An influential notion in art-house filmmaking is that of slow cinema: long takes and spare action that emphasize the real duration of onscreen events. It\u2019s a term I avoid, because what matters more than speed of action is speed of thought. Movies made up of quick cuts and onscreen turbulence, such as \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d and \u201cSuperman,\u201d may look fast, but they dole out ideas and emotions at the cautious pace of children\u2019s books. By contrast, the new film by Rob Tregenza, \u201cFast\u201d\u2014ninety-six minutes of cinema made in rural Virginia with no more than a few dozen long takes, a small batch of main characters, and plenty of walking and talking\u2014dazzles the mind with the speed and spectrum of inner experience it evokes. It delights the eye with the startling originality and the sensuous grace and grandeur of its images, settings, and performances.<\/p>\n
The movie\u2019s title is no joke. \u201cFast\u201d (opening Aug. 12 at MOMA) is set in the world of low-rent auto racing. Its protagonist, a young woman named Sterling (Madison Pankey), tries to carve out a place in the sport on the local track near her home town. She has recently returned there after an extended absence, and her life in the town is built on bones and haunted by death. Her childhood was shadowed by the loss of both her father\u2014by suicide, it is hinted\u2014and her mother, whom she\u2019s s still mourning. Sterling had promised her mother, on her deathbed, to become a lawyer and make a name for herself in the wider world. Instead, she stuck around for a young man named Billy (Dietrich Teschner), then left for a while; when she came back, Billy tried to rape her and she killed him, apparently facing no consequences. Sterling, who used to enjoy dirt-bike racing, finds a wreck of a 1961 Lotus Formula 1 car and, with help from a preening yet sympathetic town grandee (Jeff Wincott) and an embittered mechanic who lost his shop (Danny Hugus), gets it into street-legal shape to enter into stock-car races.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Sterling reconnects with a cousin named Jackie (Mia Grichendler), who also had big dreams, of modelling; a beloved and lonesome aunt, May (Suzi Haines); the town\u2019s police officer, a woman named Moses (Liv Crosby), who is also a church deacon and Bible-study leader; and her mysterious, ubiquitous Uncle Jeb (Nicholas X. Parsons), who seems to have been preserved from a previous era and functions as the town\u2019s living memory. But her obsession is the low-slung, ballistic-contoured car; she has a vision of how it should look and feel, she imagines in detail taking part in a race while merely strapped in behind the steering wheel, and when she drives it, she\u2019s on top of the world. But as much as she\u2019s pulled back to the town by her past and bound to it by the chance to race, she\u2019s also desperate to make another getaway.<\/p>\n
This summary does an injustice to the originality and the sophistication of Tregenza\u2019s way with narrative form. The tale unfolds in many time frames\u2014Sterling\u2019s memory-fraught quest for speed, the troubles of her early adulthood, even echoes of chidhood\u2014which intermingle freely on the screen. This technique puts key moments in a permanent present tense of suggestion, implication, and ambiguity. Unlike many intricate stories, there\u2019s nothing puzzle-like about the complex drama of \u201cFast\u201d: there\u2019s nothing snippety or cut-to-fit about its expansive and extensive scenes. Rather, their time-switching variety and tone-shifting allusions suggest a trip through subjectivity\u2014through Sterling\u2019s inner life and through the collective memory of the town.<\/p>\n
That mercurial flow of experience creates a sense of mental pace that\u2019s in sharp counterpoint to the aesthetic style of the movie\u2019s scenes. For the most part, Tregenza\u2014who does his own cinematography\u2014relies on extraordinarily long takes, mainly realized with a roving camera that, rather than dashing about in handheld jolts, is evidently perched on a crane or a dolly, which he controls with a dancer\u2019s refined precision and tactile ecstasy. No scene has more than a half-dozen actors, most have one or two, and Tregenza films their interactions\u2014including long solo walks\u2014in near-constant motion. The movement of the camera is both smooth and bold, emphasizing context along with action and landscape along with the people living in its presence. Above all, it finds wonder in ordinary situations and catches beauty by surprise. Tregenza\u2019s images have the visual equivalent of rhetorical richness: it is as if the movie\u2019s expanses are filled in with the characters\u2019 big and troubled emotions.<\/p>\n
Now comes the unfortunately conventional part of the review: mentioning Tregenza\u2019s early career, which is de rigueur in writing about new work of his, because his distinctive body of work remains little known. Tregenza, now seventy-five, has developed his extraordinary technique through the course of his long but grievously intermittent career, which started, in 1988, with \u201cTalking to Strangers.\u201d There, his deft use of crane shots and tracking shots was worked out with conspicuous formalist rigor\u2014exactly nine shots of about the same ten-minute length\u2014to form a portrait of a young writer in Baltimore. His next films, \u201cThe Arc\u201d (1991) and \u201cInside\/Out\u201d (1997), offer narratives that are more clearly delineated but less integrated with his technique.<\/p>\n
