It’s something of a cliché, when discussing films set in New York City, to claim that “the city is a character.” But how does that character get cast? That is the question at the heart of “The Scout,” the haunting feature debut from Paula González-Nasser. Mimi Davila plays Sofia, a lowly location scout for a New York production company. It’s Sofia’s job to drive through the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, looking for apartments, townhouses, etc. that might be used for the pilot of a new police procedural. When she spies a promising candidate, Sofia posts a flyer on the door, and if she’s lucky the occupant will allow her inside to photograph the interior. She then hops back in her car, continuing to scan the facades and monitoring her voicemail for another bite.
The niftiest trick of “The Scout” is the way in which it invites us to consider the logistics of its own production. We can assume, after all, that each of its locations was discovered by someone very much like Sofia, and that they were secured through conversations like the ones on the screen. As Sofia makes small talk with the tenants of each home, González-Nasser allows us to examine their surroundings for ourselves as the camera glances across the furniture, windows and home furnishings, challenging us whether we can imagine different characters living their fictional lives in this space. At times, González-Nasser’s lens abandons Sofia entirely, exploring different rooms as her conversation fades into the distance. It’s as if we are on an anthropological tour of New York City, with Sofia as our semi-reluctant guide.
The backdrop of “The Scout” is a celebration of the city but it’s more so an examination of the loneliness of the workaday drone navigating it. Sofia is ghost-like in her passing in and out of strangers’ lives and doesn’t have very much time to concentrate on her own. She snaps photos and asks questions about their furniture, then returns to her shoebox of an apartment where all the furniture is still wrapped in plastic. At one point, Sofia makes plans to grab drinks with an old college friend who by chance lives in one of the homes she tours, then has to cancel when her car gets booted for double parking (“I budget the parking tickets into my salary,” she deadpans). The final insult comes when she returns to the production office, only to have her hours of scouting dismissed by the director (“There’s too much rug.”). It should not come as a surprise that González-Nasser worked as a location scout herself before assuming the director’s chair; Sofia’s experiences are too acutely realized to be fabricated.
“The Scout” is a quiet film, given more to ambiance than to incident. While the characters do a lot of talking (perhaps a little too much — a common pitfall among independent first features), the emphasis is rarely on what they’re saying. Rather, González-Nasser makes us feel the weight of the tension through which Sofia navigates every day as she pries into the private domains of strangers (one character half-jokingly suggests she could be a scammer, and it’s hard not to see his point). At the center of it all is Davila’s masterfully internal performance, which conveys volumes through a simple thousand-yard stare. “The Scout” is about a very specific profession, but it’s not hard to identify with Sofia’s daily stress and ennui. It’s no wonder González-Nasser has such an eye for these quiet moments; as a location scout, she’s trained to seek out empty spaces. — Oscar Goff
Playing at the Brattle Theatre 11/6 through 11/10
A stronger
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