InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 11

SXSW 2023
very least some thoughtful questions pertaining to lived, ongoing
circumstances: Riley, as an Asian American, seems to order her
dating preferences around this essentialist attribute, and her
pursuit (with mixed results) of a career not typically grounded in
job security or financial stability runs counter to the stereotyped
traditionalism of her family.
This Closeness, Zauhar’s follow-up to Actual People, retains much
of this resonance but refines it for a slightly more ambitious
crowd of three. Tessa (Zauhar) and her boyfriend Ben (Zane Pais)
rent an apartment room in Philadelphia, where they’ve gone for
the latter’s high school reunion; but their co-tenant is Adam (Ian
Edlund), a long-term inhabitant by the looks of it, and an oddball,
weirdo, incel, sociopath — whatever’s quick to roll off the tongue.
Quickly, the tension notches up among the three; multiple
tensions in fact, as romantic distrust thaws unresolved
insecurities and overt hostility awakens performative sexual
crisis. Tessa and Ben are otherwise intimate, but the arrival of
Ben’s high school crush over beers provokes jealousy and
instigates the use of defensive and poisonous rhetoric in
response. Adam’s intermittent presence, similarly, colors the
politics of cohabitation, as an outsider from within threatening to
displace the unchallenged but inherently unstable notion of
masculine self-confidence.
Zauhar, like before, doesn’t shy away from portraying her
characters as stereotypes in some way — Adam’s indeed a bit of
a recluse, with a menacing demeanor to boot, while Ben is
nothing short of a mellowed-down, frat-boy douchebag — but this
doesn’t detract from the film’s merits. If anything, she makes a
point with this stereotyping, that within the generality of the
Airbnb apartment lie conceivable and relatable specifics which
articulate our prevalent culture of individualism commingling
with helpless suspicion. Despite the apparent candor all three
individuals display at some point with one another, there persists
a breakdown in communication, frustrating desire, resentment,
reconciliation, or some coordination among them. To pigeonhole
this languid pessimism as yet another instance of American indie
mumblecore wouldn’t be inaccurate, but it also glosses over the
hermetic framing carefully employed here, a composition meant
to reflect the very ironies of pigeonholing and typification. That
all three adults work in some area of communication (ASMR,
journalism, video games) further ironizes,
without necessarily wallowing in, their lackluster situation. The
funny thing about isolation, which This Closeness skilfully
realizes, is that the furthest distances are sometimes felt within
the confines of four walls. — MORRIS YANG
PARACHUTE
Brittany Snow
At first blush (and the next few, for that matter), actress Brittany
Snow’s directorial debut, Parachute, which premiered in the
Narrative Feature Competition at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival,
seems lab-created for a certain other, Park City-set fest. It’s a
drama cut through with some messy romance and a twinge of
darkness, is peppered with recognizable Hollywood faces in
mostly thankless supporting roles, trades in the subject matter of
mental health, and is goosed by plenty of screenplay quirks (Kid
Cudi shows up to sing karaoke and wear a series of
dad-approved button-ups; cinema’s greatest cheat code Dave
Bautista runs a muder-mystery dinner theater; the adult
romantic leads almost immediately build a blanket fort). Then
there’s the plot: Riley (Courtney Eaton) and Ethan (Thomas Mann)
meet under less than ideal circumstances. He has just gotten out
of jail after a night of drunken tomfoolery that involved a flaming
bottle of Fireball and broken up with his girlfriend; she has just
been discharged from rehab for reasons she initially remains
vague about — but which we later learn is a cocktail of body
dysmorphia, an eating disorder, fear of abandonment, and an
obsessive personality, which the official synopsis refers to as
love addiction — and has committed to a year of singledom.
Despite the shambled nature of their meet cute, however, they
immediately click. But soon Riley’s interior tempest returns, and
their relationship (sort of platonic in its sexlessness, but mostly
not) begins to deteriorate.
If that all sounds fairly gauche in description, the experience of
Parachute never dips below innocuous in even its worst moments
— mostly when Snow and co-writer Becca Gleason invoke the
indie film template for filler and temporarily disavow nuance,
such as when Riley’s rich, unempathetic mother shows up to
castigate her daughter’s lifestyle, deny her very real mental
health struggles, and bandy a few passive-aggresions about her
(very healthy) weight. The script then asks Ethan to verbally
indict the bad parenting and lingering trauma it caused,
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