‘A Desert Trilogy’
A migrant worker stops at the piano inside his employer’s house and taps the keys, thinking of his wife in Cuba. You feel the gulf between him and her; between him and the tax bracket the house represents.
A young woman studies for her US citizenship test, living in a cramped apartment with relatives. She’s prepared diligently, but doesn’t know if she’s actually going to take it. She misses home.
A young man who’s never stopped wondering why his dad didn’t want to know him heads north to find out.
These are all scenes from a series of films set here in the Antelope Valley and made by southern California production company Small Form Films. There are three: Littlerock (2012), Pearblossom Hwy(2013), and Lake Los Angeles(2014), in chronological order from oldest to new.
The first two installments are centered around Atsuko and Cory, taking place in the same universe with slightly different storylines.
In ‘Littlerock’ the two are rough sketches of what they’ll be in ‘Pearblossom Hwy’. The focus is more on their world: an urban desert island where twenty-somethings drink away the days and party most nights simply because there’s nothing else to do. Atsuko and her brother Rintaro have come to the US from Japan to visit Manzanar-a historic monument on the site of a WW2 internment camp-and find their grandfather’s name on the list of the “relocated”. Alas, their car breaks down en route and they’re drawn into the strange desert vortex of Littlerock. The siblings become intrigued with Cory after meeting him at their motel, and they start hanging out, with Rintaro’s limited English making him translator to their new acquaintances. He heads north without his sister after a fight though, and Atsuko spends several days in limbo with Corey and his “friends”.
‘Pearblossom Hwy’ delves into Atsuko (who goes by Anna in the second film) and Corey’s characters in more detail, in part by incorporating pieces of their real lives into the story. Atsuko-who’s real name is Atsuko Okatsuka, and who co-wrote all three films with director Mike Ott-really did take her test and become a US citizen after immigrating from Japan ten years prior. Corey actually did search for his father, like his cinematic counterpart, and documented some of it on camera.
‘Pearblossom Hwy’ follows the themes of the first movie, digging further. We see Atsuko feeling trapped by her family’s desire that she stay here, torn between the promise of US citizenship and wanting to return home. Corey constantly dreaming and never doing, and the conflict that creates with his brother. His brother is a veteran, and its hinted that he has PTSD and isn’t dealing with it correctly. Cory’s sexuality is in question for the first two films (a question never definitively answered) though its alluded that he’s gay. The ideal of the “American Dream” is contrasted starkly with the reality, piecing together a realistic image from viewpoints inside and out.
‘Lake Los Angeles’ is almost entirely in Spanish (subtitled in English) and follows Cecilia and Francisco, whom we meet briefly in the first two films. Fransisco’s run-down house serves as way station to a coyote transporting people from Mexico and points farther south; he shelters them until they’re ready to be moved again in exchange for some of the take. One of his charges is a girl named Cecilia. She doesn’t talk, eats little, and she’s been there longer than the others.
Fransisco takes odd jobs-shoveling stables, tending orchards, moving scrap out of a condemned building-to supplement his income, saving to bring his family here. Cecilia comes to trust him, only to be ferried away by the coyote, supposedly to meet her estranged father. After he reveals that he has no idea where her father is, Cecilia escapes her kidnapper to find herself alone in the desert.
The film creates a world around them in which the backroads, liquor stores and tumbledown ruins of Lake L.A. become the entire universe. Cecilia wanders through the desert under the tungsten sunlight, past power towers and behemoth windmills, and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere-or anyone-else. She may as well be traversing the Gobi.
Small Form has recently finished a short called ‘Lancaster, CA’, basically an extended teaser trailer for another feature-length film called ‘California Dreams’, to be released in 2016. ‘Lancaster’ is moments from Cory’s life, presumably after the events of the trilogy but before the next installment. Shots of abandoned, graffiti-scrawled buildings and wind. Him in a car talking with his brother about his early sexual experiences (and embellishing them). Riding a bike down a cracked two-lane highway under an overcast sky. Still languorous and lost in the desert vortex. ‘Lancaster’ will be screened at the Vienna International Film Festival later this year.
This story was originally published in the Acton/Agua Dulce News.
