Frankie (Ariella Mastroianni) is a young single mother struggling to make enough money, having just been fired from her job as a gas station attendant. Finding another gig isn’t going to be easy. Gainful employment is a tough ask for Frankie, who is living with a rare degenerative brain condition called dyschronometria, meaning she has problems with perceiving the passing of time. Her brain is essentially the unreliable narrator of her own reality. Like any noir hero worth their salt, Frankie makes audio cassettes to help her organize her thoughts about “a life lived in no specific order,” as she puts it on one tape.
This is the promising jumping-off point for a stylish low-budget mystery, directed by electrician-turned-filmmaker Ryan J. Sloan, which finds time along the way to riff on everything from “Memento” to “Videodrome.” In the best traditions of film noir, the initial offer which will help the protagonist out of a tough spot seems too good to be true. Frankie is offered $3,000 to drive a car from A to B. Easy, right? Anyone familiar with this kind of setup knows that simple offers are inevitably anything but, and rarely turn out to be worth the money — that is, assuming the poor patsy ever sees the money. And so it proves here.
Also consistent with the genre, the lead is lugging a hefty consignment of painful emotional baggage as she goes about the rest of her business — in this case, a tragedy tied to the loss-by-suicide support group she attends, where the relatives of people who killed themselves open up and share their feelings. “The person I knew wouldn’t do that,” “They were living this whole other life” and “I never really knew him at all” are the kinds of sentiments aired, and it’s striking how well these plaintive cris de coeur double for the basis of noir premises too: the guy or gal in over their head, pulled along by the tide of events, until it’s too late to extricate themselves.
Though it unfortunately lacks the narrative momentum of top-tier gumshoe pics, it’s no hardship spending time with Frankie, thanks to a neatly judged performance from Mastroianni. The co-writer of the film, she isn’t just another would-be actor inserting herself into a self-generated project. She’s perfect for the role. She has one of those compelling faces where you can make out the elegant shape of her skull, with pixie cut, high cheekbones, a strong but delicate jawline and large eyes with haunted late-night shadows contributing to a character who is a well-judged mixture of tough and fragile. The historic film lead she most evokes is Renée Jeanne Falconetti as the martyred Joan of Arc; Frankie could be her latter-day New Jersey incarnation.
A lovely score, featuring mournful, sleazy brass layered over a sleepy bass pulse, adds class to proceedings, but make no mistake, this isn’t a low-budget film getting by on a cool score alone. Gazer is a handsomely assembled picture, shot on 16mm despite the budgetary constraints of self-financing. The 16mm was the right call: The swirl of the grain gives the film an undeniable boost, linking it to noir’s long heritage of inexpensive little mysteries which drew audiences in with the promise of hard talk and harder action. Indeed, it’s only a slight shame that noir’s other calling card, sexual intrigue, isn’t particularly present here. The focus is Frankie, and the commitment is more to studying her character than her romantic entanglements.
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