American Reunion|101 North Broad Street, Monroe — Dog Years Opens for Business

Monroe sits fifty miles east of Atlanta, a Walton County seat with a courthouse square and a Broad Street of two-storey brick. In the summer of 2011 the production dressed it as East Great Falls, Michigan, painted a mural, and turned the shopfront at 101 North Broad Street, Suite B, into Dog Years, the coffee place where the characters keep colliding with their own past.

The unit is Coffee Camper Co. today, which is a pleasing accident. A coffee shop played a coffee shop, then went back to being one for real.

What Monroe gave the film was scale. East Great Falls has to feel like a town small enough that you cannot avoid anybody, and Broad Street delivers that in a single wide shot: parking angled to the kerb, transom windows over the doors, the courthouse visible down the block. Nothing on the street is taller than three storeys. Nothing needs to be.

Order something and take the window seat. Inside twenty minutes somebody will walk past who knows somebody else walking past, and the two of them will stop dead in the middle of the pavement to talk. That is the exact mechanic the whole film runs on, the one that makes a reunion unavoidable rather than optional. Monroe was not acting.