Not in keeping with my stated intent to focus on hybridity, but I have to rave about Liza Johnson’s new film, In the Air, a brief, almost evanescent meditation on the commotion of adolescence in a dead-end, postindustrial Ohio town.
In one of the earliest scenes, a youth sullenly refuses an adult order (is he a parent? A boss? all such relations seem collectivized, as befits the small town setting) to go fetch two sticks. As the man grows in rage, the youth finally departs — whether to complete the errand or flaunt indifference, we cannot tell — not by walking away, but repeatedly flipping backwards until out of frame.
The abrupt intrusion of such little, repetitive acts of physical virtuosity punctuate the film, elevating it above innumerable other films I have seen that seek, mimetically, to conjure adolescent boredom by being themselves boring. Johnson’s film, which centers on kids training for a circus in a town without one, is never boring. It rather grows in significance until it reached it’s final scene, one of pure cinema, that is equal parts High School Musical and Gus van Sant. In the Air leaves the emotions, just as the title promised, deliciously suspended.
