Paula Gonzalez-Nasser brings her background as a professional location scout for a metatextual meditation on the arrangements we make of the places that we live in. Her camera stoic, purposeful, and never once without a point to what it's capturing.
I'm a believer that you can tell a lot about someone from where they live—in the empty apartments that can spin a hardcover novel, or in the houses decked to hell in clutter that say nothing at all. We're made of dust and detritus, damage and dreams, and then we embroider them onto our private spaces. It's a natural instinct that The Scout investigates—of why we anthropomorphize—to tease out the lives lived beyond the details we expect, and the painful cost that can happen for the person that's tasked with cataloging it for entertainment value.
Sofia (Mimi Davila) is a location scout who spends much of her day driving across the boroughs, listening to the inner lives of complete strangers while she shoots their homes for a pilot that might never come out. The film occurs along these disconnected personal anecdotes, Sofia lingering as they talk at her, until a familiar encounter brings her racing intoto the foreground.
This is an observational feature film, in its humor and in its compositional prowess, the shots occupying space with a withered perpetuity that shocks once it flicks a long take off to the next scene. Paula Gonzalez-Nasser brings her personal background as a professional location scout (for films like the acclaimed Never Rarely Sometimes Always and the comedy series Search Party) for a metatextual meditation on the arrangements we make of the places that we live in. Her camera stoic, purposeful, and never once without a point to what it's capturing.
The filmmaking infuses magic and sense memory in its spaces, in this case apartments and townhouses, in how it plays with its form without any obvious effort, and it expresses an incredible skill from Gonzalez-Nasser; for her, the camera is like it's a fly on the wall until it unexpectedly isn't. But that's for a purpose. The film plays witness to very many inaccessible vulnerabilities: your children who have forgotten you, big adult milestones that change your direction in ways you don't want, or in the strangers monopolizing your household and then calling it shabby.
Yet mostly it's in the space of Sofia, Mimi Davila framed out of focus, her hard work impersonalized. Davila is never saccharine but she's soft, unbearably so, and singed by isolation. It's a great performance that the film isn't satisfied hiding away as merely an audience entry point: she is a person, with a life, who's trying to recapture creativity in a job all too keen to shoot the shots, pick the spots, and move on. Midway through, the story becomes all hers to have and, unlike the production company in the film that whittles at people’s homes (sometimes casually, and sometimes cruelly), she's characterized in locales and routines that build to a quiet, really sensitive epiphany on self-worth.
It’s lonely realizing you put so much of yourself away to document other people, yet Gonzalez Nasser and Davila both vie for the beauty in the mess, in the silent isolation of the crew below the line of the entertainment industry. The Scout carries their burden of creating without credit with a gossamer touch to it, sweet, serene, of a measured pace, and absolutely captivating to watch.
@obscurae