Tessa (Kit Zauhar) and Ben (Zane Pais) are staying in Philly for the weekend to attend Ben’s high school reunion. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the couple has to rent a room in a stranger’s apartment. That stranger is Adam, whose loneliness is immediately obvious to his new guests. Adam quickly becomes an unwilling voyeur to the most private parts of the couple’s life. While Ben seeks validation from old classmates, Tessa is left to find her own affection within the confines of the apartment. When Tessa betrays Adam’s trust, Adam goes to great lengths to assert his dominance over his home.
With This Closeness, Kit Zauhar offers a work that touches on couples, modern relationships and the toxicity of love when you’re young and inexperienced. The film will be available on Mubi.
Slowness and analysis
In this new film, Kit Zauhar takes the viewer into a reality that is very present and rarely dealt with. We don’t say it often enough, but traveling can be a very revealing ordeal for a couple. Finding yourself in an unfamiliar, restricted place in the presence of your life partner can cause sparks to fly.
Here, Tessa and Ben rent an AirBNB. From the moment they arrive, it’s clear that happiness is not the dominant theme. Barely in the apartment, the young woman complains that it doesn’t look exactly like the photos. Then she asks her boyfriend to remove the air-conditioning from the window, as it might let in cold air. The apartment’s occupant arrives to share their weekend.
It’s time to analyze couple and social relationships. Within the couple, jealousy is strong and destroys every little moment shared or every little time they part. When Tessa and Ben talk to each other, it’s usually to quarrel or to ask forgiveness. As the plot unfolds, we realize just how toxic this relationship is, especially for Tessa who, as a teenager, was very insecure and the target of mockery at school. So Ben takes advantage of her insecurity to make her realize that without him, she’d be on her own.
When the secondary characters of the roommate and the high-school friend appear, there’s automatically frustration, anger and bickering between Ben and Tessa. Jealousy, feelings of abandonment and a lack of respect for each other are all well represented, very similar to what we unfortunately often see in young couples lacking life experience.
Lizzy, Ben (Zane Pais) and Tessa (Kit Zauhar)
There’s very little movement, and all the action takes place in the AirBNB apartment. Yet the outside world is a character in its own right, there to accentuate the toxicity of the couple’s relationship.
Intimacy
At the heart of this story, however, is the blurred notion of intimacy, which is often underdeveloped these days. This intimacy, necessary for a couple’s success, is sometimes confused with sexuality and its surroundings. So, when Ben and Tessa find themselves in a foreign environment, with people who don’t make them feel comfortable, they have no one to turn to for support. As a result, Ben turns to his high school sweetheart, while Tessa turns to her temporary roommate who, like her, is introverted and uncomfortable in multi-person situations.
This intimacy is also reflected in the fact that the main character is played by the writer/director herself. This creates a highly personal film in which the fictional character – a video content creator – blends with the real person – also a visual artist.
The director succeeds in creating a strange feeling in the viewer. An unhealthy voyeurism that gives the impression of witnessing the predicted end of a young couple caught up in a toxic relationship. It should also be added that this voyeuristic side is an invitation to question our world and our tendency to expose ourselves publicly, leading to this loss of intimacy, whether conscious or not.
Tessa publishes ASMR videos on YouTube, a perfect example of our ever-growing need to isolate ourselves from the outside world for the duration of a short video.
A little more…
All in all, This Closeness is a slow-paced film that may make some viewers uncomfortable. It touches on a taboo and sometimes misunderstood subject: intimacy.
How many couples died during the pandemic simply because they couldn’t live together 100% of the time? They realized that when intimacy was necessary, they couldn’t handle it.
Kit Zauhar’s film shows perfectly how quickly this feeling can become overwhelming, especially when the relationship is already on the wane.
