City living presupposes closeness. Even when you’re alone in your apartment, dozens of people are likely to be sitting, cooking, napping, fighting or having sex within feet of you, separated by walls that are usually way too thin. But to live an urban life without getting overstimulated requires developing an artificial sense of distance, the ability to be alone in public, to ignore others while maintaining a sense of alertness. A pair of noise-canceling headphones. A bit of tunnel vision.
“This Closeness,” a microbudget indie directed by Kit Zauhar, wittily examines the ways we create and avoid closeness in modern life, both by choice and, especially when we’re young, necessity. The main couple at its center, Tessa (Zauhar) and Ben (Zane Pais), are New Yorkers who’ve rented a room in an Airbnb in Philadelphia so Ben can attend his five-year high school reunion. It’s the kind of Airbnb you get when you can’t or don’t want to spend much money: They’ll have a bedroom to themselves, but share the bathroom and common spaces with a host, a stranger named Adam (Ian Edlund).
Sharing space with a stranger isn’t all that weird when you’re a recent college graduate who probably has lived with at least a few randomly selected roommates in the recent past. But viewed objectively, that’s still weird — proximity without closeness, made weirder to Tessa and Ben because their temporary roommate, Adam, is an awkward guy who claims his roommate Ian actually listed the place, but isn’t there at the moment. (It’s one of the film’s inside jokes that Adam is played by Ian Edlund.)
What’s going on? Normal 20-something stuff, really: fights and weirdness, tensions over how to split the refrigerator space and how long people take in the bathroom, moderately cruel jokes heard through too-thin walls. There’s also the kind of thoughtlessness you almost have to develop in order to survive proximity — Ben goes out to dinner with old friends and returns with one of them, Lizzy (Jessie Pinnick), in tow. Having been in shared living situations before, I recoiled reflexively at how much noise they made the instant they came through the door.
All of “This Closeness” is set in the apartment, as much a smart budgetary choice as a formal one. The claustrophobic feeling is effective; the characters can escape, but we can’t. But in that small, bare apartment they’re having a rich array of interactions, both with the flesh-and-blood humans occupying the same space — Ben and Adam spar, in faux-politeness, over a malfunctioning air-conditioner in Ben and Tessa’s room — and with those outside its walls.
This comes up in a thousand little ways: dating apps, FaceTime therapists, checking on old friends through social media, hearing one-sided phone calls. The film’s stripped-down aesthetic is mirrored in the actors’ performances; they deliver straightforward lines with a hint of self-consciousness and discomfort, even between friends and lovers. It’s as if the closeness is projected through a scrim, which creates a kind of purposeful clumsiness the audience can feel, too. When actual physical contact occurs, it’s almost jarring.
Framing all of this is a funny fact: Tessa is something of a micro-celebrity thanks to ASMR videos she makes and posts to the internet. (ASMR videos, for the uninitiated, involve heightened sounds of ordinary things, like sheets rustling, hair brushing, or nails tapping on a surface; for some people, the sounds stimulate an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which feels like a pleasant tickle in the brain and often causes states of relaxation.) There’s an intimacy to ASMR, even though the activities that produce these sounds are often commonplace, even banal: getting ready to go to sleep, or getting a scalp massage. They are, in a sense, a way to create a feeling of closeness between the creator and the listener, without any actual contact occurring.
That Tessa makes the videos — a task that requires real-life touch — eventually becomes important to plot of “This Closeness.” But there’s a grander point here. In a world where life is so often mediated through screens that in-person interaction merits its own designation, being thrown into close contact with a stranger is even weirder than it used to be. Then again, most of the awkwardness in “This Closeness” happens in relationships between people who aren’t strangers at all. Being near someone is no guarantee of real connection.
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