Being obliged to keep company with a narcissistic airhead is just as enervating in film as it is in real life. Ample proof of this can be found in "Hannah Takes The Stairs", where the annoying affectations of the film's main character and her threadbare story-line seem expressly designed to test an audience's patience. We first meet our irritating heroine picking towel fluff off her body after taking a shower with slacker boyfriend Matt, before she heads off to work at an implausibly laid-back TV production company. Hannah soon rejects Matt in favor of nerdy office colleague Paul, and they embark on a desultory love affair until she starts to fancy yet another charisma-free work-mate. This latest prospect is a pal of Paul, so Hannah feels obliged to make an unconvincing display of inner torment over her romantic dilemma - and after she finally makes a decision, the narrative arc of Hannah's 'mumble-core' odyssey is pretty much concluded.
Hannah is so self-absorbed and inarticulate that she's unable to explain her capriciousness beyond a confession of "chronic dissatisfaction" embroidered with vacuous embellishments along the lines of "like, you know . . um . . whatever". Despite the repetitive drone of the film's banal improvised dialog, the actors always appear to be 'acting' and conscious of the camera's presence, which amplifies the cast's deficiencies with its own wobbly hand-held artifice. When the TV company's manager expresses exasperation about the folly of workplace romance in the penultimate scene, it seems like a rather shallow insight after suffering 83 minutes of excruciating tedium.
Hannah is so self-absorbed and inarticulate that she's unable to explain her capriciousness beyond a confession of "chronic dissatisfaction" embroidered with vacuous embellishments along the lines of "like, you know . . um . . whatever". Despite the repetitive drone of the film's banal improvised dialog, the actors always appear to be 'acting' and conscious of the camera's presence, which amplifies the cast's deficiencies with its own wobbly hand-held artifice. When the TV company's manager expresses exasperation about the folly of workplace romance in the penultimate scene, it seems like a rather shallow insight after suffering 83 minutes of excruciating tedium.