Review
“That golden thread that runs through everything…”
by Carissa Rodriguez
To borrow a metaphor coined by the lead character of Downtime as she daydreams on the subway and finds an almost metaphysical constancy of things amidst the flux of her life, Tara Milutis’ young female protagonists are spun from a familiar “golden thread” that wondrously resurfaces in all of her films. Her heroines travel with an awkward grace of their own, in elevators, public parks, ethnic grocery stores and New York City streets devising personal tactics for staying sane in a most unpredictable metropolis of the 21st century.
We find these quizzical young women in situations not out of the ordinary – however in contrast to the yellow glint of taxicabs smeared across their horizon and the crowds of nine-to-fivers that race around them, their midday flâneries give them the appearance of drifting in an alternate reality where they observe and absorb the rhythms of modern urban life at a pace of their own.
It’s precisely their uncompromising spirit, openness to chance, precarious schedules, improvised lifestyles and that stubborn strand of nonconformity that can’t be outgrown, that make each character a vital albeit marginal part of the city’s transient ecosystem.
Milutis’ camera follows her protagonists’ everyday movements with an instinctive eye – we find one girl familiar by the way she trips up on a sidewalk crack, and another by the curiosity in her gaze. Milutis’ frame, always roving the cityscape, yet always unearthing a private thought and idiosyncratic gesture, constructs a personal fluid space for her characters to wander and explore.
These pockets of reflective time are fused into the context of an even greater, complex social sphere – New York’s culturally diverse Lower East Side. Each character hailing from the neighborhood, including the Dominican teenage boy of My Style, is imbued with a sensitivity to the environment that could only have come from the filmmaker’s personal fascination with her adopted home of more than a decade. There is a sense of contemporary folklore alive in Milutis’ stories, a feeling that the lives and culture are specific only to a fleeting present, but whose traces will become an integral part of the locale’s historical evolution.
The voiceover in both Downtime and Note to Self, written for two different lanky-limbed non-actresses who appear to be variations on a type but unclassifiable by any means, are a patchwork subjective musings on everyday phenomena (technology, love, work, time, degrees of minor neuroses). These funny, original and authentic monologues ripen into loaded, powerful questions that each young woman seriously asks of herself in relation to her place in society at large. It’s rare that a filmmaker can make personal politics so seamless.
In another mode of narration, Paperscope is a film without words, rather a rapid-fire chain of action/motion/color/texture. Perhaps the most narratively simple of Milutis’ works, it’s somehow the most profound – a film of the senses. With a little time to kill and nothing but a sheet of paper, a young woman stumbles upon an unexpected thrill of solitude, that gleam of untouchable independence when something hidden in the landscape’s minor details holds a secret waiting to tell you. Tara Milutis’ vision is about trusting the signs.