In the Flesh: Clementine (Patreon)

“I’m not like you,” says Karen (Otmara Marrero) to her much older ex-lover, D. (Sonya Walger). The older woman arches an eyebrow. “And what am I like?” Karen’s reply is to the point, her voice and expression cold with disdain. One word. “Old.” Clementine, Lara Gallagher’s romantic drama about intergenerational lesbian connection, certainly has age and aging on its mind. Who’s too old for whom, who looks what age; women putting on each other’s clothes, styling each other’s hair, dressing too young in ripped jeans and band t-shirts or too old in borrowed cardigans and sloppily applied cosmetics. “Old” is something Karen calls herself more than once with flat, bitter self-loathing. It’s the reason for the push in her push-and-pull connection with the teenaged Lana (Sydney Sweeney), a reflexive understanding that she’s trying to recreate the same relationship that just broke her heart and left her reeling.

Dykes are often more than partners to each other, compelled by circumstance to be mothers, sisters, best friends, daughters — we are so seldom raised by our own people. Many of us spend long years hiding, evading, avoiding. Gallagher’s film understands the tentative, unskilled intimacy of building scaffolding around those empty places. Its structures are obscured by foliage and creeping ivy. Its bodies stand and sway in isolation. Its voices are flat, almost mumblecore. There is a great hesitancy surrounding touch, emotion, the mechanics of human connection, and the film’s few men feel dangerous and alien. There is no preciousness about desire or love as uniformly good experiences. Even Clementine’s most dramatically romantic gesture is a complex tangle of ultimately unsustainable emotions, laying bare the fraught nature of the relationship between Karen and Lana.

The delicate, almost fairytale score and the film’s alternation between intimate and deeply expressive closeups and fastidiously composed distance shots give it a picturebook sense of immersion, as does its almost total lack of exposition. Its decision to flatten the visual language of clothing and spaces in the same way it flattens its dialog is somewhat less interesting, but it doesn’t detract from the sense of suspended reality, and the intricate nature shots Gallagher assembles — like the film’s closing image of Lana standing alone above and within a sea of light-washed pine boughs — more than make up for any lack of individuality in costuming and set dressing. This is a deeply adult film, complex and idiosyncratic. Gallagher’s vision of love is worth holding on the tongue until, like a dream, it dissolves.