I laughed quite a bit during Sad Jokes. I also cringed and winced—and I’m sure that’s exactly what Fabian Stumm wanted me to do. Here playing double duty as both director and lead actor, Stumm weaves a panicky, bittersweet, sometimes farcical portrait of a gay screenwriter named Joseph, who co-parents a young child named Pino with his best friend Sonya (Haley Louise Jones) when he’s not working. Unfortunately, his plate becomes all too full at home while Sonya is being treated at a clinic for her depression, and it certainly doesn’t help matters when, quite by chance, he breaks his finger when it gets stuck in an outdoor candy dispenser. This scene, and what follows immediately after it, is where Stumm is at his best, offsetting some of the story’s serious elements with Joseph’s haplessness (which seems almost cosmic) and finding a smart tonal balance that doesn’t invalidate what comes before. Joseph is, to put it mildly, going through it, but it’s clear he’s not the only one, and the film does a very good job of juxtaposing some of Joseph’s petty ordeals with the more significant ones being fought around him.
Is Sad Jokes too much in Joseph’s orbit, at the expense of its other characters? At some moments, it does feel like it is. Haley Louise Jones’s character, for instance, arrives in a hurricane of emotion and we witness firsthand a character of great potential, but ultimately she is underutilized (though I’d venture to say Jones still gives the film’s best performance in spite of that). So too is Marc, Joseph’s ex, who is given a touching scene of wounded reminiscence when they bump into each other, but who still remains phantasmal when he exits—still incomplete relative to Joseph, who seems best represented by the gigantic plaster of his head that he commissions for his latest film: ego and art, art and ego, bound and blown up to a size beyond ridiculousness.
But even though the supporting characters here feel more like sketches, the result remains what I believe is the ideal one: a humbling greater than a mere broken finger, where the sad jokes fall away as greater introspection begins to set in. The film ends with an unexpected monologue and a silent, plaintive gaze through a window. The punchline has come and gone; the peals of laughter have died away. It’s hard not to give some props when you come across a mature ending to a film when, a mere hour before, its subject is in a hospital bed next to a hysterical lady, enacting a scene of vaudevillian slapstick and priming us, oh so cunningly, to take comfort in its ribald pleasures without thinking of the melancholy awaiting us.
Sad Jokes had its international premiere at TIFF in the Discovery programme on September 9, 2024.
The Lonely Film Critic 