Austin Film Festival review: Anna Baumgarten’s DISFLUENCY has more to say than just the words that come out

In all honesty, it’s hard to imagine the pitch that got Disfluency made. Because the premise, to this viewer, initially seemed, frankly, un-cinematic. A girl who failed a senior-year college class and failed to graduate decides to get extra credit by doing a study of her friends’ speech patterns during natural conversation. Really? That’s it?…thought I. Sure, that might make a compelling academic paper to get this character graduated, but do I really have to watch a movie of her just recording and taking notes? Well, no. The setup is a bit of a Trojan horse, and a metaphor all at once. Jane (Libe Barer) may be focused on words, but the movie is about communication. How it works, how it doesn’t, and more importantly, how it’s interrupted.

A disfluency, we’re told upfront, is a word that interrupts the flow of communication. Something like “uh” or “like.” Or if you’re a stoner, “dude, man.” And Jane has experienced an event that interrupts life in a similar fashion. When we first meet her, she seems unstuck in time. Is she in school, about to make her final presentation? Is she in a dark hallway filled with Christmas lights? Who’s giving her injections? And is her current location at her parent’s lake house really the present moment?

If this sounds like a horror movie or mystery, it is only so momentarily. Much of the summer is simply spent hanging out, studying speech, and teaching sign language to a neighbor whose kid she babysits…and who may be on the spectrum. But the moments of disorientation/horror can’t be ignored. And anyone who’s seen or had one in real life soon gets it. These are PTSD panic attacks.

Barer and her sister Ariela, who plays Jane’s sister Lacey here, are former child stars. This makes their camaraderie come easily, but it also makes more horrific their characters’ rough transitions into adulthood. We don’t want the Disney kids to be hurt, but the world will do that. In one particularly effective scene, Jane goes under the pier with a potential love interest. The low-headroom, high-tide space is meant to read intimate for the purposes of the game they’re playing, but Baumgarten and cinematographer John Fisher film it claustrophobically, like a potential drowning trap. And as Jane starts to feel it as such, the dissociation begins, triggered by the sort of physical proximity that once went so, so badly.

In the film festival program blurb, one of the film’s topics is described as “the never-ending process of healing.” That’s true of trauma, addiction, what-have-you…but it’s a phrase that can also apply to life. We can – and must – always heal, always figure out what ails us and rebound better. Even the most educated of intellectuals sometimes utter a disfluency, as even the best of us encounter their metaphorical equivalent in life.

An aspiring linguist, of course, wants to know why these things happen. What causes people to interrupt their own flow? Is it their fault, or someone else’s, or nobody’s? It’s easier to apply a science to empirical data than personal experience, which rarely totally computes according to formula. In trying to conduct rational study, we see a young woman taking back control of her surroundings in a way that makes sense.

We never do learn exactly what Jane finds out about contemporary speech patterns. But we definitely learn that the unexpected interruption can create more compelling drama. Like Jane’s life, the formula we think we may have a handle on doesn’t go in an empirically safe direction.

Nor, for the purposes of storytelling, would we want it to.