What Happened Was… (1994) Worst first date ever, or worst date EVER?

The hulking figure of Tom Noonan casts a deceptive shadow. The gangly character actor who found fame in films by Michaels Cimino and Mann (most notably the latter in Manhunter) is a distinctive yet understated presence, sizing up at an impressive 6ft 5in and possessing some memorably melancholy eyes; even from the sidelines, he commands attention and complex sympathy in roles that range from quietly affectionate to broodingly sinister. One gets the sense he knows that, as he applies every facet of his unique presence in his fascinating 1994 directorial debut (and adaptation of his earlier stageplay), What Happened Was…, a simmering, tense almost-romance where two drones at a New York law firm decide to meet up outside the office, starring Noonan himself and Hal Hartley collaborator Karen Sillas.

Sillas is Jackie, a thirty-something Long Island singleton and secretary who owns a characterful apartment in the Big Apple. Preferring to use her bedroom as a mannequin-filled, child-like dressing room and settling for a sofa bed to sleep on every single night, we learn a lot about her specific quirks from her decor as she preps for her date Michael (Noonan) to arrive; next to the door is a large blown-up portrait of Martin Luther King, and deeper inside the flat? An intimidatingly massive poster for Cats. Michael walks into this oddly-decorated home with a bottle of wine and a briefcase, yet his energy is not that of a man interested in his would-be date; he lingers awkwardly in the kitchen, fingers locked around the handle of his briefcase as he rejects Jackie’s offer of hanging up his coat. The microwave hums with a beTupperwared weekend-prepped meal, underscoring the unsettling silences that both Jackie and Michael struggle to fill as their very first alone-time outside of the office stagnates and mutates, turning what might be a tentative first date into an existential staring match neither party truly wants a part of.

Captured within the quiet blue glow of What Happened Was… is a phenomenally incisive look at inner-city ennui. Sex and the City may have later popularised the glamour of dating in the city that never sleeps, yet this is hardly a charming handover to that worldwide-sensation of a show; Noonan’s deeply-felt, excessively honest screenplay exists in its own indie sphere, looking at the unexceptional ones at the fringes of our everyday lives who are interesting in the way they are individuals, but entirely unremarkable in the crowd. Sillas and Noonan both nail this with their respective oddities, Sillas in particular hovering an uneasiness over the smallest of gestures; there’s a strangeness to the way she dresses up to the nines, leaving her dress unzipped until the very last minute, creating a weird tension about a potential wardrobe malfunction that never materialises. Noonan’s insistence on juggernauting through a conversation with random facts is also incredibly well-judged, smirking his way through explaining the science of microwaves as a sloppy bowl of indeterminate ‘seafood’ is reheated for his pleasure. They’re a couple of funny fish, and each half of the mismatched duo handles the gearshifts later in the film with aplomb, throwing their off-kilter ‘will they? won’t they?” dynamic on its head into a less conventional “could they? should they?” moral dilemma.

It would be very easy for this material to become staid and stagey, yet Noonan’s preternatural talent behind the camera enables him to squeeze maximum cinematic juice out of every department. The startling use of a snap zoom here; a sharp edit to a close-up of a handsy advance there; the view through a sheet curtain of something eerie yet alluring; this story has clearly always existed in Noonan’s head as a fully-fledged film as well as a versatile theatre piece, and while it may be an interesting curio to see how this compares to a live performance, this feels like the diamond-hard bonafide version of this material. 

Capped off with a sad little tune co-written by Aimee Mann (who would later lend her talents to Paul Thomas Anderson for Magnolia and some West Coast ennui instead), What Happened Was…’s status as a magnificently restrained hidden gem of American indie cinema is elevated by Radiance’s wonderful new restoration and release which sinks the audience fully into the mood-killing lighting and clinical setting of a single lady’s inner sanctum at the bland peak of 1990s interior design. A film that could not exist in the digital world of dating today, it feels like the last whimper of disconnected souls yearning to feel for the first time in years, decades even. We exist in a different kind of loneliness now, yet this stands tall as Noonan himself as a capsule of a malaise magnified by the terrible promise of an empty NYC.

Simon’s Archive – What Happened Was… (1994)