Overview

If Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan is a town mouse, here’s its visit to the countryside. With self-awareness to spare, L for Leisure plops us in the 1992-93 academic term and follows graduate students as they laze under the watchful eye of fluorescent title cards (e.g., Rosh Hashanah 1992 Gainesville, FL) that mirror the soft (yet often sufficient) structure that defines their lives. As an experimental comedy embracing amateurism with flashes of absurdism, the short and slapdash vignettes situate themselves between the graduate school experience and what your Uncle Gary thinks graduate school is. Seeing smart people behave stupidly (yet often intelligently - why not give yourself a break from thinking in order to think if you could?) leaves a pungent sense that rapidly vacillates between humor and dread, exposing what both those inside (and outside) the ivory tower fail to recognize about postgraduate studies.