After I wrote that post last week on the films of Kentucker Audley and Frank V. Ross, I got a nice email from Quiet City producer Brendan McFadden, gently reminding me that although I had lumped the female protagonist of the film in with the relatively cosmopolitan characters of some the other mumblecore films, in fact “Jamie as played by Erin Fisher in Quiet City is not an urban dweller, but rather only visiting that world. She is in fact employed at a franchise restaurant (Applebees) in Atlanta.”

Now that I’ve seen Quiet City for a second time, I feel like a total idiot for missing that fact the first time around. It may seem like a minor distinction, but the question of Jamie’s occupation sparks the only moment of negative energy in an otherwise extremely uncynical film, concerned primarily with drawing beauty from the mundane.

As in the film’s other, sporadic moments of exposition, this drop of character detail is almost buried in the atmosphere of the scene. Aaron Katz allows a measure of awkwardness leading up to (and a brief, cruel laugh following) Jamie’s revelation that she works “in a chain restaurant”, but he wisely lets the issue drop almost immediately. That cruel laugh is immediately redressed by the group, because the movie’s not about a girl not fitting in because she has a Southern accent and works at Applebee’s–it’s about a girl with a Southern accent who works at Applebee’s, getting lost in Brooklyn and falling into a magical wormhole of romantic serendipity.

Cinematographer Andrew Reed draws the city as a patchwork of heavy cranes silhouetted against florescent summer sunrises, iron fire escapes under multicolored spring blossoms, the icy steel of the elevated G train against the dark slate gray of a winter night. His close-up portraiture is remarkably stable, even when clearly handheld, and his camera is especially kind to Fisher, who pops off the screen as a kind of less-vulgar doppelganger of Scarlett Johansson. There are few shots in the film that aren’t disarmingly beautiful, and each benefits from Katz’ deliberate editing.

I just had my fourth year anniversary of living in New York, and I’ve spent most of that time living either in Brooklyn, or just across Newtown Creek in Long Island City. Quiet City captures the odd beauty of the outer boroughs on a good day in a way that makes me nostalgic for my own very recent past. When it comes to the look of the film, I don’t think I could possibly top Ray Pride’s neat 11 word assessment: “What a lovely, limpid valentine to the look of modern Brooklyn!”

Quiet City screens at the IFC Center tonight through September 4. You can buy tickets here.