The shots run long, long enough to savor the documentary essence of the automotive life-the pleasure of motion, the allure of city lights, the drama of possibilities, the lure of escape. There are duets, trios, reflective and poignant solos, and even a jaunty quartet, all organized and harmonized by means of images and sounds that parse the dialogue and expand the encounters. “Civic” is cinematic chamber music for voices. Sometimes tensely static and sometimes in roving motion, the shots play craftily with focus and with the car’s own architecture: like proscenium arches, the doors, windows, dashboard, and seats create frames within frames. The constraint of filming solely from inside the car presents a challenge that LeBlanc and his cinematographer, Andrew Yuyi Truong, meet by means of a tightly controlled but freely imaginative repertory of images, which cut into and out of Booker’s point of view. The cast’s performances, vigorous yet pensive, embody this poised complexity, and the movie suggests mighty currents of memory and emotion that emerge as much from its visual aesthetic as from its acting and script. They are roiled by questions unanswered, frustrations unresolved, dreams stifled, struggles endured. The conversations, stressful enough as they are, gain a heightened intensity from the imposed proximity of the car’s front seat. LeBlanc doesn’t go into detail about Booker’s activities, but it seems that he left home to fulfill his ambitions and vanished from his friends’ lives.īooker’s encounters, fraught with memory and burdened by the years of silence, resound with the shock of their suddenness. Booker’s stated reason for returning is to see his mother, and his main encounters are with two longtime friends he’s fallen out of touch with: Tee (Maurice Powell), a gifted artist from high-school days who teases him about the old car and his new looks, and Harmonie (Courtney Gabrielle Williams), a nurse who’s on her way home. The film is shot entirely from within Booker’s car (not a Honda Civic, actually, but a 1981 Toyota) most of the action takes place inside it, and everything else is filmed through its windshield, windows, and open doors. The title is a play on words that conjures the film’s rich duality and its distinctive form, suggesting both the public sphere and an automobile. A young man named Booker (Barrington Darius) shows up in his home neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles (where LeBlanc is also from) after an unspecified number of years away and attempts to reconnect with people he left behind. It is LeBlanc’s first film-he wrote the story and co-wrote the script with Nicole Otero-and it gives a boldly modernist form to the classic tale of the prodigal’s return. But there’s one I’ve had in the forefront of my mind-and of my enthusiasm-since I saw it nearly a year ago: Dwayne LeBlanc’s “Civic.” I’ve seen it many times, starting when it was on YouTube and continuing to its current, richly deserved appearance on the Criterion Channel, and I’m unfailingly enthralled by its display of inventiveness, its dramatic scope, and its beauty-in other words, by its union of concept, substance, and style. Between Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl adaptations on Netflix and the French New Wave shorts on DVD and on, I’ve had short films on the brain lately.
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