
Nerve-racking heat in New York City could be hell if there was no air conditioning system. Acknowledging the broad plain that A/C presents is fairly relatable which is what Simon Hacker gets in the comical father-daughter film Notice to Quit. This is the reason why the established real estate agent in this worst-ever narrative kept on looking at all the many advantages that a functioning A/C unit brings. Loosely situated in the five boroughs, Hacker’s film’s thunderous pace parallels that of his close mentors the Safdie brothers, but in the end, fails miserably by doing the exact thing that the A/C unit is designed to combat. It allows you to see it huff and puff.
Michael Zegen’s character Andy Singer in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” seems to have had better luck in Los Angeles than he’s having now. People are apparently remembering him from the commercial he did for toothpaste but that’s where his luck begins and ends, so to speak. With his determination to make it big in the film industry now crumbling, Andy has now taken up working as a real estate broker but unfortunately, the location he works for simply appears to be cursed as none of his clients want to be near him. A third option revolving around his boss’s orders to sell appliances to dubious dealers takes too long to build on. It is also worth mentioning that Andy has just recently witnessed his eviction due to the lack of timely payments for rent. To top it all off on the same day, Andy is worried about the current whereabouts of his daughter who suddenly appears after 10 years only to inform him that they are relocating to Orlando.
In a fitting touch, Andy seems to have also spilled some coffee on his shirt first thing in the morning. It is a detail that arguably overstates the case but it establishes how Notice to Quit will repeatedly try to induce some sympathy for this pathetic father’s figure who can barely do anything right, the actions of which might not wholly warrant that feeling. What it means is that: An otherwise innocent day when Andy is about the town with his young, sharp, and imaginative daughter Anna (Kasey Bella Suarez) turns out to be a rather infamous day of sorts as it is always sweltering with anger and struggle to become a better self, if not growth.
The story of a father and his daughter spending a productive day together but the father is trying to do basic life things only makes things worse, which sounds risky in the storyline. That is a tough perspective to convince if you do not have jaded real estate agents’ caricatures and a depressing city to engross you in.
With no thanks to Mika Altskan’s overbearing camera work, “Notice to Quit” makes you repulsed by everything New York, be it subway chairs or sidewalk benches. That notwithstanding, it does appear that the audience ought to feel that Andy and Anna’s day together needs to be more messy than it is, even amidst all the dirt they incessantly fight against. Here is a city that is and does you dirt, yet there is an ironically ‘clean’ angle of its lead protagonist that the film seems to be forever stuck in.
As the broker typifies so many ways people are duped and cheated in this dirty City, One Day at a Time stands out with all its anger and grievance, “Gel in the hair and telling people lies is not work,” so it is not surprising, Andy’s ex-wives snap, “I use mousse,” comes Andy Zegen’s signature self-deprecating as a dazzling gesture that suggests to us how acknowledged Andy is of a plethora of scams and schemes that kept him alive.
However, Hacker and Zegen never go that way with Andy so if only he was given a decent hand, he would be a decent person and a good father, in a way. His allowance of agency in this case is adamantly forgiven every single time. Even when his daughter calls him out for using a cockroach as a device to dodge a bill in a diner (and probably took away a job to the cook in that place too), for Andy it is just a cruelty-free indifferent game “That was an opportunity, not a crime.”
However, this does not absolve you of the responsibility of enduring 90 minutes to see how Zegen transforms into a more loving father, or how much of a pawn (an oxymoron for sure) he truly is. Perhaps more interesting are the parts where Zegen and Suarez display scintillating chemistry. Instead, their awkward and rather wooden onscreen chemistry only serves to worsen the film in the latter half when the characters of Andy and Anna start warming up to each other.
Encounters with overly neat concepts of quite a strong sense of security “Notice to Quit”, appeared to be a cute light-hearted sitcom that has been set in the New York City of the Safdie brothers (especially in those scenes where Andy is hysterically trying to meet the deadline or else he might not have any fingers left!). But in skipping the depictions of tear-jerking prior and edge ‘instilling’ attempts of the following, Hacker’s movie, in particular, loses its rhythm and, being also ‘quick and actively progressing in the story-line plot’, stays on for an extended period of time.
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