It seems unlikely that the New York filmmaker Ben Jacobson, while writing and directing his irrepressibly lively and likable debut feature, “Bunny,” took cues from Jean Renoir’s 1936 “The Crime of Monsieur Lange,” set on a block in Paris. But the films are actually much alike. Both confine their events to a single urban zone. Both are tributes to proletarian solidarity. And both hinge on a murder.
The Monsieur Lange of Jacobson’s caper is Bunny (Mo Stark), a good Samaritan who’s never too busy to lend a hand to the idiosyncratic occupants of his East Village tenement. Bunny is also a gigolo, which makes him something of an oddball himself: like Mister Rogers if he had bulbous biceps and got paid for sex.
The movie takes place over one day in the building as Bunny and his wife, Bobbie (Liza Colby), and his best pal, Dino (Jacobson), cope with a spate of residential dramas. Happy Chana (Genevieve Hudson-Price), an Orthodox Jewish woman who’s renting through Airbnb, cannot be alone with Bunny without his wife present. At the same time, Bobbie’s estranged father, Loren (Tony Drazan), appears suddenly with hopes of reconciling.
The escapades kick up a notch — and grow farther fetched — when a mishap saddles the crew with a bulky dead body. It’s a familiar plot point, but the pleasures of the chaos lie in the true-blue camaraderie of the characters, a group bound by nothing more than circumstance. “Bunny” is a New York movie that eschews realism but still brims with authentic affection, and in doing so, bursts with life.
Bunny
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters.
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