SWEET RELIEF IN CRYSTAL PALACE

Sweet Relief in Crystal Palace is a feature-length film about living in the anthropocene. A lonely woman is cast into unknown terrain as she combats a mysterious internal condition that breaks down the barriers of linear time in her immediate environment. The only way she can stay in the present is to keep moving.

This project was supported by the Middlebury Script Lab

SYNOPSIS:

Willa, 34, works at a county waste management site in rural Oregon. In her free time she hunts for amethysts along isolated streams in nearby woods. The setting is contemporary 21st century United States of America; with all the struggles of late capitalism and impending environmental doom dancing in the background. Willa is the canary in the coal mine so to speak.

On her way home from work she drives by an abandoned shopping plaza- the outlines of the buildings and discoloration from removed signage indicate familiar logos not quite forgotten. Willa spots a cloud of sparkling mauve mist hovering at the edge of the shopping plaza, she keeps driving, almost as if it were a mirage. No one else is around. Willa lives alone. She goes to sleep early and has a strange dream. The world around her is changing, dissolving, moving back and forth in time. Walls appear, disappear, parts of her vanish and then come back altered. Color and light dance around in a flash. She is questioned by an older man in a lab coat. A man is there, they know each other well.

Willa wakes up groggy and drives to work the next day, she passes the shopping center, news trucks are parked outside the mist. Cut to a sterile hotel room, Manville, 28, is watching the news. There is a report on the mist, there are several other pockets of it around the country. The mist appears to be a pocket without a sense of time, strange fragments from the past sometimes emerge from it: an old musket shell, primordial roars. Manville is a meticulous young man, a laptop is beside him, so is his phone, and another electronic device with a radar map. He absently switches to the history channel where an educational documentary about William Perkins inventing the color mauve in 1856. The program plays in the background as he studies his device and makes some notes.

Return to Willa's morning commute: she continues driving down the road and begins to feel dizzy. A faint mauve glow fills the car, Willa loses control of the steering wheel for a moment and veers off the side of the road. The car stops. The glowing mauve mist emanates from the driver's door, Willa stumbles out, she backs away, unable to take her eyes off it. She slowly regains her senses and backs away. The farther she gets, the faster she moves until she is running at full speed down the road. Some time later. Willa is on the run. She carries the mist with her, not by choice.

She has learned how to manage her condition, it's simple: she must keep moving. When she stays put for too long, she creates a pocket of the timeless state, as if the mauve mist is seeping out of her pores and forming a cloud in the space around her. When she is outside, and in motion, it dissipates, but inside confined walls the mist contaminates everything, absorbing into whatever solid object is nearby and dragging everything into a state of timelessness that we cannot comprehend.

Willa moves from town to town, hotel to hotel, swapping cars, changing clothes. Her life has become a nightmare of logistics and constant motion. All the while Manville tracks the phenomenon. His device tells him where it gathers and he begins to follows Willa, unsure whether to make himself known or wait until he has a better grasp on the science that is going on. He becomes fixated on her as the key. Does he want to contain her or save her? He doesn't know. He believes in his devices, he believes everything can be solved, but he is at a loss for how.

As Willa slips deeper into the margins of society and begins to find herself in dangerous situations, plagued by fatigue, Manville makes his presence known. He tells her he can save her, but she sees he is as lost as she is. Together they seek out a potential cure, but succumb to the timelessness of the mist before they are able to test it.