Stephen Dorff and Danny Huston in Travel Light.
Photo: Xenon Picutres

The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over yet — who the hell knows if it ever will be — but its early months have come to feel like a distant, drunken, collective nightmare, when everything we thought we knew about human behavior seemed to get turned on its head. At first glance, the Angelenos in Bernard Rose’s dreamy and marvelous Travel Light, which returns us to the summer of 2020, act like space aliens. They speak through each other even as they judge one another. They alternate between anxiety and frivolity, as if nothing is all that important but somehow everything is significant. They’re all incredibly weird yet embarrassingly familiar.

Rose’s film (which is opening theatrically in New York after a run in Los Angeles and will hopefully be more widely available soon) takes place over the course of

I could probably list every job I had since college if I was pressed to do so, although I mostly remember them in episodic moments, and not especially well at that. There are by now a couple of impacted decades of memories to go through—whole years of variously grim lunches and emptied-out hungover commutes and different rote tasks carried out in windowless rooms on sunny days—broken up periodically by periods of unemployment in which I wrote exceedingly mannered short stories and watched horror movies in the afternoon. I could tell you about many of those lunches and commutes and tasks, but I couldn’t really say—could never, really, have said—how or why I wound up at one job or another. That wasn’t really how my life went, in work or most anywhere else, for most of that time. I floated along until I snagged on to something, and stayed stuck there