“Basic” doesn’t make the best first impression, but then again one must be careful to assume much from a passing glance in Chelsea Devantez’s clever debut feature. That’s a mistake made by Gloria (Ashley Park) as she scans Instagram late at night for pictures of her boyfriend Nick’s (Taylor John Smith) ex-girlfriend Kaylinn (Leighton Meester), going back years to find the pair still together and concerned that it was a time when Nick apparently felt far more compelled to take pictures than he does now with her. As she looks at pictures of Kaylinn posing in front of flowery murals, she imagines an airhead and when she and Nick are in the same photo, clutching each other tightly, she pictures them still being close, despite the fact that Nick is sleeping right next to her in bed as this keeps her awake and hasn’t had contact in some time.
The grating voice Gloria gives to who she thinks Kaylinn to be in these moments can easily get on your nerves too, as well as the intense overreaction that awaits Nick the next morning when jealousy gets the better of her and she demands a break up, but when patience clearly would be a virtue for her, audiences are rewarded for having a little by Devantez, a former head writer for Jon Stewart’s “The Problem,” who comes up with a fresh and funny approach to tackling the distortion social media has created in real life.
Even the potentially positive ramifications of the extremely online life are questioned when Nick and Gloria first met because of Bumble, with the latter putting together a list of what she wants in a partner and finds an ideal match on the site that proved only partially accurate upon meeting him in person. But where she really misjudged things is with Kaylinn, who liked one of Nick’s posts after the two had broken up, setting off a wave of jealousy that has Gloria frantically looking up LinkedIn profiles and scrolling feeds and builds up an idea of her in her head that has no connection to who she actually is. Devantez wisely refrains from directing her lens towards laptops or cell phones for these ill-advised deep dives, but rather gets inside Gloria’s head as she pictures Kaylinn cavorting at a strip club (turns out to be a girls’ night with her friends) and performing standup sets making fun of her (when it’s far more likely poking fun at herself). A reckoning does eventually happen when Gloria is lured out to a comedy club to spy on Kaylinn in person to find that hosting a trivia night isn’t the glamorous gig that either of the two women have made it out to be, when Kaylinn is a little guilty of presenting a more aspirational version of herself online than what her life actually looks like, and a real friendship can start between the two, having some frustration with Nick in common.
The casting of the former Blair Waldorf as Kaylinn is particularly savvy when most entering “Basic” will already have their minds made up about her, but the film provides a lovely showcase for Meester’s softer side, gradually welcoming Gloria into her friend group. It isn’t just how Gloria’s been misled by what she’s seen online that shows the damage wrought by the internet, but also how Gloria seems to have few friends of her own, having algorithm-induced tunnel vision that leads to investing all of her attention in a boyfriend rather than a broader social circle and whether it’s supposedly connective technology or simply putting all one’s eggs into one basket with a romantic partner, the film’s warning against unskeptical devotion to any one thing is one of its strongest punchlines amidst a host of sharp ripostes the writer/director gives her cast throughout. (They are delivered with more precision than usual when the ensemble is full of longtime comedy writers such as Amber Ruffin, Ashley Nicole Black and Devantez herself.)
However, there’s a real vision to “Basic” that suggests Devantez has found her rightful place behind the camera, not only expressing multiple perspectives so dynamically, but having a keen sense of how to bring every element available to her cinematically in on the joke, at one point dropping a wild classical version of Kelis’ “Milkshake” that sneaks up on you with a hit of nostalgia while feeling entirely of the moment. When “Basic” concerns how new technology has compounded bad habits of the past, the filmmaker finds ways to offer an ecstatic counterpoint, speaking to a younger generation when she isn’t beholden to old ideas of what a movie can be.
“Basic” does not yet have U.S. distribution.