Writers and Directors: The Thiele Brothers
Watching two cousins haul a sofa around the streets of Dayton, Ohio, for 69 minutes may not be the greatest narrative for a film, but Sofa, So Good is handsomely shot in black and white and stays on the right side of absurdism. Jake and Red meet some oddballs on their journey, but the empty landscapes of a city that has seen better days are the real pull here.
The cousins live on a nice street, but they need a couch so that they can watch the games on TV. When they go to collect one on the other side of town, they ask their friend to come with a truck so that they can transport the velvet-looking two-seater couch home. But their friend comes with a car, leaving Jake and Red no other option but to carry it home.
It takes all day, and they have low-stake adventures on the way. They encounter the bored drum major of a marching band, an incredibly sweaty man who is desperate to sit down on the new sofa and a creepy puppeteer. Throughout, the pair is pursued by a bike gang called the Sadists, who have a war on comfort. Scenes are shortish, but as the minutes go by, the film acquires a hypnotic quality that reminds the viewer of long summer days in their childhood when there was little to do but roam around the urban wastelands. Suffering a decline in its population, Dayton is full of derelict factories and vacant car lots where the only people on the street are as lost as each other.
The cousins’ task is Sisyphean, they imply. However, instead of a boulder, they must lug the sofa across town, never, it seems, ever getting closer to their house. And it’s the journey, rather than the folk who they meet, that slowly draws in the viewer. The camera is often static, and so we see, from a distance, Jake and Red ford a shallow stream or see them enter the frame on the left-hand side only to leave it on the right, still carrying the sofa.
While the story is similar to Jim Jarmusch’s road movies, some of the shots by the Thiele Brothers seem to be inspired by the shorts of Derek Jarman in which he overlayed Super8 films to obtain haunting images of people or objects on top of landscapes. In the Thieles’ case (Kyle, Eli and Cole), Dayton seems old and modern simultaneously. Their choice of monochrome is sharp and clearly demonstrates their arthouse ambitions.
But, it’s still a little long, a short extended beyond its reach. Sofa, So Good might reach a wider audience if it were a brisker affair, a longish short film rather than a short feature. For a piece that focuses so much on aesthetics, the principal actors still manage to create a sense of relationship between them. Joseph Jeffries’ Jake is grumpy and determined, while Yahel Pack is the cheekier, more idealistic Red, who believes that capitalism could be replaced by a barter system. Capitalism has done Dayton no favours, but what’s left looks stunning.
Sofa, So Good is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
