Adultolescence

This is a journalistic-style, home movie shot in the director's childhood home, making it implicitly nostalgic because it has such an unsentimental commitment to the small gap between past and present.

Homecoming is both an unattained goal and always out of reach, but it's Lea May who just won't let the past or present go- the one who keeps digging up people's dirt. She's not investigating. She's not suspecting. Her personality precipitates it: her innocence and indigence make it impossible for her to gloss over, forget about, swallow the not-so-ideal things that seep up through the seams. Yet, when a breakthrough seems eminent, Lea's inability to face her own fears and misplaced blame brings her further away.

Presumably, this is a past and home Lea would have been delighted to shed a few years earlier: Mom making sure he's gotten enough to eat, Mom controlling her sex life, Mom being cynical and critical of her career dreams... and dad being the middle man or mostly absent. Yet, there is a kind of magical thinking where if she sees herself as if she's in a movie, all will turn out well.

In reality, things stay the same inside her parents' home, while outside, Lea finds herself older and always wresting with how she can let go of the past when family is forever? Indie camera-work follows close against the subjects, and there is slight amateur, digital quality appropriate for a movie that sees life as unpolished and constantly improvised. Other older film mediums like Super 8 are also used to give the movie just the sense of nostalgia it needs and helps the audience to follow jumps in not just the subjective time-line, but subjective points-of-view as well, along with filmmaker Vicky Shen's own breezy rhythms.