In an age where thousands of films get made every year, there’s often a push to make something different. This is how you ended up with rom-coms like “Love Wedding Repeat,” a recent Netflix film that ruined its characters with a complicated multiverse plot, or with Adam Sandler movies with fantastical plots. Most of these attempts to reinvent the wheel falter under the pressure of their own story- line, trying to pull something meaningful out of a jumble of half-baked ideas. Delightfully, “Palm Springs” was not one of these. If “Palm Springs” is a water park ride, it starts off as a Lazy River, meandering its way through exposition like a typical wed- ding movie. You meet Nyles (Andy Samberg, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), a relaxed but dis- gruntled wedding guest, and Sarah (Cristin Milioti, “How I Met Your Mother”), one of the bridesmaids for the bride, her sister Tala (Camila Mendes, “Riverdale”). After the two meet, it only takes about 10 minutes for the plot to explode as the roller coaster takes off: Nyles is stuck in an infinite time loop, à la “Groundhog Day,” and he accidentally pulls Sarah into it. The filmmakers’ ability to successfully pull off a plot of these proportions is a miracle, and even more so that they were able to fit it into a tight 90 minutes. And yet “Palm Springs” is brilliantly done, held together by a strong ensemble cast and a well-written story. It doesn’t hurt that the film is produced by The Lonely Island, an absurdist comedy troupe made up of childhood friends Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. Having The Lonely Island team as producers brings plen- ty of their zany comedic choices — a fight end- ing with a fork stuck into someone’s face, for example, could’ve come straight out of one of their digital shorts on “Saturday Night Live.” Like many rom-coms, the success of the film is dependent on its two leads; in this case, Samberg and Milioti are an excellent match. Even as Sarah is trying to understand what’s going on, Nyles has long collapsed into the monotony of the time loop — a juxtaposition that is chaotic but effective. Both Samberg and Milioti’s performances are charming and compelling, subtly displaying their distress and helplessness without ever losing their comedic timing. As the time loop continues, the two come to a nihilistic consensus, choos- ing to give up and waste time. This leads to a number of delightful montages of their time in the loop: relaxing in the pool, making reck- less choices, choreographed dances and more. It doesn’t hurt that this film came out dur- ing quarantine, where, for many of us, every day is the same as the day before. Nyles and Sarah’s choices to waste time feel especially real when your own life has been somewhat monotonous for months. For them, the days only broken up by their drunken adventures or the occasional appearance of violent and vengeful Roy (J.K. Simmons, “Whiplash”). Still, the mental transition as the time loop continues is visible in their appearance — both of them become increasingly, but subtly, disheveled over time. Truthfully, this is a film that’s made to watch more than once: Fleet- ing moments end up being far more indicative that there’s more going on. In a movie where the same day repeats over and over again, I didn’t think there would be any spectacular twists, but there are — and they completely change how the rest of the film is viewed. 7 It’s the early 2010s in New York, and Maria Griffiths, a trans woman in her late twenties and the protagonist of Imogen Binnie’s 2013 novel “Nevada,” is writing a blog post in an internet café. After recap- ping the strange few days she’s had, she turns to a speculative exercise: “I imagine that you’re familiar with all the stereotypes around transsexual women: that we’re all sex workers, that we’re all hairy, potbellied old men, that we’re all deep-voiced nightlife phoenixes, that we’re all drag queens, that we’re all repressed, that we’re all horny shemales with twelve-inch cocks…. Can we talk about what the actual stereotypes around transsexual women should be. The ones that hit a little too close to be funny.” The taxonomy of trans women that Maria goes on to write is really more of a self-portrait. Trans women are, she writes, addicted to the internet (the place that guided many of us out of the closet) and often a little socially inept, awkward, unsure how to take up space in the world. Maria notes that “trans women try to shirk their male privilege before transitioning, disappear into themselves, and then can never really get back out to become asser- tive, present, feminist women.” Binnie’s novel is concerned, in a large part, with the problem implied in this blog post — how do you become a person when you’ve been avoiding yourself for so long before transitioning? Maria doesn’t have an answer, although she’s very good at identifying and picking apart her prob- lems, relating them back to the structures of oppression she’s learned to identify. It’s just that she can’t get from there to a deci- sion. Maria is painfully passive, almost directionless in her inability to assert herself. The novel opens with a crisis that forc- es Maria to act, something she’s unused to doing: Her girlfriend Steph, over vegan brunch one day, tells her that she cheated on her with a mutual friend. Maria’s reac- tion is to shut down: “She’s still there, still watching, wishing there were something to say but really all she can think is, okay, whatever.” She goes to work like noth- ing happened, only remembering later that she should probably do something. Something like talk to Steph about it. She doesn’t, though. She doesn’t even think about it too much. “The more she tries to think about it, whittle it down to how she feels about their relationship, the slip- perier it gets. Thinking about Steph is like trying to squeeze a fish.” Instead, her thoughts rove over every- thing else — her job at a Strand-esque bookstore in Manhattan, her past, her unresolved conflict with her own trans- ness — while she avoids Steph for two days. It becomes increasingly appar- ent that this crisis struck her in such a way as to expose the fault lines of her tenuously maintained existence, and she spends most of the first half of the book unpacking her own life in a long, unspool- ing inner monologue. Maria’s life has depended on her own ability to avoid her- self that during this moment of crisis the avoidance starts to take on the air of self- sabotage. She’s late for work a few times and gets fired, right after Steph breaks up with her before she has a chance to do it first. Suddenly, she’s homeless-ish and jobless in one of the most expensive cities in America. At this point in the narrative, Maria’s avoidant tendencies go into overdrive: she borrow-steals Steph’s car and decides to road-trip across America. As you might have guessed, this doesn’t help either. When next we see her, she hasn’t show- ered in weeks and has just arrived at a Wal-Mart in a small town in Nevada. Before we see her again, though, we meet James, a local, who is “hotboxing the bathroom of his apartment halfway down the hill from the Wal-Mart.” He’s just had an argument with his girlfriend Nicole, and the only reason he’s getting stoned instead of making amends is that “she’s right to be mad: there is something wrong with him. He has no idea what the fuck it is, but he does need to figure it out if he’s ever going to have a normal human relationship.” If you get the sense that James’s internal monologue resem- bles Maria’s, you’re right: When he’s not watching art-house films or getting high, James fantasizes endlessly and tortuously about becoming a woman. Unlike Maria, James’s particular avoidance takes the form of abusing marijuana and mastur- bating a lot, but it’s avoidance nonethe- less. When they meet, the two of them are mutually fascinated with each other — James because he has never met a trans woman before, and Maria because she’s certain James is also trans and doesn’t realize it yet. They establish an uneasy rapport, get high together, and eventually decide to drive to nearby Reno together. Thursday, July 16, 2020 The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS SUMMER SERIES SUMMER SERIES KARI ANDERSON Daily Arts Writer FILM REVIEW FILM REVIEW EMILY YANG Managing Arts Editor The trans art of storytelling: ‘Nevada’ ‘Palm Springs’ is a zany and delightful comedy Read more at michigandaily.com Read more at michigandaily.com