Last year, Nanette Burstein used comedic flair to tackle the difficulties of trying to love and make love with someone across the country. Two years before that, she (re-)burst onto the scene as the writer/director of the documentary American Teen, a simple movie focusing on the difficulties of the acne age that demands to be seen.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Burstein will now be showcasing the difficulties of battling with your soul mate in the work place. She’s signed on to direct Unforgiving World, a remake of a French film that focuses on a married couple who are both up for the same career-altering job at an architecture firm. Instead of giving one side of the story, the film will show different possible outcomes depending on who gets the gig (and presumably how they get it).
Please Give writer/director Nicole Holofcener will write the script for Focus Features, but there’s no word yet on when to expect it on screens.
The premise sounds like one bursting with possibilities, and working through Focus should give Burstein and Holofcener both the freedom to explore even the darkest of possibilities. As a comedy, it might need those depressing elements. It feels slightly in the same vein as The Promotion, but a version where Sean William Scott and John C. Reilly are a married couple. Try and get that image out of your head for the rest of the day.
Burstein got her start in the documentary world, but with this, she’ll be taking one more step into the land of fiction. It will be interesting to see whether she stays there for the long haul or balances the real with the unreal.
