Critics reviews

Philip has received rapturous reviews; I'm glad it has found a wide audience for micro-budget cinema; I admit: the film gives the sense of a demonic intelligence behind it. But it makes me uncomfortable that it dives with such undisguised glee into the relentless, everyday cruelties perpetrated by two men who are pure, unadulterated pricks. It is this glee — this strong enjoyment of their pathology on the part of the film — that I cannot abide.

It's a character study of needling intelligence and jabbing accuracy, crafted and edited with exquisite 1970s-style jaggedness, yet offering no emotional or intellectual reward for placing us in this abject bastard's company.

This outstanding black comedy of bad manners is the third feature from the young American filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, and only at the end when you wincingly reflect on what you've seen do you realise what a Niagara-straddling tightrope-walk the whole thing has been. Listen Up Philip skewers literary preciousness with Genghis Khan-like zeal, but the film itself is, very proudly, both literary and precious.

Without a taste of the writing itself – of how Philip manages to achieve beauty or greatness despite himself – Perry's film ends up feeling one-sided and thin, a deft riff on a New Yorker stereotype that doesn't dare to scratch the surface. It's Philip who did the work, and if that work is any good, it has to harbour at least a few molecules of generosity and empathic insight. Where's that guy?

Although it's a film about artists and their need to construct myths around themselves to make success feel more grandiose, it's also a simple study into the nature of forgiveness and how cinema has made us believe that absolving people of their past sins is always going to result in the best possible outcome for all parties.

Perry, an immensely talented artist, is wrestling with himself. Listen Up Philip is an "early film" desperate for the wisdom, or perhaps the closure, that comes at the expense of the regret felt in late life. The film is the work of an artist attempting to divine his own future.

In what really shouldn't be a breath of fresh air, PHILIP's triptych structure serves to highlight the floor-mopping superiority of legitimate thespians Elisabeth Moss and Jonathan Pryce (really sweating it out here). DP Sean Price Williams' luscious Super 16mm is, additionally, one last stern reminder of the true indeterminacy of waves of refracted sunlight falling through the New England autumn leaves.

Like all good satirical takedowns, it is at once completely outrageous and perfectly believable, and contains a generous dose of affection within the stew of acerbity. Perhaps the retro book covers with pastiche titles that are sprinkled throughout the film are the perfect emblem of Listen Up Philip's overarching tone. Thankfully, his films do not get swallowed up by their own cynicism, and retain a warmth even when their characters are at their most witheringly obnoxious.

Given how shrewd, uproarious and accurate the film's satire was for a certain echelon at New York (the laughter at the press screening had the reverberating tenor of collective self-recognition), Listen Up Philip became, for me, both impressive and depressing in equal measure. In Philip we see the sour inversion of the rebellious idealists so beloved by Assayas.

With its roiling, tempestuous, largely handheld cinematography, "Listen Up Philip" is a film of style that is, in its way, as distilled and abstracted and stylized as a movie by Wes Anderson. One surprising point of contact makes the suggestion overt: anachronistic office equipment, eighties-style computers and electric typewriters, and even 35-mm. still-photo cameras crop up throughout action that is, to all other appearances, set in the present day.

Listen Up Philip will never be mistaken for a BBC soap opera but it is a highly self-conscious literary film. Well-written, strongly acted, and often very funny, it employs the conceit of an intermittent, omniscient narrator (Eric Bogosian) whose introductory statement parodies the one employed by Roth's show-biz double Woody Allen to open Manhattan: "He had been living in the city for nine years and only now was beginning to think of it as home.

Listen Up Philip is brimming with unconventional narrative and filmic strategies, where it introduces familiar set-ups between characters and slowly veers toward a darker moral abyss, an emotional universe of ecstatic desolation.