Kit Zauhar’s first film, Actual People (2021), was a semi-autobiographical hyper-naturalistic comedy of manners set during the last week of a philosophy student’s degree and very much indebted to mumblecore luminaries Andrew Bujalski and Greta Gerwig. While Actual People is a familiar example of a promising filmmaker honing their craft on a safe, uninteresting topic, her second feature This Closeness takes more risks. Not everything works and the ending leaves a lot to be desired, but it makes for a much more engrossing film. Taking place almost entirely within one small, lifeless apartment and featuring just five characters, Zauhar tackles loneliness, technology and sexual frustration with subtlety and occasional depth of insight.
“It looks different from the pictures,” says Tessa (Zauhar) when viewing the Philadelphia apartment she and her partner Ben (Zane Pais) are staying in for the first time, neatly summarizing one of the film’s main themes: the inability of the internet to reconcile with reality. They are hosted by Adam (Ian Edlund), an awkward, reclusive work-from-home video editor whose only regular social interactions involve ultimate frisbee. Once again, this is different from the digital version ‒ the listing said their host was named Lance. Lance is Adam’s quasi-mythical best friend and ex-roommate; he suggested the rental app as a good way to meet people. The transitory nature of such interactions is perfect, as Adam recounts later in the film, because if the people are weird, they will always leave of their own accord once their stay is up. We never meet Lance.
Ben is a douche-journalist and Tessa is a professional ASMR-YouTuber, a job that would have made for an interesting film in its own right. The narrative concerns the tentative breakdown of this relationship as it comes into contact with two outsiders, who both disrupt the fantasies sustaining their romantic connection. Pais and Zauhar are effective at playing a couple on the brink of falling out of love; they capture the awkward timbre and grating cadence of two people clearly frustrated with one another completely unable to articulate their resentments. Zauhar’s camera is unobtrusive and mostly static; at times, the exchanges bring to mind both visually and conceptually Hong Sang-soo’s miniature dramas of the mundane. When the camera does move, it is for a clear purpose; one sequence involving the production of one of Tessa’s videos shows how she sees the world differently due to her mining “content” from the sensuality of the everyday.
This Closeness resists the A24ication of contemporary independent cinema by having almost no music whatsoever; the actors are given nowhere to hide by the mise-en-scene and they perform admirably. The tension is built by small moments, bitter glances, snide sideways remarks, rather than the ubiquitous visual/aural tropes that dominate the majority of “unsettling” psychodramas in place of meaningful stories (see: every Netflix miniseries about a slightly disturbed individual and/or a mysterious event as a metaphor for class antagonisms). The scarcely deployed music consists of what sounds like warped, ominous ASMR and contributes to the growing sense of claustrophobia as the film threatens to build to a revelation it unfortunately cannot deliver. Occasional bursts of passion are awkward and one of the film’s more visceral scenes involving a thrown coffee falls short in its lack of conviction ‒ such a moment calls for melodrama as the act of throwing a coffee to the floor in frustration is melodramatic.
Zauhar clearly has interesting ideas about technology and its complete intrusion on human intimacy ‒the film’s best moments involve a couple’s silent disco and a pair of fake ears being caressed to induce sensation in a real pair a few feet away. This Closeness ends in a disappointing cliché involving a cut to black and an unfinished sentence ‒ the type of ending you really have to earn. Despite that, Zauhar has shown artistic maturity and impressive visual restraint ‒ qualities that hopefully develop further in her future work.
Photo courtesy of Factory 25
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