Left alone when her boyfriend returns to Ukraine, a young woman negotiates life in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach neighbourhood.
Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Haley Elizabeth Anderson
Starring: Kota Johan, Yuri Pleskun, Stella Tompkins, Erika Kutalia, Malkam Saunds
Could anyone ever get tired of looking at retro footage of New York? The excitement, the metropolitan detail, the colours which pop across time and space to capture an era where anything seemed possible at the very centre of the entire world. It has to be from that late '70ss/early '80s era: disco and hip-hop, comics on the newsstand, our absolute favourite Larry Cohen guerrilla filmmaking upon those hallowed blocks. Modern photography of NY doesn't have the same hazy thrill, its clear lines lacking the bittersweet hauntology of an era which literally shone golden with its urgent, urban jumble of iconography (I'm thinking of Succession, with its clean visual set and chestnut and pewter colour schemes typifying contemporary NY representation). Tendaberry, the largely impressive debut drama from Haley Elizabeth Anderson, spoils us in its opening moments, and intermittently throughout, via montage of NY chronicler Nelson Sullivan's work. Sullivan was a proto-vlogger who video-taped his existence; from his everyday life (like being sick after a ride on a Ferris wheel) to his part in the '80s NY club scene (a four word phrase which makes my soul crave). Used ostensibly as an indexical marker at Tendaberry's opening, through Sullivan's lens we witness the bleeding tones of Brighton Beach and Coney Island, Tendaberry's forthcoming loci, and back then the craic looked so good.
It is interesting to consider Sullivan, an antecedent YouTuber, within the framework of a film which centres on a Gen Z woman. Thing about Sullivan was that he was in the most exciting place on planet Earth during a cultural renaissance, knew people like RuPaul and Keith Haring, and was duly compelled by fate to chronicle his extraordinary context. However, the post-Kardashian contemporary social media dynamic became a confessional, a navel gazing narrowcast where users posted the minutia of their existence, which, despite all probability of being deeply average, laboured under the misapprehension that because something was happening to you it was of cultural import, and we were inculcated to share (if you're feeling this review relies too much on a seemingly incidental emphasis on Nelson Sullivan, it's only in keeping with Tendaberry's own interspersions of the man's work).
Thus, following the sepia of Sullivan's mise-en-scene, the detailed digital HD of Matthew Ballard's cinematography intentionally jars. We are in the same locations a generation later, but these streets are meaner: more hurried, colder, the alleys and subways home to huddled masses. We see 23 year old Dakota (Kota Johan - an amazing discovery) squabble with her mom on the phone and then voiceover about the way in which she will one day die, how she loves living in New York and how she hates New York at the same time: the sort of worries which are still philosophical at her age, yet exemplify the mode of Gen Z solipsism which typify the weaker parts of Tendaberry. Dakota sings on the subway, her voice merging with the film's jazz inflected soundtrack in moments of gorgeous synchronicity. One morning she catches the ear and eye of a brooding Ukrainian (Yuri Pleskun). The two start a relationship and instigate Tendaberry's drama.
Despite the intensity of its handheld camera and verité address, the first quarter of Tendaberry (the film is apportioned into seasonal fragments) will depend on your tolerance for the non-causal presentation of a relationship. Sex, running into the sea on a cold day, picking someone up and spinning around with them; it's all here, recounted with the same conditional presentation as an Insta reel. The film settles narratively during the "Winter" segment, wherein Yuri has to go back to Ukraine due to the conflict, leaving Dakota, broke and accidentally pregnant, alone...
What ensues is an examination of Dakota's struggle to survive in a brutal and expensive city which does not give a shit. Sullivan's work is juxtaposed by Anderson's capture of a metropolis which is cruel and uncaring, drained of the energy and colour which now mutate Sullivan's films from documentary to painful nostalgia. The mishaps are common: Dakota's cold water flat is going to be demolished to make way for a new build, customers are abusive to her in the 24/7 where she works, and she takes on nightclub employment which veers precariously close to sex work. The familiarity of these outcomes is a faithful recreation of their real life inescapability, where Dakota's generation have inherited an ongoing financial instability. Perhaps also inevitable, then, is Dakota's return to her family and hometown in the film's "Summer" chapter, which provides the film with an ending which is poignant yet credible.
Although Tendaberry is an imbalanced experience, the film's second half, with its unflinching social realism and incendiary performance from Johan, is utterly compelling: the movie which other people seem to think Anora is (I can't see the fuss, sorry). Anderson films with a sincerity and an assured eye for performance, making Tendaberry the first instalment in what will be an interesting and welcome body of work.
Tendaberry is on MUBI UK from April 25th.
