‘Chasing Summer’ Review: Josephine Decker Directs Iliza Shlesinger

One comes to Sundance looking for novelty, for strangeness, for bold reimaginings of hoary forms. In that sense, I suppose Josephine Decker’s new film Chasing Summer fulfills a core mission of the festival. But the movie’s weirdness is so, well, weird that it flies past interesting and lands in utterly baffling. It’s among the most discordant pairings of director and material that I’ve seen in some time. 

On one side you have Decker, who made a pair of formally rigorous movies in Madeline’s Madeline and Shirley, works that nervily risk alienation in their subversion of conventional film grammar. They are singular objects, hard to grasp and yet consistently alluring. Decker then went a bit more mainstream with an adaptation of the lauded YA novel The Sky Is Everywhere, but managed to infuse its familiar love-triangle story with her deeply idiosyncratic style. (I suppose it helped that A24 produced the film.) 

She’s endeavored to do that again with comedian Iliza Shlesinger’s Chasing Summer script. Shlesinger is a popular stand-up comedian whose style is far more normie than anything Decker would seem suited for. Shlesinger is not without her oddball qualities — she often does a sort of gremlin character in her stand-up specials, for example — but the story she’s trying to tell in Chasing Summer is about as traditional as it gets: A jilted woman returns to her hometown while she figures out her life and connects with people from her past. One knows exactly what to expect from such a narrative, but then there comes Decker to seriously quirk things up. 

That’s an interesting idea, to take something rather generic and give it an artful spin. In this particular practice, though, the results are jarring, discombobulating. The banal tropes of Shlesinger’s writing are rendered even more so in this abstract framing; they are not elevated, but instead put in stark, galling relief. Chasing Summer often plays as the most peculiar Hallmark movie ever made. I want that to be a good thing, but it unfortunately is not. 

Shlesinger plays Jamie, a dedicated relief worker who has spent two decades traveling to disaster sites around the world, aiding with cleanup and support for the locals. Of course, she initially embarked on this nomadic life because she was running away from something back home, a scandal involving a boyfriend that shocked her suburban Dallas community. But, wouldn’t you know it, Jamie’s current beau dumps her in absurdly cruel fashion and Jamie winds up back in Texas, spinning her wheels for the summer until she can leave for a prestigious work assignment in Jakarta, Indonesia. (“Jakarta” is said many, many times in the film.)

Back home, Jamie finds the usual suspects: kooky Southern mom (Megan Mullaly), queen-bee former high school friends who move in a pack as if attached at the hip, her rakish ex (Tom Welling, yes the Tom Welling) whose past bad behavior doesn’t do enough to occlude his attractiveness, and a hot younger guy (Garrett Wareing) who is moony over Jamie as only hot younger guys in movies can be. Oh, and there is Jamie’s former ne’er-do-well sister, Marissa (Cassidy Freeman), who bought the local roller rink, where Jamie picks up some part-time work. 

As the various plots of Chasing Summer develop, we are treated to a bevy of trusty standards: the awkward “you’re back in town?” supermarket encounter, the “I’m too old to be at this party” bacchanal, the “you keep leaving so no one leaves you” heart-to-heart. It’s all stuff we’ve seen a thousand times before, but Decker is hellbent on making it new, exciting, unique. 

She mostly tries to achieve that by making her camera go crazy, ceaselessly wandering and looping. She edits with abandon, cutting frequently, often with complete disregard for continuity — especially for where actors are placed in each shot. Decker is fast and loose with tonal shifts, with abrupt changes of scene. The film often looks lovely, but its arty aesthetic is rarely harmonious with Shlesinger’s comedy. The two forces of the film regularly seem at odds with one another, as if both creators are grabbing the picture out of each other’s hands and running away with it every few minutes. 

There is something fascinating about that tension, but it doesn’t exactly make for pleasant viewing, which I think is the ultimate goal here. (Shlesinger said as much in her introduction at the premiere.) That said, some scenes work better than others. Shlesinger and Wareing have nice chemistry — maybe it’s easy to have chemistry with a friendly, horny Greek statue — and there are moments of summery melancholy that gracefully register. The premiere audience here at Sundance also laughed plenty, with a heartiness that suggests this curious experiment works well on some people. 

I, on the other hand, had an almost allergic reaction to the film’s war of tone and tempo, its clashing ambitions. Philistine though it might make me, I’d kind of rather see the totally expected version of Shlesinger’s movie — freeing up Decker to go apply her acquired-taste style to something more apt for it. But perhaps this is exactly where the director wanted to be, and she has made precisely what she wanted to make. If that’s the case, then fair enough, and godspeed. May this steadfastly bizarre stew find its satisfied consumers.