After rounding out a fruitful festival run that spanned Venice to last month’s First Look, Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross’s seventh feature Gasoline Rainbow opens on May 10, courtesy MUBI. Ahead of the road-trip movie’s theatrical debut, there is a trailer.
As Savina Petkova said in her Venice review, “Bill and Turner Ross approach the narrative with a deep understanding of vagrancy as soul-searching and the camaraderie it entails. For this purpose the journey is the destination, and while this may sound like a cliché, the vulnerability shared by all pours through the free-flowing visual aesthetics. The Ross Brothers directed, shot, and edited the film into a piece of mesmerizing realism, an end product that is much more than its two composites. A third, quasi-magical being, Gasoline Rainbow is alive and beating, with the protagonists’ characters coming through as versions of themselves, their worries as well as their disregard for the future.”
Find preview and poster below:
With high school in the rearview, five teenagers from small-town Oregon decide to embark on one last adventure. Piling into a van with a busted tail light, their mission is to make it to a place they’ve never been—the Pacific coast, five hundred miles away. Their plan, in full: “Fuck it.”
By van, boat, train, and foot, their improvised odyssey takes them through desert wilderness, industrial backwaters, and city streets. Along the way, they encounter outsiders from the fringes of the American West and discover that the contours of their lives will be set by trails they blaze themselves. They are forgotten kids from a forgotten town, but they have their freedom and they have each other, hurtling toward an unknowable future—and The Party at the End of the World.
