Computer Chess

Overview

With his 2002 debut Funny Ha Ha, Andrew Bujalski inadvertently gave birth to the mumblecore movement, a loose American subgenre of cheaply made indie films with a focus on naturalistic dialogue. Now his latest film, Computer Chess, might be the mumbliest of them all. Set in the early 1980s and filmed using only the most rudimentary video equipment that would have been available at the time, this fascinatingly esoteric, ultra-niche comedy feels almost like a response to the mainstream success of folks like Lynn Shelton (Your Sister's Sister) and Lena Dunham (Girls), contemporaries of Bujalski who’ve used their hipster-auteur cred to secure projects of greater gloss and star-power.

One thing’s for sure: there’s nothing glossy about Computer Chess. Shot in black and white, using old analogue video cameras that haven’t been manufactured in decades, cinematographer Matthias Grunsky achieves an aesthetic of low-tech glitch and grain. It’s a look that meshes perfectly with Bujalski’s screenplay, in which competing teams of polyester-clad programmers descend on a cheap hotel to pit chess-playing computer software against each other.

Indebted to the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest (This Is Spinal Tap, Best in Show), awkward exchanges and low-key absurdity are Bujalski’s comedic tools of choice. The stakes of the tournament are impossibly low, something that’s made all the more funny by how seriously the proto tech-geeks take it. In their off time, characters flirt clumsily with the comp’s sole female entrant, before retreating to their rooms to argue about the future of computing. One of many surreal subplots sees a contestant left without a place to sleep, his nocturnal odyssey eventually comes to a head after encountering the group of new-age self-helpers with whom the contest is sharing their event space.

But beneath this cringe-inducing humour exists a sad and bitter heart. The ubiquity of computers nowadays has seen the geeks inherit the earth. But for the characters in Computer Chess, that is still the distant future. Outcasts, introverts and weird egomaniacs, these are men born before their time, with no way to assert their masculinity. No way, save for lines of computer code and those 64 black and white squares. As much as it is comedy, Computer Chess is also a treatise on isolation, social hierarchy and the crippling male fear of inadequacy. In a scene that exemplifies the movie as a whole, a virginal junior competitor is propositioned by a middle-aged couple. It’s hilarious, uncomfortable and tragic all at once.