Nick Alonzo’s THE ART OF SITTING QUIETLY AND DOING NOTHING

The following review of Nick Alonzo’s The Art of Sitting Quietly and Doing Nothing, which receives its World Premiere at the Nightingale Cinema this Friday, appeared at Time Out yesterday. I will be moderating the post-screening Q&A with Nick after the screening.

I’ll never forget the moment I realized that Nick Alonzo was a special filmmaker. Five minutes into his first feature, the no-budget, minimalist comedy Shitcago, the movie’s unnamed protagonist takes out his trash, pausing long enough to examine a strange stain on the side of a garbage can outside of his apartment before shrugging and heading back inside. This non sequitur is typical of Alonzo’s art: a wordless, deadpan, even mundane sequence that somehow also becomes inexplicably funny. For the few who saw it, Shitcago seemed to announce the arrival of an original and quirky self-taught filmmaking talent whose style felt not just confident but, curiously (considering he was still a college student in his early 20s at the time), fully realized. Alonzo’s second feature, The Art of Sitting Quietly and Doing Nothing, which has its World Premiere at the Nightingale Theater on Friday, May 5, is a more ambitious film, narratively and aesthetically, that confirms Alonzo’s status as a director to keep an eye on.

The Art of Sitting Quietly and Doing Nothing begins with the unforgettable image of a man masturbating beneath a blanket in the woods. He stops long enough to swat a mosquito on his face then, while writing in his diary shortly afterwards, expresses a fear of having contracted the zika virus. This impulsive young man, Carl (newcomer Alex Serrato), is a Chicagoan who has chosen to live in the woods indefinitely after having been dumped by his girlfriend, Gloria (actress/filmmaker Alycya Maganas), a tragedy revealed through flashbacks. The bulk of the narrative consists of Carl, armed only with a backpack containing a few meager supplies (matches, magic mushrooms, a book titled How to Survive in the Woods), attempting to commune with a “natural” world he is hilariously ill-equipped to deal with. Bolstered by beautiful cinematography of forest preserves in the near-suburbs (the vibrant greenery of which provides a dramatic contrast to Shitcago’s black-and-white cityscapes), an evocative score by Daniel Fromberg, a delightful animated sequence by Dominique Bloink and a surreal scene involving a person in a gorilla suit, this is microbudget cinema at its most idiosyncratic, personal and rewarding.

For more information about the World Premiere of The Art of Sitting Quietly and Doing Nothing visit the Nightingale’s website.