The Scout, a look at young movie and television location scout working in New York City and environs, brings to mind the old joke about the guy who shovels elephant poop at the circus. After complaining about how gross his job is, a friend asks why he doesn’t just quit. The reply – “What? And leave show biz?”
Sofia (Mimi Davila) is a location scout, trying to find the perfect apartment for the shooting of an upcoming television pilot. We follow her for a day as she crisscrosses New York’s five boroughs trying to come up with a number of suitable possibilities for the production to consider. Along the way she deals with voluminous voice mails received in response to fliers she has distributed in various neighborhoods, demanding property owners and a production staff that seemingly has next to no regard for the work she is doing. Her work comes at the expense of her social life; a planned dinner with an old friend gets cancelled due to job-related complications. Her only real interactions with others is the idle chitchat she makes while photographing prospective homes with the homeowners. These stay at home dads, empty-nester mothers and work from home types all have their own loneliness. The moments where Sofia interacts with them sees them opening up about themselves in part because the opportunities to do so are few and far between for them.
Based on her own experiences as a location scout, writer/director Paula González-Nasser has crafted an empathetic character portrait of someone who grinds away at their job every day, putting up with the downsides even when there doesn’t seem to be much reward in terms of upsides. The Scout is not heavy in plot, nor does it need to be. Most of it takes place across a single day and the motivation to find a suitable apartment for the production is never heightened for dramatic stakes. Even a meeting where key production personal arrive to inspect one potential home that Sofia has found seems to carry a certain lack of urgency, despite what one producer states about needing a final decision soon. (The project’s director seems particularly checked out during this and one other scene in which he appears.)
Instead, González-Nasser seems more interested in the sway back and forth between the loneliness of the job and the occasional moments of genuine human interaction that keep Sofia going. González-Nasser has a solid hand on the film’s tone and pace, moving us through Sofia’s meetings with various homeowners in a way that keeps us engaged matter-of-factually without ever letting the story or the encounters get too emotionally manipulative. The conversations may often appear trivial on the surface, but they all contain an underlying subtext of the need to connect with others.
Fittingly enough for a movie like this, The Scout does feature a number of great locations, a variety of beautiful homes and neighborhoods. Perhaps these are just the beautiful packages we hide ourselves in our loneliness, waiting for a Sofia to open them up, even if just for a moment.
