It was great, but I was ready to come home.

Narrative Feature, Narrative Competition
D: Kris Swanberg; with Swanberg, Jade Healy

By turns expansive and claustrophobic, Swanberg’s directorial feature debut is a meditative riff on the nuances of an extended, mostly unspoken conversation between two women as they travel through Costa Rica: Annie (Swanberg), still wounded from a recent breakup, and her best friend, Cam (Healy). The lovely ramble from waterfall to village to seaside seems to draw out the differences in the friends’ approaches to life and states of mind: Cam emerges as more competent and present – not depressed, in other words – while Annie is distracted, aimless, and passive. Snippets of dialogue give way to scenes that invite us to read body language, actions, met and averted glances. Ignoring the common wisdom that women are founts of emotional vocabulary and have a generally chatty approach to negotiating relationships, It Was Great floats the actually kind of radical notion that deep but inarticulate connection is not exclusively bro territory.

Thursday, March 19, 6:30pm, Alamo South Lamar

This article appears in March 20 • 2009.

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