EXT.
FADE IN on street scene. Northeastern college town, late 90s, autumn. It’s cold
– people are dressed in layers, they shudder against the wind that doesn’t blow
trees or leaves because there are none. Instead, we see trash bags and paper
flyers and parking tickets and faded receipts and coffee cups swept into
invisible vortices, dust devils sketching lazy figure eights across the empty
CVS PARKING LOT and imploding when someone pulls into the LOT in a decade-old
Volvo to buy bottled water. We’re looking at this street – call it DONNER
STREET – from a HIGH ANGLE shot, across from the CVS LOT, camera motionless.
The camera starts to TRACK to our right, and we see the CVS LOT disappear, dust and detritus devils continuing their waltz without us. We see the CVS itself – graffiti on the walls, duct tape over a crack spiderwebbing across the lower half of the door, parka-ed store patrons slipping out the door under its watchful electronic eye, etc. The storefront is fairly long, and we see windows decorated with thanksgiving turkeys and red-and-orange tinsel and the first wave of winter supplies – ergonomic snow shovels, brightly colored plastic toboggans, insectile ski goggles.
We continue TRACKING to the right until we pass the CVS and see an EATERY. Sleek, modern, monochromatic, stylishly curved couches arrayed about artfully undersized tables, nearly empty at this early hour in the bleak midautumn. There’s someone at the table by the window, and we stop TRACKING and ZOOM IN on her – THE GIRL.
She’s nursing coffee and a croissant. She’s reading the New York Times. She looks like someone out of a Jean-Luc Godard film – Jean Seberg in Breathless, blonde hair cut short and helmeted down over attractive but somewhat severe face. She is aware of and cultivates this similarity. We stop ZOOMING and see a MEDIUM SHOT of her in the EATERY. The camera stays there. We see out-of-focus bodies come into the shot briefly and leave again, clouds crossing the sun, but the sun gives no heat in this weather.
Up to this point, the only audio is ambient street noise – the occasional car, the constant wind. While we watch THE GIRL watch her coffee get cold, that ambient noise gets louder and louder, as if we were getting off that rooftop across the street and standing outside the eatery, as if we were one of the anonymous bodies, wrapped tightly in swaddling scarf, hurrying down DONNER STREET to our job, or to the CVS to buy bottled water, and we see her, THE GIRL, sitting in the EATERY, not touching the breakfast laid out in front of her on biodegradable napkins. What do we do? We stop, right there on the street, and you know New England people on a cold morning, they bump into us, they jostle us, but we just don’t care. Still, we can’t stay there, so we FADE TO BLACK. Ambient noise continues over the FADE but cuts off before the next SCENE.
INT. FADE IN on the EATERY. Camera is at eye level in the spindly tripod of a chair across from the tripod where THE GIRL will be sitting momentarily. Another MEDIUM SHOT, encompassing the table and the chair and a parallelogram of plexiglass showing DONNER STREET in front of us. But before we can even consider any of that, any of what we see, she sits down across from us, holding the biodegradable coffee cup wrapped with a biodegradable cardboard sleeve so her hands don’t burn and the croissant too. She puts them down on the table in front of her, ignoring us, making us acutely aware of our voyeuristic presence. She pulls the Times out of her bag and bisects it, reading the upper right corner of the front page while she doesn’t drink her coffee and doesn’t eat her croissant.
The door opens and closes. Out-of-focus people pass by in the window in front of us. People order breakfasts, people order coffee, people talk, but this noise is a low hum. All we can really hear is THE GIRL’s copy of the Times – pages ruffling as she scans the interior to find the continuation of Page One’s story about embassy attacks in Southeast Asia. Pages creasing as she continually refolds the rectangle into readable shapes – morning origami, tabloid geometry. Camera is stationary through this whole SCENE.
She
pulls her chair in closer to the table, sending vibrations through the tile
floor to the table legs, through the thin, curving metal legs to the table
surface, through the tabletop to the biodegradable coffee cup, making the
coffee in the cup oscillate, creating tiny waves, sending the coffee spilling
over the brim, the camera ZOOMING IN, EXTREME CLOSEUP on the tan droplets
dripping down the sides of the cup, reaching the Times, soaking through the
thin paper. She grabs the cup and lifts it from the table, creating more
oscillations in the depths of the liquid filling the cup, spilling more coffee
over the brim, the STAIN growing on the paper as the camera holds on the space
where the cup was, watching the coffee soak through each page, propagating the
STAIN through the layers of paper. THE GIRL curses. FADE TO BLACK.
EXT. Fade into a LONG SHOT of DONNER STREET, from inside the EATERY, approximately where THE GIRL was sitting, maybe even right over the STAIN. No matter, because it’s much later (or earlier?) now, nighttime on our generic college town STREET, still cold, still we have our out-of-focus New Englanders hurrying across DONNER STREET, now from work to home, carrying briefcases and wearing overcoats, perhaps. No sound at all.
