SUNKISS | Omeleto

Описание: Two friends hang out.


In the freewheeling 1990s, Alex and Sofia are two rebellious teenagers, best friends who spend all their time together running around Los Angeles. Their time together is often an idyllic bubble, and their bond occupies the space between friendship and love.

One afternoon, the pair finds themselves hanging out underneath a freeway underpass, a desolate area populated by skaters. They find themselves chatting with two older men, Trent and Casey. But when they take them up on a joyride, they discover there are some trips you can never return from.

Directed by Dice Rose and written by Rose and Sam Clay, this intriguing short drama about friendship and the exhilarating freedom of youth feels like a punk zine or a grunge B-side brought to life, with a story about a pair of best friends who just might be in love with one another. Its immersion in 90s youth culture is one of its initial pleasures, from the indie-alternative music on the soundtrack by Veruca Salt and the Melvins to the black chokers that were trendy at the time, and the sensory-rich, elliptical storytelling evokes the more free-spirited sense of possibility that existed in a time before social media and omnipresent smartphones.

Visually, the gritty, vivid and saturated cinematography beautifully evokes the best of 90s indie cinema, such as the early films of Gus Van Sant in the roughhewn handheld work, and there's also an emotional delicacy reminiscent of Sofia Coppola's earlier films as well, with its unadorned tranquility in reflective moments, the casual nonchalance in pacing and its languorous lingering on sensory details in some shots. With its handmade feeling, the film often feels like a daydream or memory unfurling in its looseness and lo-fi poeticism.

The pleasurable nostalgia serves a story of innocence and experience, as Alex and Sophia navigate the ambiguities of a friendship and an adventure that shapeshifts into something dangerous. Actors Viva Hassis Gente and Katie Otter as Sophia and Alex, respectively, have an intimate, simpatico chemistry that blurs the lines between friend and crush. One girl may be more devil-may-care than the other, but they have the intense closeness of teenage best friends, eager for experience and adventure. That thirst and courage take them to unexpected places, but those places prove as unsettling as they are intoxicating.

Nostalgic, beautifully made and imbued with an emotional immediacy, SUNKISS is nostalgic, but in some ways, it also feels historical. The 1990s setting contextualizes how much more uncertain explorations of sexuality could be at a time when silence surrounded these issues, as well as how relatively free young people were in a more permissive but perhaps negligent world, unsupervised and left to their own devices. That freedom gives them the space to explore impulses and feelings, but it also can be perilous to navigate without information, awareness or empowerment. It can also be taken advantage of by those looking to get what they can and assert their dominance or power. Through the haze of smoke and dying light comes the piercing clarity of disappointment or fear, a coming-of-age that arrives in a disquieting, disturbing place.


SUNKISS. Courtesy of Dice Rose at   / dicerose_film  .