I don’t remember much about Kit Zauhar’s first film, Actual People, other than the fact I felt it was similar to the kind of movies which are common in places like MUBI, vignettes or slice-of-life movies. I also remember that there was something that was n+1 about the movie; otherwise I don’t think I would have finished it. There are two things to note here: that this new movie was similar enough to its tradition which I would call n, but different enough that I would call it n+1; and that I have come to be okay with the fact that sometimes we can’t be more different than n+1, but that +1 makes it different enough that we understand n+1 as new.
This Closeness is more similar to n, I suppose. I did not feel as intrigued by Closeness as I felt with Actual People. It is a slice-of-life film, which could have made into the MUBI list of ‘Millenial Meltdown". Maybe it is in the list; I did not check. Ben, Tessa’s boyfriend, is from Class of 2013, so I think it makes sense for Closeness to qualify as a meltdown movie.
Ben and Tessa, young couple from somewhere in the US staying in Philadelphia for a weekend for Ben’s highschool reunion, meets Adam, their host in a service apartment. Adam is weird, wearing Dahmer-like glasses, tall and lanky, his head always looking down, and masturbating in the shower after glimpsing Tessa’s ass in the living room couch. He is capable of long silences and short replies, shuffling around in his socks and sandal on a vinyl-wrapped floor made to look like it was wood. Ben and Tessa are weirded out by Adam’s behaviour, and Ben even thinks that he is creepy, while Tessa is a little more charitable, and does not hate or resent Adam, which we think Ben does.
The couple fight over a few things during their stay, over Ben’s old classmate Lizzy, who has a crush on Ben and who shows up drunk in the apartment and gets cozy with him, and over Tessa’s behaviour with Adam, who Ben thinks has a fetish on tiny Asian women such as Tessa. After Adam speaks to Tessa about his loneliness, Tessa runs her fingers through Adam’s hair, which scene a drunk Ben chances upon, and they fight again. The next day, Adam brings his date, a tiny Asian woman, to his room, and has loud sex, which Ben and Tessa overhear and feel traumatized. Ben is clearly unaware of how loud he and Tessa were the previous day. Tessa sneaks out to check whether Adam’s date is tiny and Asian, as Ben had predicted. Finding out Ben was right about Adam having a type, Tessa gets nervous and hastens their departure from Philadelphia on the same day.
See? There is nothing alien about this film. Characters are…just people doing what people do. They fight, they eat, they drink and make decisions that would turn around and bite them, they flirt, they shower—there is nothing that is so out of the ordinary, so magical, so scary. At least to a normal person, like Ben.
Well, of course, Tessa is not normal. She is a content creator who makes and posts ASMR videos on YouTube (perfectly normal) and read books (kinda normal) and fights with her boyfriend (normal, although it shouldn’t be) and feels lonely (normal) to the extent that she cannot relate to her boyfriend or his antics, but rather would feel intense empathy with the lanky weirdo who might be, according to Ben, a rapist (definitely not normal).
I think the beauty of the movie is in making these things clear without forcing it.
Tessa is seeing a therapist, and her loneliness is explained in detail through a call she has with the therapist. Beautifully done. It is just Tessa talking to the therapist over phone, with a pair of airpods in her ears, against an off-white wall, on a bed covered with cream-colored fabric. We don’t see the therapist, we don’t see a screen, we don’t hear anything else—it is just Tessa and her therapist’s voice. Wonderful storytelling without resorting to a flashback or a voice over.
When Ben and Lizzy are drunk and borderline flirting over beer in the apartment, Tessa gets back to the apartment. They are talking about their highschool days, about the people they have had a crush on, the weird people in the school, until Lizzy asks Tessa about what she thinks of high school reunions, and Tessa tells them that she does not shove the past down her own throat, unlike Ben and Lizzy. The weirdo of Tessa’s school is now a major film producer, while she is just a lowly content creator. Lizzy on the other hand, has hooked up with the weirdo of her and Ben’s school—she and Ben laughs about it. Tessa is visibly upset.
The only friend Adam has is a guy called Lance, who never appears in the film. While the film shows Adam talking to Lance over the phone, we never hear him back. Which is okay, because you don’t usually hear the other side so much in a movie. But…Tessa and Ben think that Lance is an imaginary person, and BAM! we are thinking that maybe that is true. Adam is a weirdo, after all. Why shouldn’t he be schizophrenic as well?
All of this, in two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom.
Nice.
This has a really good plot and good dialogues. As a movie, however, I am not sure it stretches, or uses, really, the potential of vision. I mean, after all, a movie is a movie because of the visuals, right?
PS. I’ve watched Sibyl too, this week. But it is explicitly complicated to be able to write about.