Retrograde: Young Woman Challenges Traffic Ticket and Her World Collapses in This Wry Comedy
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-
The title of Canadian director Adrian Murray’s piquant micro-comedy Retrograde means going backward to an earlier or inferior position.
The same title was recently used in Matthew Heineman’s documentary about the last months of the American Afghanistan war, a recent British play about Sidney Poitier in Hollywood, and an Australian comedy series about a group of thirty-something people who meet in a virtual bar during COVID. Should “retrograde” be nominated as the word of the current decade?
Molly (Molly Reisman) is about to get a life-changing ticket in Retrograde.
Of course, there’s nothing new about going backwards. In 2004, Retrograde was also the title of a direct-to-DVD movie, starring Dolph Lundgren as a time-traveler from the future who battles mutinous commandos while saving the world from a flesh-eating bacteria in the Antarctic.
The stakes are somewhat lower in Murray’s film, which is about a young woman named Molly (Molly Reisman), a self-described small girl with glasses who’s obsessed with getting a traffic citation dismissed. It’s a crusade she pursues with a Dolph Lundgren-esque intensity. Led by Reisman’s deadpan, uningratiating performance, Retrograde is a funny, uncomfortable portrait of young millennial, struggling with her loss of status and clinging to the wreckage of her past aspirations.
The opening scene sees Molly’s back as she sits in her Honda SUV. She’s parked by the side of highway 401, where she has been waved over by a cop. Next to her is her new roommate, Gabrielle (Sofia Banzhaf) carrying a large potted plant on her lap.
An irritated cop comes to the driver’s window, and gives Molly a citation for reckless driving, after she tried to merge in front of him. It’s a $300 ticket and Molly believes, or partly believes, or wishes, that it must be an error, which can be amended by appealing to higher authorities.
The film lasts just 74 minutes, but it stretches that time out, in long, stationary and carefully blocked takes, with naturalistic performances and dialogue, lightly sprinkled with irony. The time-suck of dealing with bureaucracy feels palpable: Molly types out earnest emails to the court officials and waits for responses.
She plays truant from her web marketing job to line up to register her complaints. She makes agitated phone calls from her car, while the camera observes her from the backseat. At her cubicle at the office, Molly becomes so obsessed with pursuing her cause that she neglects routine but essential tasks. Her boss, Susan (Meredith Heinrich) grows increasingly skeptical at Molly’s explanations for her mistakes and absenteeism.
At the suburban house she is co-renting, Molly’s the frumpy, grumpy third-wheel, in contrast to upbeat fitness instructor, Rose (Bessie Cheng) and the soft, fuzzy Gabrielle, a vegan who’s into astrology and plants. When Gabrielle declines to testify as an eyewitness to Molly’s case (she points out she had a large plant in front of her face), Molly responds with unsubtle passive aggression: Is Gabrielle planning on washing her dinner dishes any time soon?
The more she is thwarted, the more her sense of self-righteous indignation inflates. She refuses a lawyer’s suggestion of how to reduce the fine, and even rejects Gabrielle’s peace-offering of paying half the cost of the ticket.
Clearly, there’s more going on in Molly’s offended mind than an annoying traffic citation. In a separate testy encounter, Molly drives to downtown Toronto to pick up a letter from her ex-boyfriend (played by director Murphy), who seems to have happily moved on. Nothing works for Molly: Not only her living arrangement, work and love life, but also the GPS in her car, or the buzzer on her old apartment, malfunction.
Clearly, also, there’s also more going on than comedy in this wryly detached character study of someone unravelling. Things come to a head at a small house party, where Gabrielle is holding court, talking about astrology and a few friends are listening with friendly curiosity.
Molly disagrees and becomes strident about the absurdities of reading the stars, in an argument that’s not only directed against Gabrielle but Fate itself. Whether it’s the stars or traffic cops that set the rules, life is not fair, and the conviction that it should be is both ridiculous and sad.
Retrograde. Written and directed by Adrian Murray. Starring: Molly Reisman, Sofia Banzhaf, Bessie Cheng, Meredith Heinrich, Adrian Murray. In theatres in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa May 19.