The Novice (2021)
Directed by Lauren Hadaway
Our natural human tendency is to look for happiness and shield ourselves from pain. To onlookers, waking up every morning at 5am during the week, to write at a café for an hour before work, seemed like unnecessary punishment. But I needed to do it; to prove something to myself, if no one else. Sometimes I’d look at what I wrote in disappointment, depressed that this is the best I can do. Maybe I should’ve gotten out of bed at 4am. Maybe 3am. It took me a while to get out of this cyclical, despondent mode of thinking, to equate time with mastery.
Alex’s (Isabelle Fuhrman) desire to row is motivated by discomfort. It’s about the ambition to be the best at something, even if it’s something that does not come natural to her. It’s the story of her life: they were smarter but she worked harder. She wants to be great and gives everything of herself. Alex is a freshman physics major, her worst subject, and is first seen at the beginning of Lauren Hadaway’s The Novice completing an exam, only to ask to re-take it within the span of her class period. She gets a C. She can’t concede anything. She has to try – hard - to get anywhere.
Plenty of contemporary analogs can be drawn to this film, from Damian Chazelle’s Whiplash to Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Those seem a little too obvious and miss what makes Hadaway’s film so sophisticated. Formally, The Novice embraces a similar sound design and editing pattern to what I’ve seen in some of Don Hertzfeldt’s short films, particularly Everything Will Be Ok and his World of Tomorrow trilogy. The rapid cuts and jarring mix of hushed voiceover coupled with Alex Weston’s anxious score provoke a perpetual sense of dread, of a looming collision between mind and body. As Alex dedicates more of herself to rowing, we see her gaunt face becoming increasingly more sallow, the circles around her eyes becoming pronounced, and her palms possessing blisters akin to something you’d see in a David Cronenberg film. Like Julia Ducournau’s Titane, the soft exterior of our bodies can and will betray our wildest ambitions.
The philosophy of The Novice borders on biblical, as Alex’s cross to bear is one where she sacrifices inclusion among her teammates for personal glory. In rowing, that lack of a social game proves detrimental. And it’s not something you can teach. Alex scribbles notes on technique and calculates the time she needs to beat in order to make varsity or break a record but in doing so she ignores the rest of the moving world, isolating herself further. What Hadaway gets at throughout The Novice is how we keep strengthening our neurotic habits in a vain quest for some kind of lasting comfort. I’ve been there. In practically every facet of my life, I was never naturally gifted. I had to work hard. And it brought out the best and worst qualities in me. “Write what you know” is the standard advice dispensed in a creative writing course. What if you don’t know anything? Then you have to commit yourself to it, to your very limit, to the point where you look back at your former limit and smirk. There’s a moment where that equation of time to mastery loses its meaning, where we begin to re-examine the way in which we’re living our lives. No one ever said it was easy, you hear. No one ever said it was supposed to be this hard, either.