Carson Lund’s first feature film has its own scope: it will not leave the playground of its characters, amateur players from two baseball teams, simple and good-natured guys from a small town in New -England.
As they play, Carson Lund is having fun. It’s the last match, the playing field will be razed, but before making a clean sweep of the past, the filmmaker and his screenwriters, Frederick Wiseman and Bill Lee, survey it up and down, to circulate the ‘to each other of the characters. Open-air confinement, for a group portrait in a closed space.
The match, a pretext
Eephus is not a sports film: if this group of friends are indeed playing, it is only an excuse. The match isn’t really a match. The competition has no stakes: only the human encounter counts. The game stretches from morning to evening, like an eternal present where each exchange seems to push back the inevitable: the end, the departure, the erasure. Beers flow, jokes flow, and camaraderie blossoms, fragile and luminous.
Lund’s tactic is collective. No individual exists outside the group. At times, we would like a close-up, a more intimate detour, but the miracle is that we get attached all the same, and that we do not feel outside of the game and its formal limits. And then Eephus has its own little climate which is that of the clear autumn day, of this last match. When night finally falls, when the last throw is made, we stay there, sharing the sweet melancholy of these characters whom we have only seen from afar, without knowing anything about their lives. This land will disappear, but the friendships it sheltered will continue to run, like a ball thrown high into the sky.
Eephus, the last lap by Carson Lund, in theaters this Wednesday, January 1st. Duration: 1 hour 38 minutes.
