One Bedroom, One Bath
2020 · 13m · USA
Directed by Mischa Livingstone
Tones: humorous, provocative, tender
Two strangers meet while hunting for a rental apartment in Los Angeles. Drifting from place to place, they take solace in the distraction and discover beauty in the banal moments of an ordinary day.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two strangers Before-Sunrise their way through LA open houses for thirteen minutes — sure, it's quaint, but I've seen this 'beauty in the banal' beat so many times the banal stopped being beautiful around 2014.
Apartment-hunting as Linklater-lite meet-cute — pleasant, observational, but the dust-motes-and-hot-dogs poetics sound like they're working hard to elevate familiar material. Likely warm and slight.
Thirteen minutes of strangers drifting through LA apartment showings is a familiar Before Sunrise structure leaning entirely on the chemistry of two actors and the specificity of the small observations — 'dust motes caught in a draft, hotdogs with extra toppings' is a promising tell. Whether it transcends the comparison is the question.