This does well to capture the experience of seeing a friend live down to one's lowest expectations and finding yourself lapsing into a provoked, judgmental, authoritative self that you don't like but know is always waiting to pop out. Also articulates—and, appreciably, at a point when I thought it was sort of done making points—a difficult thought I know all too well. (I'll explain what I mean if you ask me-in person; but not here.) Which is to say: a nice example of a film where almost nothing happens and everything is more or less true.
Been sitting with this one since seeing it on Friday night, unsure of how to write about it without accidentally psychoanalyzing myself. Structured (rather explicitly) like My Dinner With Andre, the film follows two close friends through their increasingly sporadic dinner dates. During these dinners, Krutch (Krantz) details his drunken, horny escapades while Caroline, a homebody screenwriter, uses them as inspiration for her screenplay. Krutch disrupts the little ritual of these dinner dates, however, when he gets involved with, as the Letterboxd synopsis puts it, "a controversial religion" and Caroline reacts with scepticism.During the Q&A, Krantz explains that both characters have parts of himself in them. Krutch is an impulsive, spontaneous would-be actor, while Caroline is reserved to the point that Krutch isn't even sure of her sexual orientation (though Fran Liebowitz is referenced in both dialogue and costume). That may be true, but while watching the film, I found myself relating much more to Caroline: reserved, overly critical, cynical about the world and desperately afraid of revealing herself to anyone. I say this with empathy: I think one meets a lot of Carolines if they hang out with enough film critics (or Letterboxd users), people who live vicariously through movies or books, hiding deep insecurities by projecting a certainty about their opinions on movies, literature, politics, etc. Perhaps this is just how I feel about myself, or at least how I was in my 20s. I found myself very moved by Krantz's film, which provides Caroline with a foil that she can't reconcile with her worldview. If a "controversial religion" helps someone get sober, make better choices, etc., then who is she to say it's a cult, or a pyramid scheme, or a tax scam? While this particular religion may be beyond the pale for a lot of people (particularly those that don't live in Los Angeles), the line between a cult and a legitimate religion is not as clear as the world's Carolines would like to think. But she is not wrong to believe that she may lose her friend, a troubling possibility given their friendship seems to rely on Krutch following his most self-destructive impulses.The movie ends without providing any reconciliation between the worldviews of these two characters. It also rejects the common narratives of ex-[Redacted] celebrities in Hollywood. Ultimately, it presents something that the Carolines of the world have trouble with: there is no mechanism to control or "correct" the beliefs and actions of others, and that sometimes friendship requires acceptance, even when you find some of those beliefs and actions to be intolerable.Anyway, if that sounds like a fun time at the movies for you, The Water is Always Warm will have its Canadian premiere at Bleeding Edge Festival on November 27 at the beautiful Paradise Theatre! Preceded by Katerina Zoumboulakis' Birdie!Tickets available HERE!
