In “Disfluency,” the directorial debut from Anna Baumgarten, ’15, a young woman, Jane, returns from college to her childhood home for a summer of bonfires and skinny dipping with friends — but this isn’t the idyllic paradise it might appear to be at first glance.
Baumgarten was sexually assaulted during her senior year of college. She says she “hadn’t seen a nuanced version of my experience in media.”
While Baumgarten’s experience ultimately inspired the film’s premise, at first, she wanted to ignore it.
“I tried to put it in a box on the shelf and forget about it. But that’s not how trauma works out in the body,” she says. “So one of the ways that I work through things is by writing.”
She started working on a short script, which eventually grew into a short film and, from there, into a feature film. Even though it is certainly a film about trauma, there are “a lot of ups and downs, highs and lows,” she says.
“I didn’t want to make a sad movie about a sad thing that happens to a sad girl,” Baumgarten insists.
“Disfluency” neither shows Jane’s original trauma nor exploits her subsequent suffering. Instead, the film leaves room for her multifaceted experience, which allows friendship and nostalgia to coexist with confusion and pain.
“I always find that there’s comedy in the darkness,” Baumgarten says.
In the aftermath of her own attack, Baumgarten began having panic attacks, in the midst of which she would experience “a lot of tears, a lot of hyperventilating.” At the time, she had trouble describing to the people around her what she was going through.
“One of the words I could say was ‘sorry.’… I would be saying it over and over. Then I started to think about how I was using the word ‘sorry’ in my language overall,” Baumgarten says.
Baumgarten realized she wasn’t using the word intentionally and became interested in the idea of disfluencies — words like “sorry” or “umm” that disrupt our speech, often without our realizing it.
“We have these imperfections,” Baumgarten says. “We start and stop.”
But the notion of disfluencies doesn’t just apply to our speech: it also applies to our lives, which face all sorts of disruptions. That theme runs through “Disfluency” like an undercurrent.
Baumgarten, who currently lives in Los Angeles, returned to Commerce Township, Michigan, where she grew up, to shoot the film. It will be available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV beginning Jan. 24, and much of the crew — from editor Kevin Birou, ’13, to director of photography John Fisher, ’14, and art director Layne Austin Simsecu, ’15 — are themselves U-M alums.
“In a big way, it felt like the band was back together,” Baumgarten says.
The film was completed in 2019, but its release was delayed first by the pandemic and then by the Hollywood writers’ strike. Baumgarten used the intervening time to tour U.S. colleges in partnership with SafeBAE, a student-led nonprofit working to prevent sexual violence among teens, where she spoke out about consent education, sexual assault prevention, and how to support a survivor.
“That’s been super rewarding,” she says.
Even more rewarding, she adds, is the feedback she’s received from current students about the film itself. They’ve told her that, normally when they see movies about topics like this, they tend to go for a “very pander-y” tone. But they’ve also said the dialogue in the film reflects how they actually talk to each other.
“As a writer,” Baumgarten says, “that’s magic to hear.”
Natalia Holtzman, MSI’19, is a freelance writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
