It’s been pretty well established that Louis C.K. is one of the funniest people alive, but the fourth season of Louie doesn’t seem to be about making us laugh. Maybe C.K. thinks it’d be hard to top season three’s “Late Night” triptych; maybe he’s more concerned with proselytizing (look, for instance, at Vanessa’s monologue from last week’s “So Did the Fat Lady”). Either way, he’s making the show he wants to make and not apologizing for it.
“Elevator Part 2,” like many episodes of Louie, is broken up into two seemingly disparate segments. In the first, he has to pick up his daughter Jane from school, after she ripped a teacher’s skirt off. Jane was mad at the other kids for not letting her use the “spring horse,” but really she’s mad at the system. In one of Louie‘s patented monologues, she fires off a rant about the teachers not answering “real questions” (of course, to a ten-year-old, “real questions” are things like “Why isn’t France part of New York?” and “Why isn’t God on the news?” But the point stands). If you follow C.K. on Twitter, this should sound very familiar.
Louie’s argument with his ex-wife Janet leads to a rant about public school vs. private school, but it kind of fizzles out as even Louie admits that he’s too angry to contribute anything worthwhile to the conversation.
The meat of “Elevator Part 2” is in Louie’s date with Amia, the niece of the elderly woman whom he helped out of the elevator last week. Played by the lovely Eszter Balint (who hasn’t acted since 1996), Amia barely speaks a word of English, but Louie loves her company nonetheless. Louie is a show fraught with miscommunication, so it makes a weird sort of sense that Louie would find companionship with someone who literally cannot understand him. It doesn’t hurt that Amia is gorgeous either; in a drug store, she pantomimes taking her clothes off and showering, and the whole routine is so effortlessly sexy that it’s spellbinding.
“Elevator Part 2” feels a bit incomplete, but that’s to be expected; it is after, part of a six-episode arc. We’ll see how things develop in “Part 3.”
So what Louis C.K. is doing, it seems to me, is making a romantic comedy (albeit a surrel and not always funny one). Maybe he picked up some pointers from Woody Allen on the Blue Jasmine set.
“Elevator Part 3” finds Louie returning to Amia and Ivanka’s apartment to ask Amia to dinner. The problem is, Amia is going back to Hungary, which Louie takes as a firm “no,” so he returns to his apartment to bash the shit out of his piano. But Amia and her aunt return to clear things up: she’s going back in a month, but at the moment she’s here and ready to go out with Louie again. Also, I have to mention the absolutely sublime violin duet that Amia and Jane play. Eszter Balint is in real life a very accomplished violinist, and it was great of Louie to set aside a chunk of its running time to beautiful music. Stunning. I raised the star count of “Part 3” by half just because of that scene.
So now Louie has a hard choice to make: pursue Amia, even though that relationship has a looming expiration date, or try to make it work with Pamela, who just returned from Paris? (And greeted him perfectly: “Hi, stupid asshole.”) Pamela is more beautiful than ever, but also more caustic. She laughs at Louie, visibly cringes at the thought of a “boy/girl thing,” and even takes a picture of him so he can see what his disappointed face looks like.
Dr. Bigelow (a returning Charles Grodin, from “Back”) offers some sage advice: no one cares. It’s simple enough to be hilarious, and Grodin’s delivery is pitch-perfect. Louie isn’t reinventing the wheel with “Elevator,” but it’s challenging sitcom norms, and doing a damn fine job of it.
“Elevator Part 2:” 4 Stars
“Elevator Part 3:” 4 1/2 Stars
Total Episode Score: 4 1/2 Stars
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