After a long, expansive relationship has ended, what do you do? Do you come back to that person, or keep nagging them? Do you find someone new? Do you sit around, moping about those memories and taking in the ways you've changed? Or do you just wait for something to happen?

All the Real Girls is a remarkably haunting love story, where the love comes, goes away and drifts off elsewhere, and nobody is sure what to do afterwards, including the audience: Green never holds our hand, asking us to make our own meaning out of the world he's created. It's a film about harmony. Its lovers, Paul and Noel, see in each other something relective of themselves, but by the end are unable to deal with their inability to directly understand each other. This flawed harmony is all over the film -- an autistic boy opening his eyes as he is told to imagne jumping all over the world; a man about to have a child, commiserating with his ex-best friend who isn't even in his "top ten"; the old and worn but God-like auto-body worker, drinking with his hysterically regretful sister -- but the key to understanding when this harmony is in and out of tune is the central, vividly digressive relationship, one that dances, satisfies and stings alternately.

The first kiss between Paul and Noel comes at us as suddenly as it does to them, jumping from a hand to a neck to everything at once. When they talk to each other, escaping Paul's reputation, his mother, Noel's dealing with other guys, and her brother, they feel at home in a way they never had before. They want each other to be happy. Paul needed someone like Noel from the start, even if he didn't know it. The tone most girls and some of his friends take with him can be condescending and unsatisfying even if he's learned to disregard it, and out of two scenes where he dances, one as a clown and one behind Noel, teasing her but not revealing too much of himself as to become familiar, it's clear which one gave him something to remember and cherish and hold on to.

Their downfall is equally sudden. The scene at the lake moves across the dreary mist to the beat of an eerily ordinary pop song, to fall on what Noel has done to herself, creating a hazy sense of potential mistakes to be made. It could be said that the potential for Noel to escape her surroundings both drives and destroys the relationship, while Paul's is only momentarily justified. During the tempestuous scene when they can no longer understand each other, Paul falls to the ground and beats it in a cry of desperation against accepting Noel's personality. I couldn't help but be reminded here of the scene in George Washington that finds Buddy banging on the bathroom stall, covered with blood. Buddy had lost his life to the ups and downs of friendship; Paul had lost his friendship to the ups and downs of life.

And I'm still not exactly sure what it's telling me after 3 viewings, and I mean that as a compliment. The last shot, a flowing reflection of the town where the love springs, and the final question hold overwhelming resonance, because they don't just speak to multiple characters; they speak to us. Is it Noel, always present and life-giving but psychologically impenetrable? Is it Paul, always changing but always a reflection of his past actions? Is it the flow of love, life, possibility, or just time? And when it was all over, did Paul learn anything? Was the ambience worth it? Who in the story ends up happy?

The only thing I know is that I'm happy with Green's new film. In its emotional contradictions and dead ends, its confrontational romanticism and lingering poetry, it's the richest film of the new year.

1.26.03

baaab