Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip, about an ambitious novelist (Jason Schwartzman) shamelessly self-promoting his latest literary endeavor, is like a cinematic portrait from another era. With a 16mm camera, Perry captures a nostalgic, jazz-filled feel reminiscent of the early work of Woody Allen or Whit Stillman.
In his previous film The Color Wheel, Perry was praised for comedically breaking new ground in the American independent film scene. Listen Up Philip made its world premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, where The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy praised the film as “a great leap forward for Perry.” The film went on to the 2014 Locarno Film Festival, where it brought home the festival's Special Jury Prize.
“Listen Up Philip, despite its careful attention to the tone and texture of the literary life, is not a film about artistic creation,” said Film Comment’s Max Nelson. “The hard-fought business of influence; the rifts and eddies of inspiration; the process of shaping a sentence into a kind of musical phrase; the painstaking working-out of character, plot, tone, setting, and theme: the movie deals not with these writerly gifts but with the consequences of wanting them too badly, or using them too often and too well.”
The film screens at the NYFF on October 9 and 10. Take a look at the trailer below:
NYFF Official Description:
Alex Ross Perry’s third feature heralds the arrival of a bold new voice in American movies. Even more than in his critically lauded The Color Wheel, Perry draws on literary models (mainly Philip Roth and William Gaddis) to achieve a brazen mixture of bitter humor and unexpected pathos. In this sly, very funny portrait of artistic egomania, Jason Schwartzman stars as Philip Lewis Friedman, a precocious literary star anticipating the publication of his second novel. Philip is a caustic narcissist, but the film, shot with tremendous agility on Super-16mm by Sean Price Williams, leaves his orbit frequently, lingering on the perspectives of his long-suffering photographer girlfriend, Ashley, (Elisabeth Moss) and his hero, the Roth-like literary lion Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), who himself considers Philip a major talent. A film about callow ambition, Listen Up Philip is itself remarkably poised, a knowing, rueful account of how pain and insecurity transfigure themselves as anger but also as art. A Tribeca Film release.
