What Happened Was
Two of my absolute favorite films of all time, albeit for very different reasons, are My Dinner with Andre and Before Sunrise. Both of these films, which I highly encourage you to watch more than anything else I talk about if you haven't already done so, are about the enchantment and sucker of one single really interesting conversation. The two films diverge pretty heavily from there. My Dinner with Andre is a film about work, fulfillment, and status. And Before Sunrise is a film about youth in love. But the beauty in both comes from not just their simplicity and formless structure, but in the recursive nature of the dialogue, just like in real life, where a pregnant pause or a sidelong glance suddenly carries with it enormous weight after understanding not just the comment but the 75 minutes preceding it.
What Happened Was is interested in that last thing too. And in the unraveling of yourself that happens when you spend time being intimate in a literal sense with anyone. But is more interested in a funhouse mirror look at the human psyche. And has perhaps more cynical and caustic things to say about the way people express themselves through others. Our dual protagonists are a paralegal and an executive assistant. Both seem a little off, but not wholly so. And then, over the course of the worst first date in the world, we watch the characters reduce themselves to mania.
This is an uncomfortable film to watch. Rather than transposing yourself into Andre and his counterpart, or Jesse and his counterparty, you find yourself just kind of internally screaming on behalf of both characters who have a Lynchian sense of bizarre behavior. In terms of inspiration, this draws more from Waiting for Godot than Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The dread you feel is less from a place of sadness and understanding and more from a sense of shock and increasing bewilderment. And to that extent, it flatly did not work for me quite as much as I hoped.
But as in all two-part plays, the film ends with two monologues, one from each character, where they lay bare the things that at that point are almost nakedly obvious to us, the viewer. And while I can't say either monologue or scene was particularly well written, I will say that both of them will stick with me for a long, long time. (I'm not sure the preceding seventy minutes earned those monologues, but that's a point beside.)