New movies, new restaurants — June
This Closeness, Gasoline Rainbow, a retro Korean spot in the LES, and Enrique Olvera's hyped taco spot — is it worth it?
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COMING SOON (perhaps even next week): short takes, a Catherine Breillat primer, and belated thoughts on Challengers with a restaurant pairing.
GASOLINE RAINBOW
Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV
The latest offering from the Ross brothers finds them once again conjuring their distinctive cinema, a delightfully perplexing amalgamation of scripted and unscripted techniques. The end result makes it so you can’t always tell what’s real and what’s not. For example, do 40-something-year-old former punks in Slayer shirts really wake up wanting to listen to LOTR? Or is that just a nod towards the life-changing adventure aspect of this film?
Gasoline Rainbow is explicitly not a documentary but it does take as its subject five real high school seniors who traverse 500 miles in a ratty van from Wiley, Oregon towards the Pacific coast in search of an epic and elusive “party at the end of the world.” There’s a certain grungy, beatific, beauty to the films images, which the filmmakers take care not to overly prettify—cracked earth, pine forests, sherbet dawns, shot by both the cast and crew—that evokes Myspace-era and that pre-iPhone experiential sublime, before the relentless siren song of snapping culture came to dominate our lives. These are youth looking for first-hand experience unmediated by screens.
That’s not to say these teens don’t ever take photos. But they don’t seem glued to their devices either. And they never seem to run out of battery, despite their having to wing it, rough it, do everything short of hitching a ride. Their unexpectedly wholesome journey, which leads them to misfits and middle-aged anarchists and others keeping Portland weird, is foregrounded by curious, community, and a strong sense of chosen family. The hangovers are mild and the kids are chaste, getting wrecked means smoking (legal) bowls and drinking cheap beer. In place of entropy there is a deep dramatic languor. At 100-min, the film can feel wanting, clearly channeling the “it’s the journey not the destination” ethos.
While the news cycle is bleak and the general outlook on youth one of destruction, it’s refreshing to encounter something that emanates a more uplifting sensibility. But I wonder how much of this optimism is genuinely experienced by current Zoomers in general versus being imposed by the filmmakers. (We might ask
; she’s the expert.) Throughout, a manufactured sense of nostalgia looms large. These kids listen to The Misfits and Bob Marley, Cypress Hill and Enya. These were all their own choices, according to the filmmakers, with the exception Changes by Antwon x Deafheaven’s Kerry McCoy which rides out the credits. (I guess they aren’t hip enough to know that yet.) That song’s reverb-wash exemplifies Gasoline Rainbow’s mood that feels of a piece with Tendaberry, another film that engages with nostalgia, alienation, and historical/geographical myths to a more hard-hitting degree. Streaming on MUBI.
THIS CLOSENESS
Kit Zauhar
Tessa (Kit Zauhar) and her boyfriend Ben (Zane Pais, projecting instinctually assholic vibes) spend a weekend in Philly to attend his high school reunion, an excitement which gives Tess pause. Her skepticism is only heightened when his locally rooted adolescent-era crush Lizzy (Jessie Pinnick)—brash, willful—comes into the picture. Completing this quadrangle is Adam (Ian Edlund), the painfully reserved stranger and host of the shared apartment where the couple are staying. The gangly, soft-spoken Edlund viscerally inhabits his character’s profound awkwardness, which one of the characters describes as so severe it becomes a tangible physical trait.
Laying bare the preexisting strains in Tess and Ben’s relationship, Zauhar’s sophomore effort brims with a unimpeachable and supremely organic tension that belongs not to the high-strung plucked-violin variety, but radiates forth like the steam heat of summer, which depending on your disposition might be suffocating or invigorating. This paradoxical soothingness is also how one would describe the divided effects ASMR, which plays a significant part in the film. (Tessa makes ASMR videos and shoots one during their stay.) What’s clear is the overall lack of gimmickry in the evocation of these impressions.
Unintentionally and not, characters undermine small seeds of trust they’ve gathered in a vulnerable moment, with sound and noise weaponized in the process. Unbridled orgasms, crescendoing arguments, and callous evaluations become tools of emotional confrontation. Hovering over everything: the sense of race, the threat of masculinity, even the specter of inceldom. These strands woven into the story and shown as inseparable from the roots of intimacy.
Every single-location film is likened to a play, and in the case of This Closeness, we’re not far off. The writer/director/star’s sophomore effort began as a pandemic-era play and has been translated in an appropriately cinematic manner. Cloistered light exults the minimalist Airbnb into a liminal, purgatory by turns claustrophobic and blandly pleasant. The scope doesn’t limit the story but rather accentuates it, furnishing Zauhar with a fitting backdrop to explore her chosen themes. With her quickly maturing efforts and a peerless eye towards passive-aggression. she seems poised to become an incisive chronicler of the contours intimacy.
References to the mumblecore genre were an inevitable and easy descriptor, for her debut Actual People—which she’s describes in interviews as the film she had to make, and this as the one she wanted to. Reviewing that film, I succumbed to employing the genre-comparison, too, mostly to show how it differed. This Closeness lands her in the territory of a less ethereal, mucked-up version of Miranda July, an artist also concerned with how we feel and treat others. Forgive my tendency again towards comparisons and leave it at this: Zauhar is a filmmaker distinctly her own, and This Closeness is a small-budget-indie miracle. In theaters now, streaming on MUBI starting July 3.
ESSE TACO
Since Esse Taco opened on an awful stretch of commercial Williamsburg, everyone has rightfully determined that dessert is the best thing on the menu. The corn husk meringue sundae is the diffusion-line version of the Cosme’s famed dessert, offering an accessible taste of luxury. But I didn't actually get it, having had the real deal, and trusting this to be just as good. I needed to save room for tacos so I could confidently report that Enrique Olvera’s (Pujol, Atla) casual taco joint is a bust, entirely underwhelming.
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