Photo Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

At this year's much quieter, much warmer Sundance Film Festival, filmmakers Lynn Shelton, Ben Kasulke and Nat Sanders made a habit of closing out a number of bars with a celebratory “Humpdance.” It was always a needed moment of levity, considering that no joke, the last couple months of have been kind of a downer. The election got us all riled up into an hourly news-checking frenzy just in time for the media to scrutinize the knuckles of every Wall Street sucker punch. We residents of Bummer City needed at the festival a good laugh. To the rescue was the film made by these three celebrators, a film thats intelligence transcends the question that drives it: “Are you man enough to bone a dude?”

That’s an accurate if simplistic way to dive into the Magnolia-acquired Humpday, which premiered to a packed, boisterous house at the Eccles Theater. Her third feature, replete with performances by state-of-the-art, painstakingly researched and assembled improv machines Mark Duplass (Baghead), Josh Leonard (The BlairWitch Project) and newcomer Alycia Delmore, Shelton's work is a layered study of self-definition/delusion, relationships and masculinity.

“It’s about the reunion of two old college buddies, Ben and Andrew, who haven’t seen each other for years. Somehow, within 24 hours of being in each other’s company again, they manage to box themselves into a mutual dare to have sex with each other on film. For an “art project”. Which wouldn’t be so radical or weird except for the fact that Ben’s married, and both guys are about as straight as straight can be.

"The film’s about fear of conformity; of not living up to your own image of yourself; about long-term romantic relationships; about a certain kind of male friendship between two guys who adore each other but who also bring out the most absurdly competitive aspects in each other.”

-Lynn Shelton, Spout.com 1/16/09

The tension sustained across the film’s full 90 minutes comes not so much from the will-they-or-won’t-they but from the unknown degree to which Ben and Andrew will bruise each other and their relationships in the process. Although there were predetermined story points, there was no scripted dialogue for the film. Much in the way she approached last year's Independent Spirit-nominated My Effortless Brilliance, Shelton trusted in the comic backgrounds and emotional honesty of her actors. What she writes, she's said in the past and repeated during a Q&A of the screening at Sundance, could never compare to what the actors organically came up with.

Out of necessity then, the performance and shooting styles fell deftly in sync. Humpday was shot in ten days with a two camera set-up using the HVX200, a Panasonic prosumer HD model that still holds its own against both newer and cheaper HD platforms. Largely foregoing elaborate camera moves and complex composition for the sake of a tighter lens’ scrutiny, Kasulke skillfully tailored his cinematography to Shelton’s narrative. The well-planned medium-close to reverse-shots trap every sublime nuance from Duplass, Leonard and Delmore. The coverage was a logistical necessity given Humpday’s abundant improv, although it also served to support an aesthetic choice by Kasulke. The lens on the HVX has a sort of sweet spot; it records a compressed HD format with poor resolve in wide shots, but it's possible to shallow the depth of field nicely if framing is a little tight. This also lends the film a tension-focusing layer of claustrophobia that deliciously exploits every awkward moment and is thematically in sync with the characters as they try to wriggle out of the, perhaps only slightly perceived, tightening noose of adulthood.

Coverage comprised of dirty singles enhances the strangling of the frame but also presents an editorial challenge as the shots add to gigabyte upon gigabyte takes of discontinuous improv. Without compromising, and in fact strengthening, performance, Shelton and Sanders succeed in the edit to make the cuts disappear into the film. The sculpting of dialogue and reaction is great beat-by-beat comedy and the sustaining of awkward, squirming tension twisted practically the entire Eccles theater.

To be appreciated most, however, is the way in which the film’s pacing facilitated its realism. Humpday has as much mainstream comic appeal as, if not more than, any Hollywood disaster, but the film, unlike so many others, requires no suspension of disbelief, despite its premise that could easily have come from the mind of Judd Apatow or Will Ferrel. The naturalistic performances and shooting style breath and build in scenes that are layered enough to feel never too long. In most conventional comedies, the deeper examination can come off as hokey or tacked on; here Shelton bests her wage-earning counterparts by asking the audience to think about real-world issues before she allows them to checkout from reality.

While Magnolia plans to release the film later this year, news on the film can be read at www.humpdayishere.com.