Like any other global event, there will come a time when COVID becomes a contextual landmark for art. It has a great deal of potential as a narrative shortcut for cinema in particular. Yet, it remains to be seen if audiences are ready to reminisce about a pandemic not yet fully behind them. “As of Yet” tests these waters with admirable boldness, using quarantine cabin fever, zoom happy hours, and socially distanced dating to tell an old story in a new way.
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Stitched together by video confessionals, FaceTime calls, and a handful of traditionally shot scenes, “As of Yet” tracks a few days in the life of a late-20-something New Yorker named Naomi (Taylor Garron), who is nearing the end of her third month in isolation due to COVID-19 restrictions. Naomi’s roommate, Sara (Eva Victor), escaped to Florida with her family at the beginning of the pandemic. While the pair still FaceTime regularly, cracks in the relationship have begun to widen. This is due in no small part to Naomi’s burgeoning romance with an online gentleman caller named Reed (Amir Khan), who threatens Sara’s monopoly on Naomi’s attention.
Details about Naomi’s life come in pieces through several subsequent FaceTime calls, including one with her parents, a cousin in England, and a pair of old friends in L.A. She’s collecting unemployment, is involved with the BLM protests, and has had issues with Sara before, but otherwise seems like a smart, sassy, charming, and easy-going woman who has become all wound up with COVID tension and fatigue. Yet this isn’t a movie about the pandemic, per se, but about a particular moment in a person’s life when they are forced to confront a precipice between different stages of adulthood.
Naomi is at a crossroads within a country that is itself at an inflection point. Between COVID, the protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd, and the presidential election, America in the summer of 2020 was like an unmanned firehouse blasting water at full force: with no one quite sure where it would land once the pressure died down. So when Naomi struggles to reconcile her long-standing friendship with Sara against that woman’s mind-boggling both-sides-isms and lockdown hypocrisies, she’s really reevaluating where she is as a woman with the clock is running out on her 20s (and in the middle of a life’s-too-short global moment).
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Garron, who co-directed the film with Chanel James, carries all of this emotional weight well through the film’s brisk 81-minute runtime. Set during the end of what would eventually be considered COVID’s first wave, Garron’s nervous, caged energy from 80+ days in relative isolation pulsates through the screen. It is a reminder of a time when Zoom hangouts represented the pinnacle of personal connection. It’s genuine to a startling degree, and while the iPhone screen structure of “As of Yet” reinforces this, it also handicaps it inescapably.
When something is in the news all the time, there isn’t much appetite for it on the big screen (ask all the producers that made Vietnam and Iraq movies while those wars still raged). There comes a time when audiences are ready to look back and commiserate on a shared tragedy, yet for a country that is still dealing with COVID, albeit at far lower numbers than a year ago, this one might feel like too much too soon. Moreover, most people in June 2021 are sick to death of remote wine nights and FaceTime conversation catch-ups, making for a few tedious stretches in a movie defined by them.
It’s like spending the afternoon waiting at the DMV, then going home to watch a show about the lady giving the driving tests. Of course, the mileage on this discomfort will vary from person to person, and it doesn’t detract from the delicious COVID-specific drama that frames a large portion of the narrative, what with Sara throwing shade at Naomi for the latter’s date when Sara’s Instagram stories have shown her at bars…in Florida. Their interplay, along with that between Naomi and her L.A. friends (Ayo Edebiri and Quintana Brunson), buoys the larger effort and gives it all an authentic, lived-in texture that broadens the scope beyond COVID.
Yet, for a film that is so rooted in a specific time, it oddly skimps on place, leaving out any real discussion about Naomi’s neighborhood (or any establishing shots of her apartment layout). At times Naomi appears confined in a studio walk-up, while other wider, non-FaceTime shots set her against large, empty walls where it almost seems like she’s in a loft. It’s a small quibble, and one likely owing to the guerilla nature of the film’s shoot, which should be given credit for nimbly navigating the coronavirus in a lemonade-out-of-lemons scenario. For those willing to take a temporary visit back to the summer of 2020, the chaotic firehose energy of the moment might still be a little too powerful. Yet, the exploration of a young adulthood inflection point should remain evergreen. [B]
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