, beauty, and concern.

In the performance that Tonia, Franz, and the group construct, and in Dunn Rovinelli's film itself, a dialectic is achieved. The tender minutia of Schernikau's world are turned into a public declaration. The most private of gestures are made public, as an act of defiance, in the face of a political moment that demands invisibility, if not utter erasure. In its inward, non-emphatic way, So Pretty is a forceful scream from the beautiful world.