Spare Parts
2020 · 10m · USA
Directed by Emily Kaplan
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A nomadic grifter who lifts wallets from one-night stands picks up a drunk woman at a bar. The motel-room theft setup keeps drifting toward something else: actual intimacy, which she's clearly not equipped for.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A thief who can't quite finish the job because the mark is interesting. Felix is here for any film that lets a grift turn into a problem of feeling.
The motel-grift premise is well-trodden, but the move to interrupt the heist with actual intimacy gives it a Wong-Kar-wai-meets-American-Honey loneliness I'll take.
What I dig is the camerawork mirroring isolation against intimacy — a grift premise that's really a portrait of a woman unequipped for the connection she stumbles into. Quiet bar-light melancholy.