Look Both Ways
Oct. 15th, 2022 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleI watched Look Both Ways on Netflix yesterday. The premise is that Natalie (Lili Reinhart) is throwing up at a party on college graduation night and her best friend Cara (Aisha Dee) brings her a pregnancy test. Then the narrative splits and we follow Nat through the next five years in one timeline where she's pregnant and in one where she isn't. I really enjoyed this movie. It is entirely my kind of thing.
In the timeline where Nat is pregnant, she and Gabe (Danny Ramirez), the friend from home she slept with just once and is the father of her child, go home to stay with her parents (Andrea Savage and Luke Wilson). After their daughter Rosie is born, Nat encourages Gabe to get his own place because they aren't together. She also encourages him to date, and then confesses to Cara that she made a mistake by doing that, because of course she's in love with him by now. They co-parent, he gets engaged to Miranda. Natalie, who is an artist, starts drawing a comic, largely at night while Rosie is sleeping, called Night Owl and based on a character she and Gabe used to do when Rosie was a baby and didn't sleep at night. It gets put on a POPSUGAR list of comics to watch and she gets invited to be on a panel at SXSW. Gabe's band is also playing SXSW, and he has broken up with his fiancee.
In the timeline where Nat isn't pregnant, she moves to LA with Cara as planned. They share an apartment and Nat tries to get a job working for Lucy (Nia Long), an animator she greatly admires. Cara encourages her to go to a party for Lucy's company, so Nat goes but is intimidated by the guy at the door with a list. She gets a drink at the bar and meets Jake (David Corenswet), who tells her that there are probably a lot of people on the list who've been in and out, so if she just walks in like she knows what she's doing, she won't get stopped. So she does, and then finds out that he was there for that party and Lucy isn't there. Then she gets an interview with Lucy and when she arrives, Jake meets her in the lobby to give her some tips. She gets the job, and she and Jake start dating. She eventually shows her portfolio to Lucy, who tells her it's too derivative and tells her a story about working unrelated jobs while she found her voice. Nat calls Jake, who is off in Nova Scotia being a documentary producer, and they break up. Unemployed and single, Nat starts working on a short animated film, which is accepted into SXSW. Jake shows up to surprise and support her, and she runs into Lucy who tells her that she could have been more helpful.
The end of the movie is the two Nats from separate timelines stopping at the house the original party was at, going up to the bathroom from the beginning, standing next to each other at the sinks, and saying to herself in the mirror, "You're okay." The two Nats leave to rejoin their love interests who are waiting outside the house for them, and the last shot of the movie is the Nat from the beginning looking down at the pregnancy tests. The credits include animation that shows the two Nats' futures: Nat and Gabe getting married, Nat and Jake getting the dream house they talked about.
There is one deep flaw in the movie's premise, which is that split timelines really depend on someone making a choice. But there's no choice for Nat to make; by the time the timelines split, she either is or isn't pregnant and nothing she does in that very moment changes that. I do wonder if there was a first draft somewhere where she's pregnant in both timelines and has an abortion in one, or a draft where the intention of the last scene is that whether she decides to keep the baby or not, she'll be okay.
The other thing about the movie that could be seen as a flaw is that there are a lot of things that happen that don't have a lot of setup or context. I'm not sure if there's context that was left on the cutting room floor or if the idea is that we're only seeing moments, particularly moments where the two Nats' lives cross in some way. I think I've decided to take it as the second, but it could be puzzling. The first of these things that really stood out to me is that there's a baby shower for someone who I don't think we meet before this who is implied to be someone Nat and Cara knew in high school. In the no baby timeline, they both go and Nat leaves very quickly because she can't keep explaining to people that she lost her job and broke up with her boyfriend. In the baby timeline, Nat tells Cara that she lives a block away so can't get out of going, but then doesn't go and Cara shows up at her house afterwards to tell her that was a good decision because it was a terrible party. The other one that was super interesting is when Nat, Gabe, and Miranda drop Rosie off for her first day of kindergarten. Rosie is in a cartoon spaceperson outfit: silver jacket with fake air tanks on the back and a huge cardboard covered in foil helmet. Being unwilling to wear anything but a specific costume is a very little kid thing to do, but there was no setup for it and it seemed like surely somewhere they had a storyline or bit about Rosie and the space suit. I will also say that there are segments between times that are done as animated sketches, and it's possible the explanation was in one of those and I missed it because I wasn't paying close enough attention.
I really loved a lot about the movie. Nat and Cara's friendship was so wonderfully drawn. They love each other very deeply, and they fight in one of the timelines and it's very realistic. They say "I love you" and hold hands (in a non-romantic way - Cara is queer but she and Nat aren't romantic). It was very sweet and heartwarming. Nat's central journey in both timelines is around her art, and the romantic happy endings come after the career happy endings. And I loved that she ends up with a different guy in each timeline. There are a couple of moments where I thought it would settle on one or the other of them - no baby Nat has a moment with Gabe at SXSW but he's married and it doesn't go anywhere, and baby Nat runs into Jake at a restaurant when she's visiting Cara in LA and he buys them drinks to make up for spilling juice on her shoes but it doesn't go anywhere either. So often the romantic comedy movie genre is really focused on there's only one person for everyone and they're soulmates, and I loved seeing something that's much more realistic about how there are different people who could be right for each other depending on circumstance.
