Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1871)

Paul Mazursky's Next stop, Greenwich Village is nothing to write home about - it's a film that seems to have one goal: to capture a certain time and a certain place, Greenwich village, New York, the mid 50's. But somehow, I couldn't stop watching the movie, perhaps because of its scruffy look, its haphazard plot and the characters (a gang of New York outsiders, most of them wanting to be artists). Mazursky wants to show a time where kids felt that they were very different from their parents, they wanted to be independent, drink beer, listen to jazz and have free(r) sex. The main character has just moved from his parents in Brooklyn to The Village. Not a long way, one might think but for this young man, having an apartment of his own implies freedom, independence and time and space to figure out what he wants to do with his life and his relation to his girlfriend. He pursues a career as an actor but ends up making juice in a sleazy café. (I might have had a bad day or something, but the scenes in which the mother barges into her son's flat unexpectedly were surprisingly funny - one couldn't help recognize some of the tensions in the parent-kid dynamic blown up into huge proportions.) Next Stop, Greenwich Village is a cozy, good-natured movie, a movie for nursing a hang-over or a boring Sunday.