One Shot invites close readings of the basic unit of film grammar.
Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman, 2017).
In the sanctuary of a church, Frankie (Harris Dickinson) watches his younger sister, Carla, shares a few words about their late father. “If my dad were here with us today,” Carla says, her voice adolescent and bright amid the grief of her father's funeral, “he’d want everyone to be happy.” Happiness: what does happiness mean to Frankie, whose eyes always appear alert but startled, feigning haughtiness, belying fear? Here, the camera is a gentle companion, nestling in to peer over Frankie’s shoulder, moving with his hand as he reaches for a laminated prayer card of Saint Sebastian from the church pew. Frankie contemplates the card, his thumb moving over Sebastian, who peers up to a hopeless sun as he bleeds out, body shot full of arrows. With our eyes on his hands, we wonder what Frankie is thinking about, what new shape of life awaits him after he leaves this church; we wonder how Frankie's eyes—those “sad blue eyes,” a girl tells him earlier—appear now.
Eliza Hittman’s second feature, Beach Rats (2017), is suffused with these quiet studies of hands—how they hold, react, condemn, linger. Physicality is expository for Hittman; there are stories, distinct from one’s words, in the way people move their hands. After the funeral, Frankie watches his widowed mother pick at her tights. The camera is close on her fingers, which trace the growing run in the threads. There are no words, only her murmured wisps of exasperation; all this says enough about her grief.
Hittman’s films find their protagonists in adolescence, a time when one is neither child nor adult, bloated with ideas about who to become, but little perspective—yet!—on how to choose. Frankie is tormented by his desire for men, irreconcilable with the kind of man he believes he must be after his father’s death: invulnerable, to protect his mourning mother and sister, and insensitive, to please his goonish friends, all men. In Hittman’s first feature, It Felt Like Love (2013), Lila (Gina Piersanti), awkward and mousey, wants to find someone, anyone, who will look her way. Sammy—a boy who, rumor has it, sleeps with everyone—might be close enough. Even sturdy, self-possessed Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), the protagonist of Hittman’s most recent feature, Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), struggles to reaffirm control over herself when she becomes unexpectedly pregnant; she finds her answer by traveling to New York to seek an abortion, still illegal without parental consent in her home state of Pennsylvania.
In all her films, Hittman’s camera is empathetic, calm even when her teenaged characters, wounded by angst, cannot hold still. With an honest, shivering fortitude, her handheld camera follows her characters when they do move, accompanying them into unknown corners of their selves and worlds—sometimes, in the wrong direction. Hittman, who collaborated with cinematographer Hélène Louvart on her first and third films, is a close observer of instincts, searching for tendency rather than articulation. The teenage self, after all, is scarcely articulate; these hollows of understanding are where Hittman’s searching, attentive method feels most like a language.
Where in our bodies does shame live? Somewhere in our skin, perhaps. Hittman’s teenage protagonists feel so unlike everyone around them, so ashamed of what they want to touch and how they have been touched. All these characters are grasping toward their destinies, wanting to find some dictum, firm and true, that will tell them who to become, but it's not easy to hold the future with your hands alone. Autumn’s own hands reach toward her stomach, scratching at and viciously hitting the growing mass inside her. A humiliated Lila sinks to her knees in front of Sammy’s flaccid penis and all his rage. On the webcam sites he trawls at night, Frankie tips his cap down, hiding himself as he scrolls through video chats with other men, as lonely as he is. And back at his father’s funeral, Frankie moves his thumb over the face of Sebastian, covering the martyr's face briefly; he looks up, blinking, and puts the card away.