Happy Here and Now (2002)

A little bundle of wind and rain named Katrina has wiped away much of what makes director Michael Almereyda’s Happy Here and Now (2002) such a mystical, mysterious, mythical, and magical exploration of environment and psyche. Set in antediluvian New Orleans, Happy Here and Now does not exactly follow the frustrations and hopes of a young woman searching through the charmed and haunted byways of the Crescent City for her missing sister. Rather than move from plot point to plot point, the reality and momentum of Happy Here and Now swirls, recedes, and lurches up upon the struggle and the joy of its wandering heroine. Perception, experience, the line between life and death, all are simultaneously blurred and sharpened through the lens of old New Orleans.