There is a general rule of thumb that drives the film industry – if an actor is around for long enough and dedicated to the craft of filmmaking, there will come a point where they endeavour to step behind the camera. This is oddly most prominent amongst comedians, since there is some kind of pipeline whereby we see stand-up comics transition to filmmaking without much fanfare, which is a very encouraging sign for an industry that always benefits from diverse new voices. Chelsea Peretti has been working for several years as a comedian, actor and writer, becoming an audience favourite with her television work, enough to motivate her to move to the other side of the camera in the form of First Time Female Director, her feature directorial debut. Much like the title suggests, the film follows Peretti’s character as she is hired to direct a production of a play she wrote, only to discover that the supposedly easy and glamorous job of a director is far more difficult than she ever could have imagined. Over the course of a few weeks, our protagonist battles with egotistical actors, short-tempered crew members and a range of other characters that reside on the periphery and exist solely to throw a spanner into her earnest efforts to mount a production. By no means a major work, and far from the kind of directorial debut that immediately redefines someone as a great new talent, but rather a wickedly entertaining and off-the-wall comedy that is everything we’d expect from Peretti and her peculiar brand of comedy, First Time Female Director is a lot of fun, even if it does struggle to maintain our attention for its entire duration, which can easily be attributed to her skills as a novice filmmaker still clearly trying to find her voice as a director.

The trend of comedians making their directorial debuts in genres decidedly quite different from their previous work as actors or writers has been a fascinating development, albeit one that has been slightly overstated to the point where a comedian making a straightforward comedy is almost viewed as regressive and playing it too safe. Peretti knows exactly what she wanted to achieve with First Time Female Director, which was to be an eccentric and off-the-wall satire filled with the kind of bizarre, surreal humour that she has been peddling for over a decade, to immense success. It’s important to note that every moment of this feels quintessentially like what we’d expect a film directed by Peretti to be – there aren’t any surprises or revelatory moments, so the viewer must know what to expect, particularly in her unique brand of offbeat humour that has served her so well. Constructed to be a peculiar feminist statement about the trials and tribulations of being a woman in an industry dominated by men, we can’t view First Time Female Director as being simply just a wacky film for the sake of it, but rather a compelling exercise in which a hardworking comedic voice decides to work through some of her own unique experiences in this vaguely realistic account of the artistic process and how collaborations can sometimes be derailed through a combination of ego and delusion, two common traits that are heightened for comedic effect. At absolutely no point in First Time Female Director is realism a factor – it seems like every sentence was written to be punctuated with a punchline at the end, which can be delightful or grating depending on whether the joke lands or spirals out of control, which all depends on the viewer and how they perceive what is being shown on screen. Beneath all of this, we find that there is still a lot of good commentary in First Time Female Director, it is just shrouded under layers of absurdist comedy that we can struggle to take seriously, which could be viewed as somewhat detrimental to what could have been quite a heartfelt film.

One of the benefits of working in the industry for quite a while is the connections made along the way, and Peretti has certainly amassed quite a roster of famous friends, many of whom make up the cast of this film. Aside from Peretti herself, who plays the lead (and gives the exact performance we would expect – a lot of the impact of First Time Female Director is defined by the extent to which the viewer finds her schtick entertaining or grating), we have some terrific performances by Benito Skinner, the breakout of the film and the only person who seems to be going all the way with his portrayal of the pernickety villain of the film, Megan Mullally, Meg Stalter, Kate Berlant and Andy Richter, all of whom have tremendous moments. There is also an endless cavalcade of one-scene performances from some notable comedic masters, with Jordan Peele, Nicole Byer, Natasha Leggero, Brad Hall, Nick Kroll and many others stopping by to deliver brief but memorable performances. Ultimately, Peretti wasn’t too concerned with getting complex, nuanced portraits out of these actors, and First Time Female Director was not designed to be a hard-hitting character study. However, there is still a lot of merit in how the film handles certain ideas, doing so with precision and honesty, enough to keep us mostly invested and engaged in a relatively simple story. Ultimately, the film is just a chance for some very funny actors to do what they do best, and not much else is packaged into the film, which is a decidedly very straightforward affair for a number of reasons.

Holistically, First Time Female Director is a clear example of a film that only works depending on whether the individual viewer knows what to expect. For those attuned to Peretti’s very strange and absurdist sense of humour, the film is an absolute riot, whereas for others it can be considered slightly excessive – and even amongst the target audience, the film can sometimes feel like it is stretching a few of its jokes thinner than they perhaps ought to have been, which is one of the reasons it feels mostly quite disjointed towards the end. As said above, every moment of this film feels like it is trying to be funnier and more absurd than the last, and while this kind of deranged, mile-a-minute approach to humour can be entertaining for a while, the novelty wears off and we begin to wonder whether Peretti is capable of adding genuine emotions into a film that desperately needed to temper itself to be fully effective. None of these characters are particularly realistic, and while there isn’t any reason for them to be authentic, at least giving them some sense of dimension could have allowed a more balanced approach to the material, preventing the humour from becoming entirely stale, which is eventually what begins to happen towards the end of the film. First Time Female Director could have easily elided a solid twenty minutes of running time (such a film doesn’t need to extend beyond roughly eighty minutes), and it needed to be tighter and more compact in order to actually make an impact. These flaws don’t derail the film, but they do prevent it from being as compelling as it could have been with a more measured approach to the direction and less of a dependency on the oddball humour that never abates, regardless of how much we want something to ground this story within reality.

Its not entirely clear whether First Time Female Director will serve to be a pioneering moment for Peretti in her filmmaking journey, since there’s no clear indication as to whether this could be a promising step forward for her as a director, coming across as one of the many very funny but ultimately quite derivative examples of a comedian making their directorial debut, not having enough substance to offer any obvious indication as to whether we can expect to see her helming another film again, or if this was simply an experiment. Regardless, the film has its moments of genuine brilliance, which tend to come about quite sporadically but still carry some merit in all the places that matter. For the most part, it’s a relatively charming affair – the humour is very strong, even if it can become taut after a while. The lack of a coherent structure can sometimes work against the film in principle, but it doesn’t ever lack nuance, particularly in how it develops on several smaller themes that may not be entirely covered throughout the film, but still have enough merit as a whole to keep us entertained. Peretti is a unique voice in contemporary comedy, and First Time Female Director is a labour of love, which is why it is not difficult to view it as mostly successful, even if we secretly hope that her sophomore effort will be a bit more precise in how it develops its characters and makes use of a more coherent structure.