Joan Didion’s oft-quoted quote about how we tell ourselves stories for a living presupposes that you can and will use the tools to tell yourself that very story. But what happens when language fails you? What happens when fractures risk preventing you from speaking what could help you live? Writer-director Anna Baumgarten’s film Fluency addresses these questions by telling the story of a young woman struggling to find herself again. Well-intentioned and a clear attempt to provide a twist to what is unfortunately a well-worn tale about the effects of sexual assault, “Disfluency” nonetheless falters because of its desire to cloak that narrative in the jargon implied by its title.
Disfluency, as the first scene of the film tells us, is an interruption or irregularity in speech. “Speech is not perfect because we are not perfect,” a professor lecturing in an invisible class tells us. “ums,” “likes,” and “totallys” are all examples of this. With this introduction, we are thrown into the world of Jane (Lieb Barrer), who failed her last college class and had to move back home with her parents. As Jane reacquaints herself with her sister and her coterie of high school friends — including Amber (Chelsea Alden), now a single mother of a deaf young boy — Baumgarten slowly reveals what prevented Jane from graduating, as well as how her own interest in… Disfluency helps her get her life back on track.
For example, Jane decides that she will conduct an independent study on the language tics she observes in her sister and her friends. She hopes this research will help her obtain the credits she needs to graduate. But as she spends time with these friends who seem stuck in stunted adolescence, and as she hangs out more with Amber, whom they’ve all avoided, Jane realizes that her interest in linguistic fracture could be an indicator of something else. Memories of what happened to her in college, which occasionally return on screen, slowly come back to her — eventually leading her to admit to Amber (in American Sign Language, no less) that she may have been assaulted: though she can’t even bring herself to articulate a word. R that she very much knows she has to use.
The scenes in which Baumgarten asks Jane to address her trauma head-on — when she shows us the messy ways she initially dealt with it and the imperfect ways she deals with it now — are the most effective and affecting. By treating Jane’s experience carefully, she refuses to turn her story—as victim, survivor, both or neither—into a fantastic story. The scene featuring a police officer, who chooses to take handwritten notes much to Jane’s dismay, is the film’s most illuminating. Similar to shows like “Unknownable” and films like “Promising Young Woman,” “Disfluency” is interested in thorny questions rather than simple answers. Jane’s academic leanings become the way Baumgarten presents to her audience.
To get there, Baumgarten burdens Jane’s narrative with too many subplots that both mitigate and mitigate her plight. For example, Jen’s relationship with Amber ends up feeling like just an instrumental vehicle for her own journey — as do her many interactions with her sister, parents, and even her crush. Because she presents herself as an outsider keen to study the discourse of those around her, Jane ends up on the sidelines of her story—until the end, of course.
Barrer is a gifted actress, and there are glimpses of the complexity she brings to Jane, but in playing a self-confessed, introverted observer clearly struggling with what happened at school, she falters in making Jane a strong anchor around which the “disfluency” is constructed. It’s the break in the title. But this becomes a tiresome tune to play over and over again and similarly, the supporting cast – most of whom are defined as types and tropes borrowed wholesale from coming-of-age films – can’t quite achieve the difficult tonal balance that the film aspires to. Clearly. (Here a potential social media influencer, here a protective father, here a neighbor, here a well-meaning boy).
And so the film ends where it begins, with the idea that people aren’t perfect, and that’s why talking isn’t. Such a message, boldly expressed by Jane as a kind of academic epiphany, sounds cheerful rather than profound—which makes it no less true. But for a film that tries so hard to think through trauma and linguistics, and their interconnection in ways that often seem interesting and often downright banal, such a conclusion feels unsatisfying because of how little it provides. If its ambitions never meet the level of its execution, “Disfluency” (aside from the clunky title) is a gentle watch with its heart (and head) in the right place that still manages to charm, perhaps because it glorifies the very concept of imperfection.