Showing Up

After two unsuccessful attempts to include SHOWING UP in the Unknown Pleasures program, the film is now finally available. „Films about artists and the art life rarely grapple with the everyday business of what artists do – or, in their procrastination, don’t do. That’s why Kelly Reichardt’s SHOWING UP is such a revelation – and, as a wry departure in this writer-director’s career, such an outright pleasure. Reichardt’s films have often been touched with humour, but here she has made an out-and-out comedy – although characteristically, a philosophical, laidback, melancholic one. It’s set in Portland, Oregon – an enduring bastion of US counterculture – where struggling sculptor Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is planning her own show. Committed though she is, she is easily distracted by life’s inconveniences: her troubled brother (John Magaro); her cranky father (Judd Hirsch) and his freeloading house guests (a delicious comic turn by Amanda Plummer and Matt Malloy); an egotistical, negligent landlady and fellow artist (Hong Chau); and a pigeon which enters Lizzy’s life at the worst possible moment. As taciturn, tight-wound Lizzy, Reichardt regular Williams shows a whole new deadpan comic side to her talent, as the director’s focus on the ordinary and the uneventful opens up a rich vein of comic nuance and even, at times, joyous farce.“ (Jonathan Romney)