Tregenza worked for many years as a film professor, and, since 2007, has been at Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, in and near where \u201cFast\u201d was filmed. (He has also worked as a cinematographer, including on B\u00e9la Tarr\u2019s \u201cWerckmeister Harmonies,\u201d and also co-founded a film-distribution and home-video company.) In 2015, after a hiatus of nearly two decades, he shot \u201cGavagai\u201d (a coinage borrowed from the philosopher W. V. O. Quine), about a man who arrives in a small Norwegian village to continue the work of his late wife, the translator of a poet who\u2019s from there. This film had the quietly explosive power of a personal liberation. It\u2019s a road movie\u2014one of chance encounters and startling observations, in which the drama of romantic and artistic devotion is invigorated by Tregenza\u2019s visual imagination, which manifests itself in wondrous, documentary-like explorations. He followed it up with another film made in a small Norwegian town, the Second World War drama \u201cThe Fishing Place\u201d (2025), about Nazi German occupiers\u2019 efforts to recruit a woman to spy on a German cleric in exile there. Again, Tregenza\u2019s singular methods bring spiritual exaltation to a tense drama of fidelity and passion\u2014and he adds a twenty-two-minute postscript, a single crane shot dramatizing the making of the movie, that\u2019s both a marvel in itself and a vertiginous reflection on the place of history in current society and cinema.<\/p>\n
Tregenza, lately prolific, seems to have made \u201cFast\u201d with a newfound, robust sense of uninhibited freedom, as if the energetic realm of its drama has coalesced with his art. In Sterling\u2019s determination to get the Lotus running and to drive it come what may, Tregenza presents the need for speed as a magnificent obsession and the thrill of physical experience as a spiritual quest. The racing scenes\u2014the camera keeping pace on the track with Sterling and her competitors or mounted on a drone following them overhead\u2014are more exciting, more internalized, and more conspicuously beautiful than anything in \u201cF1.\u201d (Tregenza adds an element of self-referentiality to these scenes, by way of visits to a postproduction studio where those images are playing on video screens.) Yet it\u2019s a mark of Tregenza\u2019s art\u2014and of his philosophical insight\u2014that his most astonishing and edge-of-the-seat road scene takes place in town, where Sterling is driving her Lotus within the speed limit as if it were a hatchback. This extended take, at times following the smooth ride through the streets and sometimes running ahead, morphs into a strange yet ominous slow-motion chase, revealing both the neighborhood\u2019s geography and its abiding mentality.<\/p>\n
Much as Sterling is, for better or worse, deeply rooted in her town, there\u2019s a hint of menace in the town\u2019s self-regarding nostalgia and even more in the folksy warmth embodied in the character of Moses, the police officer who\u2019s also enforcing official organized religion. She makes a strong appearance at a scene of violence\u2014short, crafty, brutal, hate-filled\u2014at the race track, which Tregenza nonetheless films, however incongruously, with a ravishing sense of nature-engulfed grandeur. That\u2019s why \u201cFast\u201d, for all its aesthetic exaltation of daily wonder, also affirms another dimension of a spiritual quest: a feeling of \u201cfuck you\u201d to the narrowness of small-town life.<\/p>\n
Tregenza\u2019s imagistic fury doesn\u2019t come at the expense of\u00a0drama; his choreography is never reduced to a stunt, and the cast never appear constrained by the demands of timing and blocking. As Sterling, Pankey strides with calm assurance but talks with an ingenuousness that seems spurred by renewed contact with home. The men exude contentious authority in various ways, from the grandee\u2019s circumspect command and Uncle Jeb\u2019s sly omniscience to the mechanic\u2019s viperish resentment and Billy\u2019s acerbic flirtation. The dialogue is terse, expressive, confessional, pugnacious; the actors\u2019 voices and manner, their controlled tones and gestures, all suggest the endurance, in small-town isolation, of the mind set of bygone days.<\/p>\n
Several symbolic scenes, similarly unfolding in sinuous long takes\u2014a ritualistic repetition of local habits at the junk yard, a formal dance of non-seduction at a luncheonette with a jukebox\u2014lay bare the town\u2019s ingrained and unyielding mores. A climactic, boldly inventive flourish of reminiscence, as Sterling tangibly revisits her past, blends virtuosity with a revelation: the quest for speed on the racetrack runs the risk of merely going around in circles. \u201cFast\u201d may be Tregenza\u2019s breakout film in more than one way.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n