Photo via Whiskey Creek Productions
Kasey Bella Suarez and Michael Zegen in ‘Notice to Quit’
Kasey Bella Suarez and Michael Zegen in ‘Notice to Quit’
Fast talking, highly caffeinated Andy Singer (Michael Zegen) hustles at the low end of rental brokerage from his cell phone in a Manhattan bodega. When he stops by his own apartment, he’s met by a cop who hands him an eviction summons the size of an old Manhattan phone book. The landlord is sick of excuses but relents with the unexpected arrival of Andy’s 10-year-old, Anna (Kasey Bella Suarez). Andy, who hasn’t closed a deal in months, is given one day to find rent money or the lock will be changed.
Andy is the low on luck protagonist of Notice to Quit by indie writer-director Simon Hacker, a film that achieves things that once were normal in Hollywood movies. It’s a sweet story about lives gone off track, delivered with humor, grit and a pinch of pathos. As Andy sets forth in search of quick bucks (he doesn’t want Anna’s company, but she sticks like gum on the sidewalk), they become one of the best father-daughter con artist duos since Paper Moon.
Rent aside, they face another deadline. Anna is moving to Orlando with mom who has sole custody. Andy’s a failed actor who never got further than a toothpaste commercial, and despite his show of big-city hustle-bustle, he’s a loser, albeit a beautiful one. Suspicions arise early on that a mensch is lost inside the fumbling con man who can never nail a deal.
Fortunately for Andy, Anna is smart, assertive, curious and, on occasion, the only adult in sight.
Notice to Quit’s hook is that the path to any sort of reconciliation (Andy hadn’t seen Anna in months) is paved with sharp stones and hard words. There is a brief encounter with Andy’s dad, a penurious abstract artist who grants only minimal hearing for his son and his granddaughter. Benign selfishness runs in the family. And there is an amusing side story about Andy’s misfortunes with a thuggish gang of crooked appliance dealers. Seems Andy steals appliances from the apartments he shows and sells them to the gang. Problem: the appliances don’t work.
Notice to Quit is a New York story set in late summer when heat rises from the dirty pavement, pealing the paint from the walls of the dilapidated flats Andy calls “pre-war” to endow them with charm. He lives in a shark tank where the slow swimmers get eaten, but he’s still chasing a dream.
