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‘Matt and Mara’ Review: Two Writers Rekindle Their College Bond in a Subtly Slippery Relationship Drama
Kazik Radwanski reunites with actors Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson for 'Matt and Mara,' a fragile study of friendship slipping into something more.
Thirty-five years after “When Harry Met Sally…” asked the question of whether straight men and women can be friends without sex getting in the way, “ Matt and Mara ” rephrases it with more anxiously fraught social stakes — raising the accompanying and ever-relevant query of whether two neurotic writers should really fraternize with each other at all. Mara (Campbell), a thirtysomething creative writing professor at a Toronto university, appears to have several reactions at once — exhilaration and exasperation lapping each other on the actor’s remarkable, sharp-planed face — when Matt (Johnson), whom she hasn’t seen in several years, blusters unannounced into one of her classes. Radwanski’s script is low on incident — and the film, at a tight, jittery 80 minutes, can afford to be — but this tension keeps it taut and urgent, in the manner of particularly gripping people-watching: Even Nikolay Michaylov’s restless, sometimes invasively close-up camera operates on a close interest in human nature itself, its gaze fixed keenly on its protagonists’ reactions to various miniature, everyday epiphanies and bombshells.
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