“Strikingly crystalline, Reichardt’s writing, filming, and editing give a lot of life, energy, and truth to every character.”

“To show up” is one of these expressions in the English language that has so many different meanings, and one possible summary of Kelly Reichardt’s last movie (and yet, her first to make the cut into Cannes’ competition) is to say that it covers the whole scope of these meanings. Another kind of summary, more prosaic, would be to state that the film follows one week in the life of Lizzie, a resident artist in a small art school. Lizzie’s show opening is due in a few days, during which we will witness her interactions within her different circles, which intersect quite a lot. Jo, her landlord and neighbour, is also a fellow artist who has an exhibition coming; her brother is himself an artist and her mother works at the art school. When her cat attacks a pigeon and drags it into her apartment, Lizzie puts the bird back outside only to discover the next day that Jo rescued it and is now asking Lizzie to look after it when she is out.

This storyline involving the cat and the pigeon is in a way the main narrative thread of Showing Up. Animals are as important as humans in the movie, and among humans the art life, the family life, and the basic, boring life also bear the same importance. Reichardt depicts and scrutinizes these different worlds Lizzie jumps from and into, and by doing so, like in a literary short story, she says a lot about life by seemingly showing very little. There is, as always in her cinema, a lot of intelligence at play here in the way she refuses to lock her characters and their actions into hermetic boxes, labels, or ways of interpreting. On the contrary: everything is fluid, ambiguous, rich in meaning. As the groups of people and animals around Lizzie overlap, so do creativity and ordinary chores, art and lunacy, family and work.

Strikingly crystalline, Reichardt’s writing, filming, and editing (which she does herself) give a lot of life, energy, and truth to every character. Jo quickly becomes the co-lead of the film, partly due to the way Lizzie behaves and dresses (with dull colours, high socks and mules), so stiff it puts Jo in the spotlight by comparison. Michelle Williams remarkably blends herself in this kind of absent presence, while Hong Chau dazzles in her much more exuberant and energetic character. The dynamic of the relationship between the two women is never being settled in favour of one or the other, just as their art does not have to be explicitly meaningful or explained to us; and people do not have to be labelled as good or bad, right or wrong, sane or mad. The closing scene of the movie, at the opening of Lizzie’s show, is the perfect gathering of all these ideas and beliefs. The art pieces, the organisation of the event, the family issues, the inconsistent chatter – everything there feels so true, hitting just the correct note. All the people (and animals) involved are doing nothing more or less than live – they showed up, indeed.