Review: "New Year's Day" (1989)

New York City has produced many unique independent film makers -- famous ones like Woody Allen and Spike Lee, mid-level famous ones like Jim Jarmusch and Abel Ferrara, and then more obscure ones like Hal Hartley and Henry Jaglom. 

Jaglom is an interesting case. Born in England, his family fled the Nazis and came to NYC in the 1940s. Jaglom was part of the New Hollywood of the 1960s and '70s (he was an editor on Easy Rider in 1969), then became a director himself, but he never achieved the heights of some of his contemporaries. Instead, he's made a large number of very small, very intimate films, usually about people in show business, usually starring his friends and family members. They're almost like well-made home movies -- personal, naturalistic, short on story but big on characters, and highly improvised.

One of them is New Year's Day from 1989.

It's about a middle-aged New Yorker, played by Jaglom, moving back to the city after a failed marriage in Los Angeles. He arrives at the apartment he's just rented, on the first day of the year, to discover that the three women who are moving out are in fact still there for one more day. At first he tries to find a hotel but everything's booked. So the women invite him to stay and, over the course of the day, more and more people show up, an odd assortment of characters, and an impromtu party begins. Jaglom's character, Drew, begins to flirt and fall for one of the women named Lucy (played by a pre-Friends Maggie Wheeler) who is herself moving to LA to escape a bad relationship and recharge her career (her sleazy ex-boyfriend is a very young, pre-fame David Duchovny). The other two women are struggling themselves -- one of them, played by the late Gwen Welles, is depressed and behaves badly because her friends are moving away, and the other one, played by an actress named Melanie Winter, strongly wants a child -- and is looking for the right father. Over the course of the day, and many, many, many, many conversations (the movie is all conversations, no action), these lives touch and bounce off of each other (in some ways good, in some ways bad) as a new year and new lives begin.

The entire movie takes place inside this NYC apartment on this particular New Year's Day and there's really no plot to speak of -- just lots of talking and philosophizing. But the acting is very good, totally believable, and it's a rare movie where people speak like actual human beings. It's worth seeing and you can find it on Amazon Prime. New Year's Day is the only movie I've seen set on the always strange, weird first day of the year -- where everything seems and feels possible until you realize that the past is never gone and the future is never certain.