A cold night in a wealthy New England suburb: a carjacking and subsequently, a romance.

At its most basic, the impetus for this project came from the desire to tell an unconventional love story. I sought to reinvent a project I worked on a few years ago, in which a man breaking into an apartment is met with a lonely woman who asks him “coffee or tea?” I was inspired by a James Joyce quote which I cannot locate that said something along the lines of: "the idea is to tell a simple story with complex means". In a way, I believe that this has been my goal for a long time and that my personal artistic inspirations have simply pushed me further in this direction over time.

While the film was initially intended to be an adaptation of a (very) short story by Alberto Moravia, it is grounded and made relevant to contemporary audiences by my own experiences growing up in Connecticut which inspire the film's characters. In my Sophomore year of high school, I made friends with a group of wealthier kids who had access to a car earlier than others. As we had nowhere to go, we would wander and drive around aimlessly, never going home satisfied. During this time, I came to understand that the kids who had more money would intentionally cause trouble for themselves repeatedly to give their lives a greater sense of meaning. This notion, or more generally that we act against our own self-interest for pleasure, is a theme I have become infatuated with, and was the subject of my last narrative film as well.

With this project, I hope to give this feeling of youthful ennui not only a poignant and restrained visual representation, but also give it the contradictory balance of violence and sensuality that can be felt in Moravia’s writing. I hope that this approach will accurately convey the inability to satisfy this feeling of perpetual liminality, and how only through genuine romance can one catch a glimpse at an escape from this cycle.