Retake

A lonely middle-aged man hires an escort and asks him for something strange: to repeat a road trip he took years ago, exactly. The name, the way of speaking, the shirt, the song in the car, all of it has been specified in advance. As the road runs west the younger man starts working out whose place he is standing in, and playing a part stops being distinguishable from actually being there. Nick Corporon does not reduce any of this to a cheap secret; what happened comes out slowly, at the moment the man stops carrying it alone. The distance between Tuc Watkins and Devon Graye is the material the film is made of. It is about how grief can turn into rehearsal, and how the rehearsal has to end somewhere.