Sasha Gordon is a composer who directs, and so far she directs the way she scores: short cues, quick exits, a joke where the swell should be. Her one feature is slight and likeable, and we would like to see her given more room.
Fi1m perspective
The best joke in It Had to Be You (2016) is a jingle. Sonia, played by Cristin Milioti, writes music for adverts, and the tunes Sasha Gordon wrote for her are catchy and dreadful in exactly the right proportion. We hummed one on the way to the kettle and resented it. Gordon scored the film as well as writing and directing it, so the music is part of the script rather than a mood laid over the top, and it is the one place in the picture where she shows off. She has earned it.
The career runs the wrong way round for a director. Gordon studied music and visual art at Brown, then piano and composition at the Mannes Conservatory, and only after that went to film school at NYU. She had scored a long list of features, shorts and series before she directed her own short, Manhattan Melody (2011), and she has kept scoring for other people since, including Daphne & Velma (2018) and the documentary short Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl) (2019). It Had to Be You, from a story she developed with Levi Abrino, is still her only feature. A television pilot, Maggie (2019), about motherhood, followed it, and a second feature about an immigrant girlhood is in development.
What she does with the romantic comedy is turn it round. The proposal comes at the start, the woman panics, and the man she is dithering over turns out to be right. "For me the message is more about the dissonance between what society/pop culture expects of women in a given situation and the reality," she has said, and the film bears that out. Somewhere around the middle we found ourselves firmly on Chris's side and slightly cross with Sonia, which is not how these films usually work on us, and we suspect it is exactly what Gordon wanted. Bobby Webster, who has shot three of her projects, films New York in flat ordinary daylight, and Amanda Laws's editing gets Gordon out of her daydream sketches before most of them wear thin.
Not all of them are sharp. Some are a single idea asked to fill a scene, and the Rome stretch goes soft in the way these things do. The tone stays light even when the material could take weight, a few of the dirtier jokes are pushed rather than found, and Sonia's flightiness is sometimes hard to credit in a woman her age. None of this sinks the film. It does keep it small.
Eighty-five minutes is a composer's running time: state the tune, vary it once, stop. That discipline is the best thing about Gordon's debut and also the reason we are not yet sure what she is. Whether she can hold a longer line, and let a scene run past the point where a cue would end, is the question her second feature will have to answer. On this evidence we would go and find out.
Biography
Sasha Gordon is a composer and filmmaker. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, she immigrated to the United States in 1989. She holds a master’s degree in piano and composition from the Mannes Conservatory and a master’s degree in filmmaking from New York University’s Tisch School.
Gordon has composed scores for numerous films and television series, including the Oscar-winning short God of Love (2010), I Believe in Unicorns (2015), Lovesick (2014), Daphne & Velma (2018) and Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl) (2019). She wrote, directed and composed the music for her debut feature It Had to Be You (2016). Her television work includes scoring the Emmy-winning series Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street and an Emmy-nominated score for Ghostwriter.