In the timeline where Nat is pregnant, she and Gabe (Danny Ramirez), the friend from home she slept with just once and is the father of her child, go home to stay with her parents (Andrea Savage and Luke Wilson). After their daughter Rosie is born, Nat encourages Gabe to get his own place because they aren't together. She also encourages him to date, and then confesses to Cara that she made a mistake by doing that, because of course she's in love with him by now. They co-parent, he gets engaged to Miranda. Natalie, who is an artist, starts drawing a comic, largely at night while Rosie is sleeping, called Night Owl and based on a character she and Gabe used to do when Rosie was a baby and didn't sleep at night. It gets put on a POPSUGAR list of comics to watch and she gets invited to be on a panel at SXSW. Gabe's band is also playing SXSW, and he has broken up with his fiancee.
In the timeline where Nat isn't pregnant, she moves to LA with Cara as planned. They share an apartment and Nat tries to get a job working for Lucy (Nia Long), an animator she greatly admires. Cara encourages her to go to a party for Lucy's company, so Nat goes but is intimidated by the guy at the door with a list. She gets a drink at the bar and meets Jake (David Corenswet), who tells her that there are probably a lot of people on the list who've been in and out, so if she just walks in like she knows what she's doing, she won't get stopped. So she does, and then finds out that he was there for that party and Lucy isn't there. Then she gets an interview with Lucy and when she arrives, Jake meets her in the lobby to give her some tips. She gets the job, and she and Jake start dating. She eventually shows her portfolio to Lucy, who tells her it's too derivative and tells her a story about working unrelated jobs while she found her voice. Nat calls Jake, who is off in Nova Scotia being a documentary producer, and they break up. Unemployed and single, Nat starts working on a short animated film, which is accepted into SXSW. Jake shows up to surprise and support her, and she runs into Lucy who tells her that she could have been more helpful.
The end of the movie is the two Nats from separate timelines stopping at the house the original party was at, going up to the bathroom from the beginning, standing next to each other at the sinks, and saying to herself in the mirror, "You're okay." The two Nats leave to rejoin their love interests who are waiting outside the house for them, and the last shot of the movie is the Nat from the beginning looking down at the pregnancy tests. The credits include animation that shows the two Nats' futures: Nat and Gabe getting married, Nat and Jake getting the dream house they talked about.
There is one deep flaw in the movie's premise, which is that split timelines really depend on someone making a choice. But there's no choice for Nat to make; by the time the timelines split, she either is or isn't pregnant and nothing she does in that very moment changes that. I do wonder if there was a first draft somewhere where she's pregnant in both timelines and has an abortion in one, or a draft where the intention of the last scene is that whether she decides to keep the baby or not, she'll be okay.
The other thing about the movie that could be seen as a flaw is that there are a lot of things that happen that don't have a lot of setup or context. I'm not sure if there's context that was left on the cutting room floor or if the idea is that we're only seeing moments, particularly moments where the two Nats' lives cross in some way. I think I've decided to take it as the second, but it could be puzzling. The first of these things that really stood out to me is that there's a baby shower for someone who I don't think we meet before this who is implied to be someone Nat and Cara knew in high school. In the no baby timeline, they both go and Nat leaves very quickly because she can't keep explaining to people that she lost her job and broke up with her boyfriend. In the baby timeline, Nat tells Cara that she lives a block away so can't get out of going, but then doesn't go and Cara shows up at her house afterwards to tell her that was a good decision because it was a terrible party. The other one that was super interesting is when Nat, Gabe, and Miranda drop Rosie off for her first day of kindergarten. Rosie is in a cartoon spaceperson outfit: silver jacket with fake air tanks on the back and a huge cardboard covered in foil helmet. Being unwilling to wear anything but a specific costume is a very little kid thing to do, but there was no setup for it and it seemed like surely somewhere they had a storyline or bit about Rosie and the space suit. I will also say that there are segments between times that are done as animated sketches, and it's possible the explanation was in one of those and I missed it because I wasn't paying close enough attention.
I really loved a lot about the movie. Nat and Cara's friendship was so wonderfully drawn. They love each other very deeply, and they fight in one of the timelines and it's very realistic. They say "I love you" and hold hands (in a non-romantic way - Cara is queer but she and Nat aren't romantic). It was very sweet and heartwarming. Nat's central journey in both timelines is around her art, and the romantic happy endings come after the career happy endings. And I loved that she ends up with a different guy in each timeline. There are a couple of moments where I thought it would settle on one or the other of them - no baby Nat has a moment with Gabe at SXSW but he's married and it doesn't go anywhere, and baby Nat runs into Jake at a restaurant when she's visiting Cara in LA and he buys them drinks to make up for spilling juice on her shoes but it doesn't go anywhere either. So often the romantic comedy movie genre is really focused on there's only one person for everyone and they're soulmates, and I loved seeing something that's much more realistic about how there are different people who could be right for each other depending on circumstance.