Behind-the-camera work can be thankless, especially if you’re a location scout. In The Scout, the debut feature from writer/director Paula González-Nasser, Sofia (Mimi Davila) lives a life of transit and handshakes: schlepping back and forth across the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, knocking on doors and haggling with New Yorkers to allow a camera crew into their home. Set over the course of a single day, the time we spend with Sofia is frenetic, an endless scroll of missed calls and parking tickets, angry DPs and creeps with jaw-dropping brownstones. But with The Scout, González-Nasser crafts something wholly serene. The movie is an article of observance, a steady hand’s reflection on a whirlwind job and a life caught between moments.
It can be hard to see what makes Sofia tick. In her first feature starring role, Mimi Davila constructs a gear train of interiority, and the physical distance of González-Nasser’s camera — masterfully patient and still as pond water — widens the lacuna between Sofia and the city in which she lives and works. An adult but still under the boundary of 30, Sofia is tight-lipped and always running late. She’s curt with coworkers but savvy enough to lay on the charm toward owners of prospective filming properties, which turns out to be an essential skill. The Scout is cavalier with its plot but manages to stitch together an intricate series of vignettes that comprise what it takes to succeed in one of the more enigmatic jobs in entertainment — and the enigma doing what she can to get by.
It turns out, that often means playing therapist to the litany of property owners that may or may not have the right apartment for Sofia’s team. As she drives to and from Brooklyn and Manhattan, Sofia enters the homes of lonely sweethearts and overpaid creeps, disgruntled shop owners and nerds with too much downtime. The Scout assembles a wide-ranging pastiche of New Yorkers that all, somehow, avoid exceptionalism and caricature. Even at their comic extremes — in this case, a pet shop owner who pressures Sofia into a date for the privilege of photographing his store — these scenes are neither exploitative nor cheap punchlines. González-Nasser prefers instead to study the quiet and discomfiting solitude of weathering a microaggression, of clocking the exits when a meeting threatens to go sour.
A lesser effort may have discounted Sofia’s competency at the expense of her youth, but The Scout is proud to show a girl who knows what she’s doing. That’s not to say her day goes by without its struggles (a glovebox full of unpaid parking tickets earns her a boot on her car), but Sofia is clearly seasoned enough to navigate the city and lock down deals with a bit of sweet talk. In fact, her interactions with property owners are occasionally lovely. A standout early scene places Sofia in the Upper West Side home of the elderly Anna (New Hollywood veteran Rutanya Alda), who quickly takes a liking to Sofia. The Scout’s gentle hand can make Sofia’s professionalism hard to detect — she operates through quick glances, tonal shifts, and the odd bon mot — but she bags enough trust with Anna to have her lying in bed and clutching a teddy bear. “You can’t put your life off forever,” Anna tells Sofia, lovesick from the absence of her expatriate children. “Oh, does it really matter what I say?”
Sofia’s face time with these property owners ranges from the banal to the predatory to the deeply vulnerable, and eventually, they sluice enough of Sofia’s reserve to reveal a history. Dejected after a rough meeting, Sofia gets a message from a familiar voice: it turns out she’d taped a scouting request to the door of an old friend, Becca (Otmara Marrero). Their reunion is tenuously friendly but loaded; they exchange pleasantries on the cliff of a years-long friendship soiled in bad blood. On the page, it’s a scene as patient and nuanced as anything in The Scout, but Davila’s performance — a catalog of sunken eyes, nervous glances, clipped sentences — reveals the regrets she can’t bring to voice, an adulthood chiseled by relationships dead on the vine. Before long, it’s off to another location to appraise.
The Scout is a softly autobiographical work. González-Nasser wrote it in response to her own years as a location scout, the sweat-breaking, citywide hustle of scoring locations and the unexpected intimacies of stepping into a stranger’s home. Her movie is a work well-served by time and distance; it wields the maturity of reflection and the stillness of experience that’s only gained through years of digestive retrospection. The Scout’s juxtaposed placidity against what can fairly be labeled a coming-of-age story is a rare mark of precision for a debuting auteur. Location scouting is, essentially, a job of observation; González-Nasser proves her time in the field was well spent.
DIRECTOR: Paula González-Nasser; CAST: Mimi Davila, Rutanya Alda, Max Rosen, Otmara Morrero, Matt Barats; DISTRIBUTOR: Greenwich Entertainment; IN THEATERS: September 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 29 min.
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