“We create this snapshot of this moment in time and we go onto the next issue,” Mickey (Jake Lacy) says in “Magazine” of what the work is that he does as editor-in-chief of the Platten Magazine, words that clearly resonate with Nora (“Palm Trees and Power Lines” standout Lily McInerney), a summer intern, and were likely said in some variation to writer/director Alexandra Pechman when she was in a similar position when her directorial debut takes that idea to heart. A vivid, beautifully melancholy postcard from New York publishing industry circa 2011, the film lives up to the idea of seizing something transitory and abstract as it spends a precious few months with Nora finding the joys of a collective project such as a quarterly literary journal as well as the disappointments that come with its limitations, especially when it is temporary, unpaid gig.
Pechman acknowledges it’s usually only the privileged that can take such an entry-level role at a tastemaking publication, the start of its unerring authenticity when it eschews a more conventional – or ingratiating – narrative that Nora gets a foot in the door by sheer grit alone – she may not come from immense wealth, but definitely has the cushion of an upper middle-class upbringing not to sweat a summer in New York. More importantly with her porcelain features, she wouldn’t look out of place at a party where she would seem to be a more valued part of the brand than at the rotating desk she inhabits with other interns Tabitha (Lukita Maxwell), Leonard (Daniel Zolghadri) and eventually Greer (Ruby Cruz). It’s dispiriting to find all her fancy college degree is good for is preparing coffee in the morning and getting the occasional assignment to fact check an article, and although the office is tucked into a tiny brownstone, the distance between their station and that of Mickey’s in the back seems immeasurable. All are timid to take even the few steps to meet those even in the middle such as Thomas, an assistant editor, and Tess, an editorial assistant, and discouraged from daring to think about parlaying their internship into a full-time position to sit alongside them when a job on the small staff is unlikely to open up.
If it were someone outside the industry telling the story, this could be assumed to lead to competition, but Pechman could know from experience that camaraderie is equally possible when the specific job is often less desired no matter how prestigious it is than to have a greater handle over the future, which bonds the group of interns in a shared sense of uncertainty even if they are always clocking who’s up and down in their boss’ estimation, usually answering not to Mickey, who will slink in late to the office after late nights he can justify as publicizing the brand, but his second-in-command (AnnaSophia Robb), who does much of the work and gets little of the credit. Also having an all-too-rare female lens, the filmmaker also shrewdly subverts the other obvious engine for the drama when Nora begins a relationship out of the office with Thomas, which would be frustrating enough when she can’t deduct whether there’s actually something romantic there with the flighty bachelor and agrees to keep it a secret when neither want to be seen as taking advantage of one another by the other staff, yet is seen for the problem as it is in a whole other sense when Thomas knows that Nora’s time at Platten is limited and as so many before and after her have experienced, any indiscretions will have no lasting consequences for the men who have already made the masthead.
When Nora comes to learn the hard way that the discomfort of trying to be someone that she’s not will always shine through, it seems like that even the one clear misstep made in “Magazine” could be thematically apt when when Pechman clearly wants to honor what she felt watching Whit Stillman’s “The Last Days of Disco,” perhaps the last film this successful at capturing what it’s like to be on the fringes of high culture on the outside looking in, with dancing scenes that are not unpleasant but awkwardly inserted. However, the film generally unfolds with such relaxed elegance that it never needs to be expressed otherwise what flipping through the pages of Platten actually feels like, with the specific era it’s set in perfectly evoked by the synth-heavy soft pop score of Zach Robinson and some expertly executed needle drops and time itself bottled up well by cinematographer Alex Ashe, who is showing a knack for serene imagery that nonetheless have a stirring sensation underneath in such films as “Peter Hujar’s Day” and “The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire.” Although you can’t be certain what the future holds for Nora when “Magazine” leaves things on an agreeably ambivalent note, but it undoubtedly ends on a high when one knows that Pechman is right where she should be, delivering such a poignant and sophisticated feature debut.
“Magazine” does not yet have U.S. distribution.