by Douglas
Messerli
Bella C. Sonen
(screenwriter and director) Sunset / 2024 [11 minutes]
A truly amateur
affair, with some of the dialogue evidently improvised, this short film
concerns two young high school girls, Lily and Mia (Savannah Meriwether and
Nathalie Wolf) who have been in a lesbian relationship, suddenly discovering—on
the very last day of their summer vacation evidently—that their summer has
suddenly slipped by and on the very next day one of them is off the school to
Boston, the other soon to travel to North Carolina.
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While one retains the illusion that they can still find a way to
maintain their relationship, traveling back and forth to see one another, the
other—clearly the more practical and mature of them—perceives that she will be
wanting to make new friends, to discover a new life, and, that despite the love
they feel for one another, it cannot be maintained by attempting to hold onto
one another, with long periods of travel involved. She has already been
receiving texts from her new roommate about the plants she’s bought for their
dorm room.
Director Bella Sonen fills the interstices
of this slender tale with poetry and music of the sort that young girls love to
hear; but, although the attempt to present a serious moment in two young women’s
lives with integrity, the film ends primarily with a sense of youthful angst
and sentimentality. That too is surely worthy of being captured on film, but
for an older audience this short freshman work will not be very revelatory.
One lovely moment, however, occurs as one
of the two girls shows up to the other’s house wanting to share their last
sunset together, only for the other girl to point out that it’s raining. The
two, nonetheless, crawl out onto the roof so see if they might catch a glimmer
of the setting summer sun only to fall asleep in one another’s arms. It’s a
touchingly sadly comic moment in a time where there is little room for such a
perspective.
Los Angeles, August
31, 2024
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).
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