The film could be described as “meditative,” but with an important twist: while the directors and Lashay guide the audience through a thoughtful and introspective process – making sense of this place in the world, what it even means to be somewhere at all, what are the natures of being and becoming – the ultimate goal is much more playful and energized that this description might imply. Thanks to Lashay’s charismatic charm and curious perspective, the film is neither slow nor moody: every observation or pause seems to be directed at seeking a possible path forward, at finding, identifying, and connecting with the life and the spirit of freedom hiding in the dry and spare desert.
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Lashay T. Warren and his coworkers are standing at the corner of 151st Street and McDonald Drive, trying to get their bearings straight. They’re carrying rakes and shovels – they’re here to do some light road-maintenance work – and they’re looking for the next street they’ve been assigned to work on. Turning left and then right, they consult a GPS map on their phones and eventually make an educated guess about which direction to proceed. What’s confusing – almost surreal – about the scene we’re watching is that the group does not appear to be on a street at all, or even in a city: they’re standing in the middle of the Mojave Desert, tumbleweeds and all.
The setting is California City, California. The town was established in 1965 and sprawls over 200 square miles across the desert: land-wise, it’s actually the third-largest city in the state. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone: despite its size and the ambitious visions and early investments of its founders, who hoped to create the next Los Angeles, the plan didn’t really take off, and for the most part the houses and people never arrived. Today, although it benefits from an extensive network of roads, sewers, water pipes, electrical mains, subdivision plats, a lonely golf course, and other assorted infrastructure investments (already aging, occasionally failing), the city remains largely undeveloped. (If you’re curious, you can check out the satellite imagery and street-view photos via Google maps.)
This fascinating setting – a ghost town that never had a boom; or perhaps it’s a bustling metropolis, still waiting in the wings – provides the backstory for Victoria, a thoughtful and uplifting new documentary from the creative team of Sofie Benoot, Liesbeth De Ceulaer, and Isabelle Tollenaere. The film centers on the aforementioned Lashay, a 25-year-old Angeleno who has moved to California City with his girlfriend and five young kids from his old neighborhood in Compton – under two hours away, but worlds apart.
Like the city around him, Lashay is unfinished, and this is what draws us to him: he’s working to figure things out. We never learn exactly why he’s left Los Angeles and what brought him to California City; some blend of fleeing trouble and seeking opportunity is suggested. (In passing, we learn that his past includes having “caught his first bullet” on one street corner.) The new setting seems to offer the promise of a fresh start – a high school degree, a job – but to make use of the opportunity he’ll need to sort out some things. Through his early reflections in the video messages he sends back to friends in Compton and the longing way he revisits the old neighborhood via Google Earth, it’s clear that he’s lived through a lot already. He carries around an “inner city” of his own, but it’s fading.
As he explores his strange and unfamiliar new home and begins to make peace with where he’s at, both spatially and spiritually, Lashay’s process and the corresponding narrative of the film both employ a metaphor of place (here, there) and movement (leaving, arriving; drifting, seeking, finding; hurrying, climbing, resting) to help us understand what it means to slowly, patiently, honestly, and creatively make sense of a complex world. Through the film’s intimate, but never intrusive, camerawork, we are fortunate to be along for the journey.
In order to find work through this transition, Lashay must clarify what to keep and what to leave behind, and be open to finding new meaning where he is. Noting that the streets here have names, not meanings, he works to create his own sense of place, even renaming landmarks and locations as a volitional act of becoming and belonging; real meaning can’t be just dropped onto the landscape arbitrarily: it must be earned, or built over time.
In addition to exploring the desert and working on the (seemingly futile) task of keeping sand, time, and sagebrush from obscuring the original grid-plan of the city, Lashay and his friends have enrolled in a local adult-ed GED program. (In contrast to the bulk of the story, one perceives a sense of urgency here: he’s 25, and it’s possible the program only extends up to 26-year-olds . . . ? A quick web-search for the “Kern Service and Conservation Corps” seems to confirm this.) Through their class’s coursework, we are introduced to the film’s central narrative framework: the students are learning about 19th-century pioneer narratives, reading, reciting, and discussing old letters and diaries describing the journey west, the longing for home, and the discovery of a new land.
