Jess and Moss

Jess and Moss (2011), one of the two last films I saw at this year's HKIFF,  is in a class all its own. It's a low budget film about the lives of two lonely teenagers during one summer vacation somewhere in Western Kentucky. The elder one is tall and lanky Jess (Susan Hagan) about 18 and her constant companion is the younger Moss (Austin Vickers), about 13.

Throughout that summer, they cycle about the countryside, explore ponds, jump up and down trampolines, swim, play around with fire crackers and fireworks, build up a sort of secret private meeting place at a deserted house near certain abandoned silos nearby, with their favourite toys, books and other objects for  diversion lying about in no particular order there and listening to old vinyl records played on a hand-wound record-player. There they feel bored, make small talk, boast, play games, puzzle about their future and generally and keep each other company. Throughout the film we never see nor hear them talk about having any parents of their own but we find them inventing how well they are loved by their parents who have died in a traffic accident. The closest they get to having any relative is that Moss talks about having  an "uncle" which we never see and there is just one scene in which we see Jess with an elder brother who complains that if she wants to smoke, she should buy her own instead of stealing his. They puzzle about what is going to happen to them when the school holidays end.

In the meantime, we see them talking above the broken down tractors, the roof of a silo, warding off mosquitos off their legs each tiny swollen reddened spots on the sites where they had bitten them. I like one scene in particular in which Jess is smoking. Moss also takes a cigarette, holds it between his index and thrid fingers, extends it towards Jess for a light, and then makes as if inhaling and exhaling the cigarette smoke as it had actually been lit and another in which they fight over which particular bottles on a window ledge should be reserved for whose pea-gun shooting and how Moss got angry when Jess shoots at a bottle which Moss said should be reserved as his shooting target!

One peculiar feature of the film is that whenever Jess has got something which she thinks particularly important or worth noting, she would record this on an old fashioned casette recorder, which serves as a structural device to provide some kind of order in her life and also to provide a narrative framework for the film. Sometimes, when the recorder is rewound, we see images of Jess running backward! There is a scene in which Moss is listening to a recording of a lecture on the nature of memory in which the speaker says that we only use about 12% of all our memory capacity. Is that what the director is trying to show us?

There appears to be nothing of any lasting significance in what Jess recorded, just bits and pieces of random thought which occurred to her as and when they were taped in short phrases or sentences.   But it is precisely the lack of any coherence in such thoughts which make the recorded messages so realistic as true to life fragments of random adolescent thoughts and feelings.

I like the lusciousness of the Kentucky vegetation during summer, expertly captured, giving the film a very warm, cosy, relaxing breeze like feeling. But not only are there idylic scenes of evanescent teenage joys, the director Clay Jeter also intersperses footages of yellowing and grainy photograph-like episodes about even more ancient memories of the childfren, some more than 25 years old, to give it a feeling of  "dated " nostalgia feel which  seems to tie in so well with the nature of the infantile reminiscences portrayed. The acting by the two children is so natural and un-self-conscious. They appear to be just "acting"  themselves. The photography is great. I'd give it a 2B.