Punch-Drunk Love (2002, Paul Thomas Anderson)
Tuesday 22nd of July, 6:45pm in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema
Join us on Tuesday the 22nd of July from 6:45pm (film starts at 7pm) in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema for a screening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s fourth film, Punch-Drunk Love (2002). The film is 95 minutes long so the screening will finish around 8:35pm.
After two long, large ensemble films, Anderson resolved to make his next film a tighter, smaller-scale 90-minute work - this peculiar twist on the romantic comedy. Character-wise, Punch-Drunk Love was the smallest-scale Anderson film to date, only revolving around three: Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), a lonely bachelor who works in the bathroom supply business and is relentlessly mocked by his seven sisters; Dean Trumbell (Philip Seymour Hoffman), owner of a mattress store and operator of the phone sex line that Barry calls out of loneliness; Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), a friend and coworker of one of Barry’s sisters, whom he falls for.
This smaller scale and more intense focus on a handful of characters and relationships presaged the tighter focus of Anderson’s next two films, There Will Be Blood and The Master. At the same time, it shares a contemporary setting with his first and third films and a location in the San Fernando Valley with his second and third. In that sense, the film is the transition point between the first and second periods of Anderson’s career. Here, his mature visual style began to emerge, with a more carefully chosen and co-ordinated use of colour, mise-en-scène and his signature tracking shots, all to evoke his protagonist’s inner world: at times juxtaposing, and at times merging together, a mundane and often stupid everyday reality on the one hand, and a heightened, dreamlike state of romantic yearning and ecstasy on the other. The film is also notable for Jon Brion’s magnificent score, capped by the use of Shelly Duvall’s song ‘He Needs Me’ from the 1980 Robert Altman film Popeye.
Although seen by some as one of Anderson’s lightest and most minor works, for others Punch-Drunk Love remains his finest film. Certainly it is one of his most perfectly achieved, where his maturing visual style and recurring themes are both brought to bear on an over-familiar, commercialised genre - the romantic comedy - and subvert it in singular, unexpected ways.