Each sequence of the film mirrors the language and experiences of these settlers, but here Lashay is the pioneer, sharing his own journal entries with us (or those back in L.A., passed and gone – or perhaps some imagined future audience). He reads these reflections in a voice that is slow and deliberate, as is not uncommon for inexperienced readers, but the honesty of the emotions, the cleverness of the perceptive insights (on his surroundings and himself), and the unpretentious poetry of the language and the imagery comes through powerfully, perhaps even stronger as his pacing and attention draw our focus to every word. These first-person voice-overs are variously sweet, pensive, inquisitive, poignant, and very funny, channeling an inner lost-alien-on-earth similar to Wim Wenders’s wandering angel spirit-guide in Wings of Desire, or Eduardo Mendoza’s whimsical alien in the novel No Word from Gurb. (Connecting this journey with the history of actual down-to-earth pioneers – real “salt of the earth” types – also keeps the discussion from becoming too theoretical or flighty: unlike other films exploring the philosophical/navel-gazing quest for self-examination, Victoria is refreshingly grounded.)
As the film follows Lashay’s quest to find himself on the path of life, the progress of his thoughts and his voice-over narrative are matched with his more obvious, visual movement across the landscape. Like the pioneers whose spirit and words they emulate, these young urban émigrés spend a great deal of time simply walking; it’s how you come to know where you are, which is to say, how you find yourself. (The intersection of these two themes – walking, and learning the landscape – are explicitly called out in one of the classroom exercises, when the students are asked to define a “pioneer”; the two responses: “a person that travels on feet” and “a person that knows the land.”)
Interestingly, despite the fact that the characters all work on road maintenance in a state that is known around the world for its car culture, the film does not include a single moving car, and the filmmakers seem to delight in playing with this aspect of the story. Time and time again, the centrality of walking over automated transport is highlighted: the family’s old clunker has broken down, and thus we watch our hero walking miles to bring back a new battery – the person is actually carrying the car; Lashay and a friend rescue a woman with a motorized wheelchair, stranded due to some mechanical failure, and so – again – human power proves the more reliable source of locomotion; another scene involves the crew carrying home the broken pieces of a busted airplane or rocket ship they’ve found in the desert; multiple scenes are filmed in cars that can’t move, reduced to a strange sort of outdoor furniture; and at one point Lashay even films himself using a rake to erase the tracks left by a vehicle, explaining that this is his job.
Removing cars from the equation serves another function: as any true pedestrian knows, walking slows motion down to a human pace, and provides the time, the space, and the intimacy for thought to unfold at the human scale. Walking connects people to places and places to history. Here, in a land where the very roads are subsiding back into the desert, orienting oneself is slow, tricky, intuitive work, involving an almost psychogeographic blend of wandering, drifting, seeking, and seeing. (Occasionally, the film juxtaposes the cautious, perceptive motion of the walker with images of faster transportation via Google Earth flyovers, which remind us of the sense of detachment one feels traveling a mile a minute and viewing the world from 30,000 feet.)
The film could be described as “meditative,” but with an important twist: while the directors and Lashay guide the audience through a thoughtful and introspective process – making sense of this place in the world, what it even means to be somewhere at all, what are the natures of being and becoming – the ultimate goal is much more playful and energized that this description might imply. Thanks to Lashay’s charismatic charm and curious perspective, the film is neither slow nor moody: every observation or pause seems to be directed at seeking a possible path forward, at finding, identifying, and connecting with the life and the spirit of freedom hiding in the dry and spare desert.
A broken water main creates a geyser, which in turn creates a rainbow: an unexpected spark of delight, a problem converted into a smile. A balloon is freed from a sagebrush and set free, to flit across the landscape and out of frame. Lashay imagines the life of an insect hitching a ride on one of the tumbleweeds that roll endlessly and effortlessly along. The kids push a tire slowly up to the top of a rise, just to release it speeding and bumping down the opposite slope. At the side of the road we meet a tortoise crawling slowly along: is this is metaphor to decode the “meaning” of this enigmatic film? No, because it’s not that clunky: but we do recognize a fellow traveler, and our narrator provides some shade as the two walk and exchange pleasantries.
Lashay’s journey is not without sadness and loss as well. He’s left something behind – people in Compton, friends lost too soon, an earlier sense of self, meaning, and belonging – which is understandably hard. His ever-perky friend Sharleece tells him about her school report on black holes, and he instantly recognizes the phenomenon. “Black holes is just like Los Angeles . . . everything pulls you in, everything goes around and around. And once you’re sucked in, a lot of people don’t get out.” Reaching escape velocity is hard, even from this distance, and the psychic threads that connect us to people and places act as long cosmic tethers, strange wormholes to transport us if we slip or stray. But like that freed balloon, Lashay won’t let the past become an anchor; at least for the moment, his next step is to be here now.
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Victoria has been recognized with the Caligari Film Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Jury Award for Best Belgian Documentary at Docville, and the award for Best Artistic Approach at Big Sky. In June 2021 it will screen as part of the San Francisco IDFF.
All images are screenshots from the video.
