a year?

The two best scenes about stand-up comedy and performance art are in this film. By best, I guess I mean accurate. But so much so that it treads the same line as that Jeff Buckley song. The lyric is, oh, that was so real, but something in the way he sings it makes it sound like, oh, that was surreal. It’s a subtlety of experience that is not served well by writing about it, which is, of course, why Jeff sang it, and also why Simon Amstell made this film.

I don’t want to spend too much time on the stand-up scene, not only because it’s deeply uncomfortable for anyone who’s ever done or attended stand-up to dwell on it, but also because that same reason again. Really, it’s too real-y. Filmed in one shot from an angle akin to CCTV, a comedian’s set goes from promising to ruin in real-time. Nothing else I’ve seen comes close to scratching the potential high of a gig that goes well or the sickening lurch of a room full of adults turning against you. The final line is too good for me to repeat here.

I have less experience in performance art but not none. Seen more than I’ve done, much like writing. In this instance, everyone sits cross-legged on the floor in a blank room. A performance artist breaks through a large sheet of paper by doing a roly-poly. The audience bursts into conscientious applause. Cut to our filmmaker protagonist, struggling with his own creative and emotional blocks, listening to the performance artist chat about the work. The performance artist, chugging water and wiping away sweat, says casually that what they've just seen took her a year to make.

"A year?" he exclaims, barely containing himself. However, cursed as he is with a fine-tuned self-awareness, he immediately realises what he's done, and goes slack in the silence that he's created.

Those two scenes are worth watching the film for alone. There's also doing mushrooms and Buddhist monks and worrying about friends who have depression and clumsy infidelity and a London that I recognise. A rom-com where the rom is the least interesting element and yet! It’s still exciting and, crucially, inciting. Oh, and it’s properly com. The final line of the stand-up catastrophe and, “A year?” have scored themselves into the daily lexicon between me and my husband. Nothing like a quote to make you laugh that just sounds like talking. Now That’s What I Call Writing.

Both stand-up and performance art attract a lot of derision, most of it justified. But the way they’re shown in this film, alongside the frustrations of filmmaking, I mean - fuck. How long is a year? What should be done in one? The audacity of what it takes to make something, anything at all. The absurdity, even.

Oh, that was so real.