Stay Until Tomorrow (2004)

Nina is a former teenage soap star who abandoned her acting career to go to college, and then dropped out of college to travel the world. In the several years since, she has remained attached to the lifestyle of a transcontinental drifter. Back home for a few weeks, she drops in unannounced on her childhood friend Jim, and asks if she can crash with him for a few days. Jim, a librarian, readily agrees despite having just begun an intense relationship with a young coworker. Nina's days at Jim's turn into weeks, as she hides out from a persistent ex-boyfriend, and tries to learn Italian at the library for her next job. With an initiation by the security guard, Nina also discovers the adventurous potential of the library rooftop. She thus encounters (and creates) many more distractions from her studies than anticipated, transforming Jim's workplace into a site of comic, literary, and sexual escapades. Jim is a strong-silent type, who brings to mind the phrase "still waters run deep". But he is also the Actor Playing Jim-the chatty, analytical, and dreamy opposite. Through this dual character, Stay Until Tomorrow becomes a comic and kaleidoscopic film-within-a-film. The Actor Playing Jim longs to salvage their film from art-house obscurity, but Stay Until Tomorrow is irredeemably uncooperative. Like its heroine Nina, the film celebrates beauty, unpredictability, absurdity, and the potential richness of experience.