The TITLES of the film appear on the bottom of the screen – really old school TITLES, the kind that look like someone typed onto the filmstrip with a typewriter. What they say doesn’t really matter, but they’re there: name of the film, director, producer, actors and actresses, maybe some of the more important workers. SCENE continues until all the TITLES are done, then cuts to next SCENE.
INT. Fade in on THE GIRL and THE BOY are sitting at the EATERY. It’s later (or earlier?) than SCENE 2. We’re looking in from the street. MEDIUM SHOT. They’re each reading different sections of the Times. She looks up.
THE GIRL
Are you afraid of getting old? I am.
THE BOY
No. Drink your coffee, it’s getting cold.
There’s another cup of coffee sitting on the table between them. It’s been there for some time – no steam curls up from the surface. Spilled coffee marks the sides of the biodegradable cup. She drinks from it, grimacing at the temperature, and sets it back on the table.
THE GIRL
Seriously.
THE BOY
No. I don’t think about it.
THE GIRL
You should. Every day goes by, and all I
can think about it how I’ve wasted it. How
we’ve wasted it.
She sips from the coffee again as if to make a point, but grimaces once it reaches her lips. She twists around in her chair and throws the half-full cup in the TRASH. She realizes her cruelty and qualifies herself.
THE GIRL
I don’t know, maybe that’s cynical.
He flips to the next page of the Times before he answers. He’s still hurt.
THE BOY
Yeah, I think it is.
Again, we hear the low hum of the EATERY throughout this SCENE. It’s indistinct, so much so that even if we totally ignored THE GIRL and THE BOY, we wouldn’t be able to make out words or even distinct sounds, because there’s a hum coming from THE GIRL and THE BOY. Not an audible hum, but something that dogs can hear. A sound wave canceling out the other noise. A magnetic field. An oscillation, a force, a power that commands us to focus on these two, even when we try to look away.
THE BOY looks younger than THE GIRL. He’s reading the Times like she was in SCENE 2. He’s leaning back in the spindly chair, so much so that it looks about to fall, but he pushes back anyway, almost daring gravity to tip him. He has short hair, thrift store clothes, fashionably unfashionable black plastic glasses, and what looks like a mustache as interpreted by someone who can’t grow a mustache.
He sighs, turning another page in his Times like his father did at their breakfast table growing up – purposefully, with an air of finality.
THE BOY
You get like this before your birthdays.
THE GIRL looks irritated. Or hurt. Or impatient.
THE GIRL
Let’s go.
They get up and leave. The camera ZOOMS IN on the table where they were sitting. Just off center, on her side, there’s a coffee STAIN left by the cup she threw away. CLOSEUP on the STAIN. FADE OUT on this shot, the STAIN remaining, a luminescent afterimage on the lens like the autumn sun outside leaves on our eyes – purple like a bruise, crescent-shaped like the moon.
FADE IN on DONNER STREET. Camera is outside the EATERY, facing the door, positioned somewhere in the STREET. We’re TRACKING to our left, keeping THE GIRL and THE BOY in the center of as LONG SHOT. Out-of-focus cars pass through our vision, not like clouds this time but rather like fish close to the surface of the sea. We move with THE BOY and THE GIRL slowly, stopping when they stop.
THE BOY gives a quarter to a BUM sitting on a stoop.
BUM
Thanks mister you and the lady have a
nice day alright.
He ignores him. She smiles at him. The wind pushes at the helmet on her head, but her hair is motionless. The street noise is louder here than in the EATERY: the spell’s been broken. They stop to look at store windows. They enter a bookstore. We wait outside with the BUM, who keeps up a steady patter.
He has short hair, thrift store clothes, no glasses. He holds a biodegradable coffee cup. He’s shaved recently. He’s white. He talks quietly, but we can hear him, even from the street. When THE BOY and THE GIRL leave the bookstore, he watches them go.
We continue following them down DONNER STREET. We ZOOM IN as they reach a decade-old Volvo parked on a cross street. We hold on a MEDIUM SHOT of THE BOY, THE GIRL and the car. They talk, we can’t hear them. They drive away. The camera stays. Time passes. The BUM walks into the frame from DONNER, turns at the corner, and walks down the cross street. We watch until we can’t see him any more. The cross street looks much like DONNER STREET, and we can see dust devils blow into the frame from the CVS LOT. They chase each other up the cross street, disappearing before they make it to the end of the block.
It starts to SNOW. The SNOW is grayish, wet, and melts almost as soon as it hits the ground. It could be a blizzard of coffee cups, biodegradable shreds of Styrofoam absorbed by the macadam. There’s a newspaper in the street, so illegible from the SNOW falling that we can’t tell if it’s the Times or not. It disappears as the SNOW begins to stick. The CREDITS roll over that shot: SNOW falling on an intersection off DONNER STREET. FADE TO BLACK.