MIMI DAVILA IN THE SCOUT.
Place finder for a TV show in NYC
This documentary-style film follows Sofia (Mimi Davila) as she goes around one day in her car photographing potential New York City locations for a TV pilot, working for its producers. How not-great this seemingly interesting and "cool" job is comes out when said producers gather at one of these locations and bicker and sound off tiresomely. All Sofia's work could be for nought, and they're bores. At the far outskirts of this story there is the glamor of media art - the television drama, which we see nothing of, however, and perhaps may not even be happening. The actuality of the story is a particularly repetitious form of vérité, for this is a kind of docufiction whose very lack of eventfulness is the key to its authenticity of texture. In some dispiriting variation on an idea of John Barth, the search for a story is the story.
Some things do "happen." Occupants who let Sofia in to photograph the place where they live may be chatty, philosophical, or odd. The occupant of one of the locations - and these are mostly people who have responded to feeler flyers - even turns out to be a woman Sofia knew very well four or five years before, when there were different boyfriends, different jobs.So there is plenty of reminiscing and catching up to do. But this catching up gets cut short after a while because Sofia, and the film, must return to her dutiful, laborious, fatiguing round of connections and entries and photo-shoots of interiors. And the not-yets and maybe-nevers signaled by voicemails Sofia listens to in her car, eleven of them (all acknowledged in the closing credits).
These are actual New York places; that's what Sofia is looking for. Details aren't specified, but the impression is that interiors will be used somewhat as-is, though one of the producer group asks an apartment owner "Is there anything here that can't be moved around?" or something like that. They might move everything out of a room except the light fixtures and the fire irons or a piece of heavy, yet fragile furniture that isn't save to move. Sofia is also actually driving a car around New York City and she reports to her friend that she has been getting boxes-full of parking tickets. One location occupant is an IT guy who shows her how he has jacked into the government site and can remove his tickets: he offers to do this for her too. It's his come-on. Toward the end when she consents to dine in a restaurant with this man, with a nice piece of irony typical of the film's style, Sofia returns to her car to find it has been booted, and she's stuck.
She does get home that night. She is back at work the next morning. She attends a meeting of the TV team and we see how readily locations she has documented can get rejected. She wisely keeps her mouth shut; it's all part of the job. And when she is sent for a location near Rockaway, at evening-time she takes off her shoes and walks down its famous beach to the water, where we leave her in quiet contemplation.
This peaceful final moment notwithstanding, The Scout goes to show us how very unglamorous and Fuller-Brush-salesman-y, yes, even in New York, the outer fringes of show-biz so-called "glamor" can be. It sounds cool, but ain't. And yet even being a Fuller Brush salesman might be interesting and cool for a day, a week, a month, or a year. Sofia has done this for a few years, though. So writers about this film have rightly shown that its overriding emphasis is on the protagonist's "exhaustion." Maybe this topic is one that hasn't been done before and therefore is original. Barth spoke of a "literature of exhaustion," which meant leaving no room for originality any more. Now that it has been done here, the location scouting theme too may be exhausted. If the job is as much drudgery as The Scout makes it appear, the topic is not a fruitful one. It has been dealt with thoroughly now. A more entertaining and interesting film might be made with the TV-show scout job as a pretext for a more exciting story, but that would be not a better version of this film but a wholly different film.
The Scout is a worthwhile effort in itself, even if it's in the order of slow cinema vérité. Hollywood Reporter's Lovia Gyarkye calls it a "mellow debut." The Moveable Feast's Stephen Saito calls it an "elegant and transfixing character study." The Playlist's Chase Hutchinson says its a "fascinating discovery." It's an unusual little film, full of unique specificity, time and again gently and surprisingly morphing if only momentarily from monotony into poetry, from the particular into the general. New York City is a world of places waiting to be filmed.
The Scout, 89 mins., premiered at Tribeca (NYC) Jun. 5, 2025, showing at a dozen domestic festivals including Mill Valley and Vancouver. US theatrical release by Greenwich Entertainment Sept. 25, 2026.