BLACK BEAR
Aubrey Plaza, Sarah Gadon and Christopher Abbott retreat to a remote lake house and turn on each other in Lawrence Michael Levine’s Trump-era metathriller, Black Bear. Total Film talks stir craziness with the writer/director and cast.
Aubrey Plaza becomes Aubrey remote lake house.
Black Bear is the sort of film that evades easy categorisation. It doesn’t have a narrative in the strictest sense. The actors play multiple roles, and are often lying about their identities within those roles. It is a dark, meditative, meta-nightmare that is often laugh-out-loud funny, and yes, there are several actual bears in it. There’s no neat solution that unlocks exactly what is going on.
Even the writer/director Lawrence Michael Levine at times feels unclear as to what he actually made. “When I was writing it, I didn’t know where I was going,” he tells Total Film.
“I had a lot going on in my personal life and a lot that I wanted to purge and things just kind of rolled out of me. I didn’t really know where the story was going… I surprised myself.”
Levine has been working as an actor and filmmaker for years, but Black Bear is undoubtedly his darkest work. He’s been known for gentler fare, still genre-bending and experimental at times, but with a lighter, more comedic touch, not miles away from the work of Joe Swanberg or the Duplass brothers. Black Bear was a departure from that style, born of time he took to reconnect with his creative spirit. This period of unbridled creativity for Levine came in early 2017, just after Donald Trump’s inauguration when, for many Americans, the society they lived in felt dark, tumultuous and filled with conflict.
“I think you can feel the cloud of that time, the chaos of that time in the movie. It was a bad time for me personally, and for the world it seemed like a dark, chaotic time.”
The result is an experimental thriller/ comedy/drama played out in a remote house in upstate New York when indie filmmaker Allison (Aubrey Plaza) arrives to stay with Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and his pregnant girlfriend Blair (Sarah Gadon). From minute one, the tensions are palpable. There’s a clear attraction between Allison and Gabe, and a competitiveness between the two women, with Blair falling into the emasculating nag role and Allison the ‘cool girl’. This all is further exacerbated by the tempestuous state of Blair and Gabe’s relationship, which is filled with constant digs and humiliations.
“It was coming at the end of a period where I had done a lot of work for hire,” continues Levine. “I’d worked with Hollywood studios and production companies, et cetera. The work I did for them was much more collaborative and conventional and workshopped and outlined. A lot of times you emerge from that process with excellent work, but it didn’t feel free or joyful or particularly personal. After five years of doing that, I wanted to go back to
my roots, to the movies that made me want to make films in the first place, and see if I could make something personal, artistic, creative.”
Despite singling out Korean director Hong Sang-soo as an inspiration (“He’s really playful with form and he does cool stuff with narrative”), Levine’s major frame of reference for Black Bear chimes closely with the relationship drama at its core – he points to John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh and Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage as key influences.
Room for interpretation
Gadon describes the set-up: “They’re all kind of awful. They’re all on their worst behaviour. They’re all bringing out the worst in each other.” It’s a tightrope to walk, to make viewers want to stick with characters like that. “Larry still manages to do it in a smart enough and funny enough way where you don’t want to just shut the movie off,” smiles Gadon. “Blair and Gabe, they’re cooped up with each other living in this bubble, and it’s not just that it’s Aubrey’s character – just the wind blowing could have broken them. But there’s passive-aggression and chauvinism between the two women too. And it’s uncomfortable to talk about, but I think a lot of women relate to that more than they would love to admit.”
The back and forth between Gabe and Blair is shockingly cruel but at times darkly funny, like a millennial spin on Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? The experience of discomfort in the company of an acrimonious couple is a universal one, but Levine uses it as way to speak to a larger societal conflict.
“I’ve been with many couples like that,” he says. “I don’t know that I haven’t been that couple. Maybe not now, but I’ve been in therapy for 15 years. I don’t know what was going on 15 years ago! In 2017, it felt like men and women were at each other’s throats and people were attacking their own. There was a lot of helplessness where people felt like something devastating had happened and they had no outlet to express their rage, so they did it with people around them. There were a lot of fraught conversations in the Trump era.”
What unfolds is unpredictable, but it never leaves the confines of the secluded estate. The house, much like The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, is a character in itself and seems to have its own motives. In a time of lockdown and quarantines, its isolation seems even more profound.
Finding the perfect location was not something Levine was willing to compromise on. “We needed a house that had three separate structures, each of which a lake was visible from, where no other house was visible either,” he explains. “This was the only house we found where we wouldn’t have had to cheat, which would have been difficult, particularly since we shot the second half of the movie in a very verité style.
It was really the only place we found, and it was very inconvenient. It was eight hours from New York City, there was no wifi, there was no phone
“It felt like men and women were at each other’s throats and people were attacking their own.” Lawrence Michael Levine
reception, it was solar-powered. There were various issues because of the house, but it was worth it.”
Black Bear demonstrates what Aubrey Plaza is capable of. After her iconic sarcastic performance as April Ludgate in Parks & Recreation, she has shone as a wannabe Instagram influencer in Ingrid Goes West, a foul-mouthed nun in The Little Hours and Lenny the nightmarish Shadow King in Legion. But in Black Bear (which she also produced) she gives what could be the performance of her career, and is already earning critical acclaim. She and Levine had previously acted together in an episode of the Netflix show Easy, where they bonded over a shared sardonic sense of humour and serious approach to acting.
“When we were doing the episode of Easy, the episode had nothing to do with our relationship as characters, it was just like a farce,” Plaza warmly recalls. “But he would ask me if I wanted to do intimacy exercises on the lawn, which made me laugh, but it also impressed me because I like taking acting really seriously. I’m a theatre nerd, I am into Meisner exercises and all that stuff. It made me understand how Larry thinks about performance. He’s a rare one.”
By all accounts, the shoot – in a remote location, over weeks of night shoots – was not an easy one, but the resulting film is a fascinating one-off. Space is given to interpretation, and your reading of events may depend on your personal experience, and could vary with repeat viewings.
For Gadon, it is that element of the film she enjoys the most. “It is very interesting to see different reactions from the audience,” she ponders. “Obviously, there’s a lot of discussion about, ‘What does it all mean?’ But for me, it’s even more interesting to ask, ‘Who did you identify with?’ Because I think it’s so telling for where you’re at in your own life.” Whatever it is you take from Black Bear, it will likely include a desire to see whatever nightmare Levine dreams up next.
BLACK BEAR IS RELEASED IN CINEMAS AND ON DIGITAL IN SPRING 2021.