The characters in L for Leisure wear Ray-Bans and tortoiseshell horn-rims, oxford shirts for the girls and tank tops for the guys; title cards are handwritten in pastels reminiscent of the Drive font, or early MTV programming; the original songs that make up the soundtrack, by John Atkinson of Brooklyn’s Aa, sound a little bit like the 8-bit Out Run theme, and a little bit like shoegaze. The film is shot in grainy, sun-kissed 16mm and follows mellowed-out, privileged, pretty people hanging out; watching it is like living inside an Instagram filter—basking in the authored, self-contained textures of the fairly recent past.
Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s film, which plays at Videology on Friday night (having made a very well-received run ‘round the fest circuit last year), is set over the 1992-93 school year, specifically over the various school vacations, on beaches and in family homes in SoCal, Great Neck, Baja Mexico, and other photogenic locales. The laid-back, uninflectedly affluent vibe, and focus on social minutae, is played up on the film’s website with the very film critic-friendly tagline, “Find out what happens when people stop being real… and start being polite,” as if the Sally Fowler Rat Pack had moved into the Real World house.
