Men dominate the first scene of Green, in which journalist Sebastian (Lawrence Michael Levine) and his friend (Alex Ross Perry) pompously extol the virtues of Philip Roth, engaging in a game of one-upmanship to see who can concoct the most effusive praise. Yet the true focal point of the scene is Sebastian’s girlfriend, Genevieve (Kate Lyn Sheil), who suffers through the discussion with a bored, exasperated look, eventually growing so tired of it that she makes the mistake of disagreeing with one of Sebastian’s loftier compliments. In an instant, the men turn on her, not with hostility, but an infuriating condescension that reaffirms their intelligence at the expense of hers; Sebastian even throws an arm around Genevieve while talking down to her, and the frame seems to constrict with discomfort and invasion.
Director Sophia Takal shoots the scene in suffocating medium close-up, which she subsequently applies to shots of Sebastian taking Genevieve with him out to the countryside, where the pair sublet a rural home so he can research an article he’s been commissioned to write. Anyone can see that the trip is a bad idea for their already tenuous relationship; even Sebastian’s playful flirtation becomes warped by Takal’s tight frames and dissonant sound design, which distorts hissing insects and faint wind around murmuring electronic textures to give the most innocuous conversational scenes a tense edge. Genevieve cannot figure out why she stays with Sebastian, and the film itself bristles with her misery.
But the frame opens up, literally, when Genevieve meets Robin (Takal), a local woman whose motor-mouthed ingratiation initially irritates the New Yorker but gradually wins her over. The two abandon Sebastian for a walk in the woods, where the camera suddenly leaps out to take in the women in serene long shots, studious of the space around them and the calm it reflects. The two bond over shared experiences of men in authority positions hitting on them. With a hint of despair, Robin asks, “They do that even in New York?” If the camera earlier matched Genevieve’s resentment of the man in her life, it now sways to match her joy of finding someone else to talk to, and in the film’s funniest visual gag, a scene of the two women and Sebastian getting ice cream nearly cuts the man out of the frame altogether. He senses his exclusion intuitively and is prompted to make petulant jokes about the women’s closeness that do not even earn pitying, insecurity-assuaging chuckles from them.
When Sebastian takes a clear interest in Robin as well, however, Genevieve bypasses her pre-existing scorn for the man, for outright mania. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Sheil should recognize the actress’s capacity for revealing sudden chasms of rage, and here, she folds layers of passive-aggressiveness and outright hostility over each other like tempered steel. Genevieve speaks in faint mutters pitched halfway between timidity and superiority. She makes numerous jabs toward Robin, but she also enters into a platonic relationship with her new friend that is every bit as codependent as her romantic one with Sebastian. When Sebastian betrays his lust, he triggers a protective backlash in Genevieve, who refuses to let her boyfriend intrude upon the happiness Robin represents. Sheil’s beady stares and clenched jaw suggest that Genevieve would rather destroy Robin than see her become like the other once-positive elements in her life (her job and living in the city) that she’s sacrificed due to her boyfriend’s whims.
The grace and calm of the film gives way to a final act of erratic, inconsistent stylization to match Genevieve’s fraying emotional state. Imagined trysts between Sebastian and Robin are filmed in over-lit scenes at jittery frame rates like old Super 8 footage, while the mounted camera shots that gave the middle passage such elegance now become uneasily oscillating depictions of social tension. One notable scene depicts a heated exchange between Sebastian and Genevieve about whether they can go back to New York to see an art installation. The camera drifts back and forth with each put-down and dismissal, and glimpses frequently at Robin, sitting helplessly between them, clearly wanting to salvage the conversation.
Genevieve’s corroded sanity powers the finale, in which the detached sarcasm in her voice gives way to unmistakable loathing. When Robin brings a date into the house in the middle of the night, Genevieve responds with insults and demented teases that reveal the depths of her sexual jealousy and sense of betrayal. The only thing more unsettling than the threat of violence in that scene is the couple’s attempted reconciliation in the coda, which features a sex act so desperate and loveless that the notion of whether Genevieve and Sebastian can repair their relationship makes the viewer question why they would even want to. Green’s despairing conclusion confirms it as one of the most driven, multivalent works to come out of the contemporary American independent scene this decade.
