This Time – One Fluid Night Festival

Writer: Allie Jennings

Director: Robert Vaughn

Obsessed with the “Beyonce of Broadway,” Grace finds her dad’s letters after his death and struggles to recognise Liza Minelli but it sends her on an unusual road trip to a club in LA to track down the singer as a way to understand her father. Writer Allie Jennings and Director Robert Vaughn’s This Time is deeply sentimental but with its funeral home setting and purpose to scatter her dad’s ashes, there is a pleasant initial quirkiness that becomes dampened over 100-minutes as odd couple teenager Grace and older funeral parlour worker Red team up.

There is a degree of emo-angst underpinning This Time with 16-year-old Grace written as a fairly generic young adult feeling at odds with the world and particularly her timid mother and overbearing stepfather. It’s a trope that has run solidly through American movies and television shows for decades which Jennings doesn’t attempt to reinvent, but taking the character on a journey to better self-understanding proves watchable.

One of the hardest things to achieve in drama is absent presence, and Jennings doesn’t really manage it here with Grace’s beloved father never coming fully into view. Given the character barely knew him and spent little time in his company, the connection that the film grasps for slips out of reach even when she reads from his letters. Although, her home life is demonstrably awful at the start of This Time, it is never clear why a semi-stranger is the focus of her quest or the basis of the new father-daughter relationship that emerges with Red along the way.

Running through the film is an experience of bigotry and homophobia both in the present and the past which Jennings uses as a rite of passage for Grace (Anwen O’Driscoll), a 16-year-old finding out who she is. The violence and verbal abuse in small towns is strongly conveyed yet the narrative is a little muddled about how Grace’s sexuality is relevant first to the road movie tropes and later to responses to her father.

Red (Charles Martin Smith) feels like a character we learn too little about which in a buddy movie with only two main characters is an issue, undermining his reality and likelihood as a companion for Grace. Red talks in ellipses and philosophical reflections that stretch the credibility further, and while the connection between the actors is convincing, how their meeting helps each other is less clear.

“So, you’re just going to throw me away like everyone else” Grace complains late in the movie and the stodgy dialogue doesn’t help create investment in her trajectory and the fairly inevitably ending where all is well despite the situation around Grace and her family barely changing. But this is the movies where fulfilling one quest makes the whole world a better place. Yet, despite the quirky scenario, This Time is a highly conventional story.

This Time is screening at the One Fluid Night Festival 2024.