"Whenever I see Casey, I always feel like there's something I want to say to her, like, 'I love you,' or 'You're beautiful,' or 'Why do you seem so far away?' " groggy-voiced narrator Harriet Dodge confesses in local writer-director Jenni Olson's dolorous yet passionate first feature. The Joy of Life is a cinematic love poem of sorts, just semirequited, as most things involving love are. It chases desire around San Francisco as if trying to capture fog with a butterfly net, an effort both intoxicating and frustrating, like so many things about the city, you might say. Finding a highly personal place where the film aesthetics of Chris Marker, Barbara Hammer, and landscape devotee James Benning intersect, The Joy of Life is "experimental" yet immediately accessible; universal in themes yet as specific as a diary entry. Its narrator lets consciousness stream over everything from Erich Maria Remarque to fisting to the misogyny that might hide behind "butch" lesbian and transgender role-playing. Her passing dissatisfactions are painful (envying the "successful intimacy" of "all these couples"), funny ("My therapist is getting on my nerves"), petty, philosophical, and always familiar. Never far away are thoughts of the emotionally elusive lover forever drifting out of reach, like some lesbian Flying Dutchman. All these reflections (plus a spoken passage from Lawrence Ferlinghetti) are set to quietly rapturous shots of a San Francisco revealed as tranquil and small, not glittering but glimmering, not a destination but a place where we live. It's that floating, incessantly social yet in-your-head place where work just seeps into the margins not already occupied by hanging out, where one's 20s (or the 1970s) can ebb and flow endlessly without ever quite turning into something else – unlike The Joy of Life, which eventually takes a sharp turn toward history, tragedy, and a public plea to erect barriers at "the world's leading suicide landmark": the Golden Gate Bridge, which since its opening in 1937 has attracted more than 1,300 terminal jumpers. One of them was Mark Finch, Olson's codirector of the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. If suicide is the ultimate act of aloneness, and usually a cry of protest against it, this beautiful film wants to be sure those cries never go unheard. See Rep Clock for show times. (Dennis Harvey)