Summaries

Synopsis

We are driving a flat, winding, dry and isolated road through desert brush. Everything is quiet. Two young men in a car say nothing to each other. They arrive at a marked "wilderness" trail and head off without anything but the clothes on their back and an extra shirt. With energy and boundlessness they go and go and go. They mention the "thing" that they're apparently going to and how it should be there somewhere. They have no map. The landscape changes, they run, they smoke cigarettes and finally they decide they don't really want to go to this "thing" and they turn around. The shots are very long and tedious. We realize they're lost. The brush disappears and it is mountains, then it is rocks, then it is desert. Then it is night and they sit by a fire. The next day goes on and on and it is unclear how many days are now passing, though the landscape still keeps changing: a lunar surface, and crags of jagged rocks. Their clothes and faces dirty, their clipped exchanges almost indecipherable. They separate and then find each other again, Gerry stuck at the top of a huge rock formation. They discuss him jumping down and the other Gerry makes him a "dirt mattress", which is successful and they keep going. Finally flat white salt is all that's beneath them. They are both barely moving, shuffling their feet like broken-down machines. Gerry, who was falling behind, drops to his knees and lays down. Gerry stops and walks back to him, lying on the ground beside him. After a while, Gerry says that he's leaving and slowly, painfully, reaches over to Gerry as if to find comfort in holding his hand as he draws his last breath. Gerry shakes him off and, his movements stilting and awkward, he rolls on top of him, struggling, not with a hug but with a fraughtful busrt of energy to strangle him. He then lays still. After a while he gets up and walks in another direction, leaving dead Gerry, seeing moving forms on the horizon. We see the vast unbearable landscape move by quickly, no longer within it we are safely on the outside now, in a car. Gerry is sunburnt and dead-eyed, he turns to look at the young boy sitting in the backseat with him, looking out the window.