Writer-director Isabel Hagen, and by extension her debut feature, “On a String,” understands the comic value of a good ugly cry. There’s nothing funnier or sadder than watching someone reduce themselves to a puddle in front of your eyes, especially when the other party can’t quite bring themselves to match that energy. That simple principle, of finding the humor in the quotidian sadness of modern existence, sits behind every note of Hagen’s incredibly personal film, and is all the better for it.
After all, life is full of disappointments, and no one knows that more than professional musicians; Hagen is a trained violist, and her character here, a fictional version of herself, is perpetually on the back foot in life, love, and family. Her Juilliard education hasn’t exactly yielded professional dividends, instead stuck playing background gigs with friends at weddings, abortive engagements, and awkward film scoring sessions. The film’s opening gag is an incredible case study for the film to come: Close-ups on two faces, a man proposing to a woman in a park while Chopin plays in the background. He pops the question; unfortunately, she says no. Cut to a wider shot of Hagen meekly fiddling away behind them, continuing the music while this couple’s life collapses before her eyes.
“On a String” plays out largely in these kinds of episodes, as we see Isabel float from one gig to another, Zac Nicholson’s camera perpetually placing her and her fellow players in the background of other people’s stories. She’s a fly on the wall, both in other people’s lives and in her own. Her family (with whom she lives), all musicians or musically trained, treat her with a mixture of patronizing support and growing impatience. She can’t quite hold down a boyfriend: She breaks up with her existing beau at the film’s beginning (cue the ugly crying; one of Hagen’s most effective close-ups involves us watching her try to force herself to cry with him, before giving up), and enters a dangerous flirtation with the married father (Fred Weller) of one of her viola students.
But the inciting incident, or what passes for one in this charmingly airy feature, comes from a suicidal, self-serious ex-boyfriend (John Kroner), now a player in the New York Philharmonic, who lets slip during a lunch date that a viola position is opening up at the Phil. Cut to heaps of anxiety and weeks of abortive practicing as Isabel grasps at this one chance to make something of herself. Hagen, who carries herself with the bewildered anxiety of Frances Ha or Hannah Horvath, meekly asks her parents for reassurance. “Just believe in me?” Her father’s (Dylan Baker) response? “You’ll have to be more specific.”
Hagen’s script, which won Best Screenplay in the US Narrative Competition at Tribeca earlier this year, is full of these kinds of devastating replies, delivered dryly by Hagen and her game cast in a series of episodic encounters cut with razor-sharp timing by editor Olivia Vessel. “On a String” is rife with one-scene wonders and jump cuts that place a punctuation mark on a joke, or otherwise lingering on incredibly awkward exchanges between Isabel and her scene partner, who invariably wants to woo, disappoint, or inconvenience her in some way. Isabel’s no saint, nor is she particularly ambitious or socially skillful. But when you’re dealing with folks like an impossible-to-please independent film director (Eric Bogosian) or a kooky indie musician (Charlotte Ray Rosenberg) who’s nice to you but makes you play on bad songs, it’s easy to relate to her meekness.
“On a String” is a sweet movie about a mean world, where unambitious talent tries to get by amid unforgiving people, and even those close to you won’t give you the support you need (or, in some cases, might screw you over to grasp at their own life preserver). At a brisk eighty minutes, its charms and gentle manner practically fly by—so much so that it might be surprising when the credits seem to start rolling far sooner than you’d like. But that’s the appeal of a good, assured indie film like this: It’s a calling card for its major talent, one that leaves you, in many ways, wanting more.
