You Hurt My Feelings (R, 93 mins)
Directed by Nicole Holofcener
Since her film Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) in which an aspiring writer creates and sells fake personal documents belonging to famous people, director Nicole Holofcener has been fairly quiet. A pity. She has a lot to say about the crumbling Western world and our attempts to get on regardless, trying to be the best we can be, when everything is falling apart. She’s fascinated by the limits of self-belief, the impact of dishonesty in relationships and the effects of lying to protect those closest to us.
That fascination is evident in every shot, every line, every gesture in Holofcener’s new film You Hurt My Feelings. Writer Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and psychiatrist Don (Tobias Menzies) are as happy a couple as anyone could imagine, loving, sharing their icecreams, actually sharing all their food, like a couple of completely compatible birds who’ve mated for life. There’s humour in the way their relationship is portrayed, but this isn’t a romantic comedy. It’s a fairly serious drama that manages to be light-hearted. Quite a feat.
Scenes of Beth and Don in their professional lives, Beth teaching budding writers, Don counselling troubled people, slot in easily between scenes of their marriage, fun times, wedding anniversaries and also scenes in which Beth, in a way that borders on annoying, incessantly asks Don’s opinion of her so far unpublished first novel. Don, who doubts his own effectiveness as a therapist, supports Beth at every step, never expressing any doubts about her novel’s potential, referring to the success of her published memoir and giving her every reason to feel confident about her novel.
