Sam’s World (2024)

Sam’s World

In his books “Cinema 1” and “Cinema 2,” Gilles Deleuze differentiates between the movement-image and the time-image. The former is linear; cause and effect determine what happens on screen events that hinge upon outward action, kinetic energy skipping across the tops of characters’ psyches. In the latter, a character’s mood-thought-feeling dictates the measure of time; driven by potential energy, it seeks to reorder the past in order to make sense of present or future. Both are concerned with rhythm. Their distinction is marked by where the metronome sits.

In Lily Lady’s first featurette, “Sam’s World,” that metronome is lodged inside them. The film follows Sam (Lady), a mid-20s non-binary sex worker navigating creatives and writerly types just beyond heteronormative culture’s periphery over roughly 24 hours. They room with their partner Rex (Annie Connolly), a photographer-editor whose support for Sam appears desperate in equal measures love and enablement. The two are fraught: It turns out Sam is secretly pregnant, and Rex has been harboring more traditionally corporate ambitions that begin to diverge from Sam around this subject of work.

Of course, concern for public judgment is always a rationalization of deeper emotional insecurities; when Sam and Rex run into one of Sam’s much-older clients at the park, Rex grows visibly tense: “I don’t want to have to think about you being intimate with someone else.” In fact, from their very first interaction after which Rex tells Sam about applying at a café across the street for a “real job” it becomes clear that Rex will be much more an active participant than an aggressor in a relationship toward which they seem largely indifferent.

And it is not so much that Rex is ignored as she in her excessive concessions depleted efforts to support reach out touch is treated with an apathy that invalidates partnership between them. Sam’s most expressive moments around Rex come when Sam is either diminishing the feelings of Rex, or when Rex is coming to the comfort of an inconsolable Sam.

Where “Sam’s World” succeeds at broaching broader implications of sex work is in its refusal to fetishize or voyeuristically prod the trade — something many other movies are only too eager to do from a safe distance. When they’re in the park together, neither Sam nor their client comes off as exploitative; there’s a courtesy shared between them, as between co-workers who know what could be gained and lost by one using another to fill respective gaps within either life.

According to interviews, Sam’s World is Lady’s first try at making a movie, and it shows: the color grading is inconsistent; too much of the film is taken up by long conversations that make it feel even shorter; actors who seem just as inexperienced with working in a medial space as Lady does often land their lines awkwardly.

However, for all its amateurism, there are moments of such lyric grace when Sam is alone that they approach the transcendent. These abstract scenes marry what might be called the film’s prosaic “Brooklyn New Wave” aesthetic with an emotional lushness that justifies sitting through it. Sam’s World also demonstrates a keen ear for textural sound (particularly in one scene where she lies thinking in the bath and her nails scratch her stomach), an element of filmmaking often overlooked but maybe benefited from by Lady’s lack of formal training or experience.

In Deleuzian terms, Lady works best in the time-image, and so it makes sense that those scenes end up working hardest becoming its brawn and heart. The rest of them more concerned with sam’s social sphere start to rub against the film’s emotional grain and already feel repetitive by the end of this hour-long featurette about her. After seeing it, nobody should be surprised to learn that Lady comes from poetry before film; hopefully such brevity will mark their future work. They have an eye for beauty behinds camera there too.

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