The independent filmmaker Rob Tregenza loves a moving vehicle onscreen, more for how it embodies one person’s drive than out of a need for speed. His latest feature, “Fast,” follows a young woman in Virginia who wants to be a professional racecar driver, but Tregenza’s almost ghostly film is more concerned with the movements of her memories than the thrills of the track.
Sterling (Madison Pankey) seeks to leave a difficult past behind, which includes the loss of her parents and having to fight off an attacker with a crowbar in a junkyard. She test-drives her Lotus 51-C (a 1960s one-seater) and meets with a rich mentor and a deacon, but rather than a point-to-point story, Tregenza overlays time frames and family history to nearly Faulknerian effect.
Sterling’s allusive conversations take place in the between-times emptiness of her small town, only enhancing the sense of the outside world as a backdrop for the passage of time. At one point, a man gets out of his truck, then crosses the street to speak with a woman in a hoop skirt from another era.
Tregenza’s camerawork is brawnily expressive. He shoots capacious long takes (in terms of time and space) and an epic continuous car ride across a bridge, with switches between color and black-and-white film.
Sterling’s racecar suggests an escape vehicle from ordinary life, a bit like the welder in Tregenza’s “The Arc” (1991) who rides a bicycle with a sail. Tregenza too feels bracingly unmoored from any conventions but his own.
Fast Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters.
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