Tribeca 2021: This "Poser" Sneaks Up on You

by Jason Adams

It is said that our 20s are spent trying to figure out who we are, accumulating likes and dislikes, testing out identities like stage costumes for some great reveal, to be determined. You fake it until you make it, the "it" being some semblance of a self. It's a precarious and unsettling time for a lot of people, and Ori Segev and Noah Dixon's film Poser, screening at Tribeca, does a fine job actualizing on-screen that amorphous state of flirting with emptiness, giving us a slow-burn Single White Female for the 21st century in the process...

When we first meet Lennon (Sylvie Mix) she's skulking around a grungy art gallery in her home-city of Columbus, Ohio, eavesdropping on hipster opinions to pass off as her own. Pass off to who exactly it's not clear, because you can tell right off the bat that, like opinions, Lennon also doesn't seem to have any friends. She has a sister and several co-workers who all stare at her noncommittally, never getting closer than a table's length; none of them seem to know what to make of her, and Poser makes the case that maybe that saying about "other people being unknowable" can find terrifying foothold in certain cases out there. There's a dose of Patrick Bateman's mask about this one.

Speaking of, you know how half of American Psycho is Bateman's vacuous inner monologues about art and music -- endless empty prattle about the sociology of Whitney Houston songs that feels simultaneously stolen off both the New Yorker and the back of cereal boxes? It makes almost too much sense that the now equivalent of those passages would be a podcast, and so Poser has Lennon decide seemingly out of nowhere (but then everything about her feels "out of nowhere") to become a music podcaster. A match met in Indie Scene heaven -- she barely has to do a lick of work before a stream of wildly pretentious musicians are more than happy to bleat their monotonous revelations at her. Turns out there's no better listener than a vacuum, but at some point a black hole begins to swallow back.

Before long Lennon manages to work her way up to her number one obsession, a pink-haired electro-pop songstress called Bobbi Kitten (played by Bobbi Kitten) who rocks out on stage with her duo partner Z Wolf, an unspeaking synth-twink in a werewolf mask (always in a werewolf mask). Another musician Lennon interviewed knows Bobbi and in the way of that small city telephone game of everybody knowing everybody without even having to try it's not long before Lennon and Bobbi are newfound besties, a deep well of erotic will-they-won't-they about them as they eye one another up down and sideways.

Bobbi isn't untalented either; she actually has some good thoughts about art to share. And a smart touch to Poser is that Lennon, for all her vacant-eyed eeriness, sees that, and doesn't actually have bad taste in things herself --  turns out it's more terrifying that she is instinctual enough to latch her barnacle self onto the good shit, and vampire it out before anybody even realizes she's discarding art-shaped carcasses in her wake. Her plagiarism is so quiet and internalized it seems like that kind of good-natured self-searching we all go through... until it doesn't. She's a one-woman plague of imposter syndrome, and by the time she's done the abandoned warehouses where the songs were once sung will be overrun with rats.