Review: Gasoline Rainbow (2023)
The Ross Brothers produce a hymn to teenage joy and interdependence
Gasoline Rainbow (2023)
Written and directed by Bill and Turner Ross
Co-written by Davey Ramsey
The long tradition of the road movie has many branches. The main branch being the alienated white heterosexual man between 25-50 years old, having some sort of minor crisis and seeking an answer to whatever bothers him, the other branches change one or more elements: women, as in the case of “Thelma and Louise;” queers as in the case of “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” a young man carrying the body of his accidentally electrocuted sister in a double bass case on the roof of his car through France as in “Invitation au voyage.”1
In “Gasoline Rainbow,” the flavors are teenaged, sexually ambivalent, rural. Five high school grads from a town in far-eastern rural Oregon — a one-blinking-yellow-light town isolated on the high desert — take a celebratory road trip to the Pacific Ocean, which none of them have ever seen. They’ve got a van and not much of a plan, and not even enough money, it seems, for a one-way trip. But enabled by the consequence-free daring of youth, the strength of their life-long friendship, and the heady sense of freedom that the summer after graduation brings, they set off.
These aren’t jocks or nerds coming from a traditional high school social framework; they’re basically skater kids, who maybe have never even seen a skatepark. And it’s impossible to peg them as queer or straight; they don’t seem to fit on anyone else’s spectrum. They’re just five friends (their sexuality so nascent and unfocussed that it’s hard to remember whether there are three boys or three girls in the group) who love each other.
As they head for the coast, they run into people their age, or a little older, who are like them. They go to parties they hear about or stumble upon. Some of these strangers rob them blind while they sleep, stealing even the tires of their van, which they abandon. But this setback, which would doom a trip by anyone more invested in a typical American life, hardly gives them pause; they just set off on foot toward their goal.
All this is filmed with handheld cameras, giving it a documentary or found-footage feel. But for viewers who aren’t familiar with the filmmaking Ross brothers (and I wasn’t before this film), they use improvisational wild-action cameras with a no-script, less-see-how-this-develops approach to produce what is most definitely a fictional film. They go through the process of casting all the actors, though most or all of the actors in their films are amateurs. All the locations are set up in advance of the cast entering the scene, with the supporting actors told what beats the filmmakers want the scene to contain.
If this sounds uncomfortably like a reality TV show, the aim is completely different. While shows like “Survivor” try to foster conflict between the characters, who subsequently behave like starving wolverines, in “Gasoline Rainbow” the purpose is to bring out the camaraderie and interdependency between the main characters. The same-age people they encounter welcome them into the parties, and the adults are warm and protective, not creepy.
The result is that the viewer also becomes protective of the five wandering teens, and invested in their goal to reach “the party at the end of the world.” This is a movie of uncommon sweetness that reminds the viewer of the beauty of being a teenager: go on a trip without much of a plan, and anything is possible.
Not sure if anyone remembers the 1982 movie “Invitation au Voyage,” directed by Peter Del Monte, but it was widely shown in cinemas that showed foreign movies in 1983, and reviewed in the New York Times