At one point off-screen in “Eternity One,” director Marnie Ellen Hertzler assures a then-12-year-old Mary Ella that what she’s experiencing now is a mere blip in the timeline of her experience as the young woman is going through typical emotional tumult of her age, frustrated that “no one takes me seriously” as her mother begins to date again after the loss of her father. She lives on Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay where the actual geography has made it difficult to confide in anyone, seemingly having few others to talk to besides her mom in the fishing community and she’ll spend much of her time with a sketchpad working out any feelings she has when she has ambitions to be an animator rather than discussing them. Still, knowing that it’s a tender moment, Hertzler assures, “If you look at life like a line, this part is this big,” presumably pinching her forefinger and her thumb.
The moment is made to feel even smaller when Hertzler pulls back to the much larger scheme of things in her provocative second feature, which might’ve been dismissed as simply one girl’s coming-of-age story with the raft of them being made from how many cameras there are out always filming, but can’t be overlooked now in its novelty, featuring a talking asteroid and a visit to the TransVision Future Summit in Madrid where futurists discuss matters that Mary Ella couldn’t even fathom but will no doubt shape the world she’ll eventually adopt. Those that might’ve been previously enchanted by Hertzler’s debut feature “Crestone,” in which a group of SoundCloud rappers convened in a barren Colorado enclave to get high and make new music with the environment shown to have a direct impact on their output as existential fears set in, will be similarly charmed with the director’s ability to put present-day puttering around in a greater context where it seems like keeping in touch with our humanity through mundane activity is the first line of defense against losing all hope.
“Eternity One” posits that the asteroid that hit earth 35 million years ago wasn’t only an agent of destruction when it wiped out the dinosaurs, but rather one of creation when it could also take credit for forming the Chesapeake Bay and throughout the film, Hertzler mischievously cuts back on occasion to another now circling the earth, expressing its inner thoughts via subtitles for its groans about whether it will be making a return any time soon for another realignment. As anyone approaching puberty at any time in human history might feel, Mary Ella lives in constant fear of the end of the world, though in her experience that might only involve some slight embarrassment rather than the very real possibility that her generation is facing a true turning point as Hertzler will go out on the water with the local fishermen who are growing more concerned about the effects of a changing climate on their catch.
The various elements of “Eternity One” don’t coexist quite as comfortably to elicit a certain feeling of dread as they did in “Crestone” where having music as an expression of unconscious anxieties could be more easily layered in and Hertzler depends on more abstract connections to be made between the different spheres of Mary Ella’s experience, the TransVision summit where speakers discuss pursuing immortality by “killing death” and the development of robots such as Grace, which could unburden humans unless they become infected with the idea of overtaking them, and the extinction-level possibility of an asteroid hitting earth. However, frustrating as it may be to some that the film ping-pongs between these seemingly disparate strands without especially smooth transitions, the parallels come to form an unexpectedly hopeful picture when all the rites of passage that feel too large to take on to Mary Ella will be managed with time, just as all the major issues facing civilization as a whole can be made more unlikely to solve when they are perhaps not blown out of proportion but presented as too overwhelming to quantify.
With the occasional peek at Mary Ella’s sketchbook, the drawings can be more sophisticated over the five years Hertzler spends with her, articulating a kind of growth and preparedness that wouldn’t have happened if she had been more self-conscious of it. Although the director doesn’t diminish the problems the teen can identify and build up in her head – or the overall odds she’s up against as the film touches on the catastrophic conditions that are all around her – “Eternity One” shrewdly draws on the knowledge of the audience that Mary Ella will make it through and come to see she always had the strength within herself to survive, offering some inspiration to all in tough times that such things aren’t as impossible as they seem.
“Eternity One” will screen again at New/Next Fest on October 4th at 2:55 pm at Charles 1.