Duck Butter

By: Jennifer Verzuh

A film that was almost entirely shot in twenty-four hours with no dialogue pre-written should not be this good. When the cast and crew of Duck Butter at the film’s world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival revealed that the movie was all improvised and shot largely under these time constraints, I was honestly shocked. You don’t get that sense at all from the final product.

There’s nothing about this work that seems haphazard, random or inconsistent. The dialogue is so incredibly warm, funny and revealing that you’d assume the script was incredibly detailed and had gone through numerous drafts and edits rather than merely an outline that actors and crew worked with during shooting. And the direction and editing are sure and focused.

The film appears at first glance to be fairly standard indie mumblecore fare – a fact, hilariously, the film seems to be completely aware of and enjoys playing with in its early moments. The film begins with Naima (played by Alia Shawkat, a constant and welcome presence in festival indies, who also acted as co-writer and producer here) having landed her first big acting gig on the set of a film directed by Mark and Jay Duplass, two of the biggest names in lo-fi independent cinema.

The film goes somewhere deeper though that helps set it apart from the slew of other festival indie comedies. It’s obsessed with the idea of intimacy and what that means in a relationship (physically and emotionally) and what it means to achieve. The film entirely rests on the connection between Shawkat and her co-star Laia Costa, who plays her love interest Sergio: an aspiring singer-songwriter from Spain. And, thankfully, their chemistry is excellent and their characters both come across as fully developed apart from each other. Each comes to this encounter with baggage from exes, careers and interests, friends and family.

The two meet and are drawn together at a bar where Sergio has been performing and they wind up going home together. After sex, they lament about past relationships, lies, and how some couples spend years and years going out only to get divorced almost immediately after getting married, musing how it’d be easier and healthier to get everything out (good and bad) at the start of the relationship. Naima jokingly suggests it’d be a fun idea to spend twenty-four hours straight together exploring each other, having sex and being completely honest with one another. Sergio immediately is intrigued and suggests they really go for it. “I want to know you for real,” she tells her. The prospect is scary to Naima, initially, but she eventually decides to go for it and the film takes off from there.

It’s a fascinating concept that works surprisingly well. They really do get to know each other and by extension so do we, perhaps too well. Any pretenses the two have fall away during this time together. It’s almost like a more humorous and realistic queer Before Sunrise. They annoy one another, cry, reveal personal secrets, confront their mother issues, walk the dog, send angry emails to former bosses and make love more times than I can keep track of. And knowing that the actors actually stayed up for a full twenty-four hours shooting these scenes makes it that much more authentic and genuine.

Costa is really good here and it’d be a shame to overlook her performance. Though there are elements of her character that seem like you’re stereotypical overly attached “crazy” new girlfriend, her performance makes her feel real, engaging and deeply funny. She feels like a real person, not someone merely there to supplement Naima. Shawkat though is truly the star of the film. She provides a real emotional core and makes us like and care for her though it’s difficult not to also be insanely frustrated with her.

Although this twenty-four hour experiment is supposedly about testing out the possibility of a new relationship and letting one’s wall’s down, Naima just can’t seem to do so. She’s guarded and closed off, though she attempts to hide this. Shawkat does an excellent job of portraying a woman whose emotions are difficult to know, even to herself. You see in her performance these small cracks where she actually lets Sergio in and reveals something about herself and starts to let yourself actually fall for this woman.

It’s these moments, even more so than the brilliant comedic ones, that make the film because being in a relationship and vulnerable with someone is as difficult and scary as it is fun and special. This film reminds us of that and asks us to examine whether those joys are worth the pain for us.