Sun-Lit

releasing 3.18.17

Last week, I shot the last two scenes of what is, in total, a four scene release titled Sun-Lit for TRENCHCOATx.com. As inferred, the visual theme that ties the scenes together is natural light. And by that I don’t simply mean daylight, which is what I think of as a colorless absence of darkness during the daytime. I mean sunlight. I mean the intense golds and yellows and filtered strands that stream through windows when the sun moves and through tree leaves in the park. I mean the beams that we need in order to see dust float through.

The attraction to sunlight for me as a unifying thread is squarely rooted in the unconstrained feel of spending hours wasting away an afternoon between the sheets. For a good portion of us that territory lies in the weekend. People know what I mean when I say sex that feels like Saturday. But even more wonderful, for me, are those afternoons stolen from the weekday. They are Tuesdays in a hotel somewhere else while we wait for the intimacy of the knock that brings room service. They are Wednesdays when we’ve ditched school. They are the first Thursdays of summer. I associate these stretches of daylight not with the more extreme sports I might engage in after midnight, but rather with the rolling haze and warmth that comes from so much closeness of skin and of breath in the space of two sheets. I associate these times with wrinkled sheets.

What I tried to capture with these four scenes were four of the scenarios I remember most vividly as having taken place specifically in the afternoon. With Valentina and Jay I tried to box four straight lines around that sort of preciousness that new couples endlessly appreciate—unallocated time. They have nowhere to be. There are no phones in sight. The fans are pushing around the summer air. Valentina wears a cotton tee and cotton panties. Looking through the window, she says, The neighbors can see in.

Jay smiles mischievously. Let’s give them a show. What follows is comfortable and close. This is the sort of relationship that knows that on these sorts of days the question is not if you will have sex, but when. Most often the answer is constantly.

In the next scene I went for that feeling’s opposite. If Jay and Valentina’s afternoon was a slow and simple luxury, Manuel and Eva’s was one of urgency. I’m in love with the way we shot the intro to this scene, first for the quality of the footage, and secondly for the stark contrast it created once we caught up to Eva and Manuel in real time. We realize we’ve been watching her memories of a couple that used to be. Make up sex feels like fresh air once you’ve breathed for too long against a plastic bag.

Next we see a couple more established in their relationship. We sense they’ve been together for a while, and when Ana mentions a girl she saw in passing that day to Sean, he picks up on the nuance of the conversation. You see girls on the street every day. Why do you mention this one? As he presses Ana for more details about the girl, they whittle her away from whatever reality she occupies and turn her into a fantasy they might fancy living out. Their first time experimenting with a threesome in a spontaneous bit of role-playing leaves the audience believing that soon they’ll begin experimenting too in real life.

Finally, there is the sex you have in the afternoon because you shouldn’t be having it. Here again we find Manuel, and understand where he went when he left earlier in the movie. Karlee is in a place in her own life that is also in upheaval, and the two of them come together out of a mutual tailspin more than a mutual attraction. The sex is riddled with the raw edges that each is smarting from. When it is over, Karlee stands to leave. Having found release from that pent up tension she has new clarity. She draws back into herself as she looks at Manuel. She makes him leave too.