Critic's Notebook

Eric Branco/Summer 2001 LLC

Josephine Decker’s “Chasing Summer” announces itself as an outlier. For a filmmaker whose work has often been marked by fragmentation, sensory abrasion, and a willful resistance to narrative comfort, this new film feels almost disarmingly straightforward. It unfolds as a recognizable homecoming story, complete with old grudges, unresolved romances, and the uneasy realization that the self one fled is still waiting patiently back where the odyssey began. That air of convention is no accident. It has a great deal to do with the film’s writer and star, Iliza Shlesinger, whose comic instincts pull Ms. Decker toward something cleaner, calmer, and — by her standards — positively classical.

Ms. Shlesinger plays Jamie, a humanitarian aid worker who once styled herself as half of a “nonprofit power couple.” That identity collapses abruptly when her partner ends the relationship with a speech that sounds suspiciously as if it were drafted by his new girlfriend, a woman so young she has never seen “Iron Man.” With her next assignment in Jakarta, Indonesia, still weeks away, Jamie finds herself effectively homeless, drifting back to the Texas town she left two decades earlier under a cloud of rumor. At the time, it was said that she had tried to trap her high-school boyfriend, Chase (Tom Welling), with a pregnancy — a story that has hardened into local myth.

Jamie’s return is marked by a series of small, humiliating rejections. Every friend she contacts for a place to stay demurs; one explains, apologetically, that the couch has been sublet. With nowhere else to go, she moves back in with her parents, Layanne (Megan Mullally, wielding an impeccable Southern drawl) and Randall (Jeff Perry). She also begins helping out at the roller rink owned by her sister, Marissa (Cassidy Freeman), whose resentment still smolders.

Ms. Shlesinger’s humor thrives on blunt reversals and delayed admissions. When Marissa announces she’s heading to Smoothie King and asks if Jamie wants anything, Jamie declines — only to shout “Mango!” seconds later, after Marissa has turned away. In another scene, a rink employee, Harper (Lola Tung), invites Jamie to a party. Jamie scoffs at the idea of drinking with a bunch of 20-somethings. Cut to the next scene: she’s there, enthusiastically playing games and leaping into the pool. The joke isn’t simply that she contradicts herself; it’s that she does so without apology, as if the contradiction were the most honest response available.

At the party, Jamie is singled out by Colby (Garrett Wareing), whose eagerness is both flattering and alarming. She resists him at first, citing her recent breakup and the obvious age gap, but Colby persists — not aggressively, exactly, but with the confidence of someone who hasn’t yet learned caution. Against her better judgment, Jamie allows herself to be seen with him, and then to be understood by him. “You are always leaving so no one can leave you,” Colby tells her, in a line that could have felt diagnostic or glib if the film hadn’t so carefully prepared the ground beneath it.

“Chasing Summer” is frequently hilarious, but it is also attuned to the emotional logic beneath self-sabotage. When Chase inevitably reenters Jamie’s life, the film’s geometry snaps into focus. The danger of exposure — of hurting Colby, who is almost painfully decent — becomes acute. None of this unfolds with faux surprise; the outcome feels legible long before it arrives. Ms. Decker’s achievement is that inevitability never curdles into contrivance. Recognition, rather than shock, is the film’s governing pleasure.

The supporting cast is impeccably calibrated to Ms. Shlesinger’s rhythms. Ms. Mullally, in particular, turns even the smallest moments into miniature set pieces. When she deliberately mispronounces “yogurt girl” as “you go girl,” the joke lands not because of exaggeration but because of her absolute commitment to the phrase. It’s a performance that understands comedy as precision.

For viewers familiar with Ms. Decker’s earlier work, “Chasing Summer” may come as a surprise. Her previous films — among them “Butter on the Latch,” “Madeline’s Madeline,” and “Shirley” — often foreground interiority at the expense of narrative convention, favoring dislocation, impressionism, and emotional overload. Those films are bracing, sometimes alienating, and unmistakably personal. Here, Ms. Decker appears less interested in rupture than in control. Her stylistic signatures remain — most notably in an opening montage that jarringly juxtaposes images of natural disasters with audio from a sex scene — but they surface sparingly, like reminders of a wilder temperament kept mostly in check.

That restraint proves productive. “Chasing Summer” is unusually accessible without feeling diluted. It is funny and emotionally alert without tipping into preciousness or corniness. Even when it resolves itself a bit too neatly, the film’s sincerity never wavers. What emerges is not a renunciation of Ms. Decker’s sensibility but an expansion of it — a demonstration that her command of tone is finally quiet enough to register as ease.

The film feels poised to mark a turning point. For Ms. Shlesinger, it confirms that her comic voice translates cleanly to the screen, capable of sustaining a character rather than merely delivering jokes. For Ms. Decker, it suggests a filmmaker newly comfortable letting narrative do the heavy lifting. “Chasing Summer” doesn’t abandon complexity; it simply trusts the audience to find it without being pushed.