Friends and Strangers

Ray & Alice (Fergus Wilson & Emma Diaz), two Australian twentysomethings that are living cushioned, comfortable lives in affluent Sydney, don’t have any real problems, and that’s their problem. This non-dilemma becomes fodder for wry, incisive comedy of everyday social mortification in writer/director/editor Vaughan’s ennui-drenched Friends and Strangers, in which molehill difficulties—an impromptu camping trip that fails to lead to a desired communion, a series of misunderstandings revolving around a wedding video—take on mountainous significance. A startlingly original piece of work located somewhere at the intersection of screwball comedy and cringe comedy, Antonioniesque alienation, and Rohmerian ravishment, and an exemplary work of art that calls into question the value of art in a modern world that has reduced it to nothing more than a marker of social status.