What if you could hire a doppelganger to solve your responsibilities while you dedicate yourself to another activity? It is the logline for Serious People, the directorial debut of Pasqual Gutierrez, which he co-directs with Ben Mullinkosson. Gutierrez is a prestigious music video director, having directed videos for The Weeknd, Madonna, and Playboi Carti. Gutierrez also worked with the Toronto-based musician in Sacrifice, Take My Breath, Save Your Tears, Out of Time, and Too Late. He’s also directed videos for Bad Bunny and Rosalía, two of the boldest artists in the current music industry. Meanwhile, Mullinkosson‘s last work, The Last Year of Darkness, had been distributed by MUBI and received rave reviews from critics. Consequently, Serious People is the collaboration of two talented young directors making their names in the film industry.
The film has a documentary-like aesthetic. Gutierrez plays himself. He is a successful music video director, and his wife, Christine Yuan (also plays herself), is expecting their first child. When Drake and his label, OVO, approached him and his partner to direct a video for them around his baby’s due date, Pasqual has to decide whether to be present at his daughter’s birth or direct the most crucial work of his career. He surges with a non-orthodox solution. The director searches Craigslist for people to act as him for the video shoot while he is in the hospital with Christine. He finds Miguel (Miguel Huerta), a hard-working young man from East LA, who looks exactly like him. The duo starts rehearsing for the crucial moment, even though his look-alike knows nothing about direction.
In a sense, Serious People seems like an absurd joke. Those you tell at a bar, “What if I hire someone to become me for a week, while I go on vacation?” It sounds ludicrous. Yet, the directing duo Gutierrez & Mullinkosson creates a fascinating study of absurdity and limit. How far along can a nonsensical idea go? Both of them attempt to answer it. Firstly, the film is both a naturalistic and an idealistic portrait of LA. The cinematography by Nick Bupp and Neema Sadeghi utilizes angles that mimic the non-fiction style, an utter realism. At the same time, the shots of Pasqual driving his vintage BMW coupe down the sunny streets of California look dreamy, as they capture the routine life in the entertainment capital of the world. It is almost an ideal perception of what people expect from the city: Hollywood, famous people, cool stuff, and a bunch of money. However, the comedy’s irony lies in the reasoning behind the central conflict. He needs a clone because he has to work. LA is an excessively pricey city to live in, and he is about to become a father. He needs to provide for his family. The solution is the most absurd idea ever.
Hence, the natural approach of filmmaking serves the idiocy of the director’s idea. Miguel is astonished by all the possibilities, while Pasqual can finally spend time with his wife. Where lies the comfort for both, also comes the imprevisibility of the look-alike. The comedy comes from the absurd. What generates the laughs is the reactions of the people around them. Pasqual’s partner is morally opposed to it, even defending his absence from his daughter’s birth. Mainly because children do not remember the first day of their lives, he would not be a bad father if he missed it. However, the insistence on the idea leads to a hilarious final act, in which Drake finally appears on our screens and the most outrageous interactions take place in a set. Miguel fails to become Pasqual and listens to his urges to direct the Canadian rapper, resulting in laughs and shock. The final scene alone justifies the emotional involvement of this film. Yet, it has so much to play with and thrives in extracting comedy from the nonsensical, which is a limitless source of inspiration in our daily lives.
In a sense, Mullinkosson goes for the opposite of his prestigious documentary here; he substitutes the neon lights in China for the warm Californian sunsets. Alongside Gutierrez, who draws inspiration from his absurd ideas and personal dilemmas, the duo crafts a small, nonsensical comedy gem. Serious People presents the pair’s ludicrous ideas while engaging the audience in a wild run through the streets of Los Angeles, where they watch the outlandish conceptions of a man attempting not to disappoint anyone around him.
Serious People is available for purchase.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
You might also like…
