“Places where I can be myself, those are my favorite places,” June (Lucya Yusimov) confides in the tape recorder carries with her in “Mackenzie,” her only travel companion as she plans to head out west. The recordings will be more valuable later when she wants to revisit who she was before adulthood, listing her favorite colors and other things she likes and doesn’t, but noting the amorphous sense of where she’s most comfortable may never change as she ages, unsure of where exactly that is.
In Mylissa Fitzsimmons’ modest yet affecting day in the life of an 11-year-old, morning turns to night as the young girl at its center goes on a quest to meet her crush “The Facts of Life” star Mackenzie Astin in Los Angeles, a trek that looks particularly futile when just getting to the bus station in Salt Lake City from her home in rural Utah requires passage through the mountains. Of course, June is too young to know better and it seems like as good an activity as any to push back on an impending move to Idaho that she’ll do anything to avoid, pretending as if she doesn’t hear her mother’s calls to pack by reading or fiddling around with the tchotchkes in her house. She can’t be too excited for new surroundings when her mom can’t be bothered to get out of bed at all, which makes it possible to pocket some money from the dresser drawer and take off on an adventure, assuming she can properly read the map that she’s been studying sporadically for a bit.
It may be a budgetary concession that there are few major obstacles in June’s way and few people she encounters (the crew itself on set was just two people), but the lonely journey proves compelling enough when Fitzsimmons crisply captures the moment the young girl is entering adulthood when she traverses a trail she knows well enough, shown dipping into some buried treasure she placed between some rocks on a previous visit, and emboldened enough by how far she has come without incident to go a bit further where things could get a bit more dangerous. Set in the 1980s where latchkey kids were more common and no cell one could be used to call home, the film also makes great use of the mountain town of Moab where the natural wonder can be easy to get lost in, both capturing the imagination and more practically confusing June when one set of rocks can look like another, with cinematographer Jaffe Zinn’s elegant widescreen compositions pleasingly overwhelming as they allude to just how much June may be in over her head.
Although the climax that sends June in the right direction may feel a little too pat given all the uncertainty that Fitzsimmons successfully stirs before, the film gently inserts points of maturation as the ring pops and Pop Rocks she relies on for sustenance throughout the climb start to disappear and she gradually lets down her hair from the pigtails she starts out with to make it feel as if you’re really watching someone grow up before your eyes. Yusimov has the right mix of tenacity, curiosity and determination as the restless young woman to engage and believe would see setbacks as more reason to forge ahead without caution. It’s the small things that are made to feel big in “Mackenzie,” which turns out to be true of the experience as a whole.
“Mackenzie” does not yet have U.S. distribution. It will next screen at the Santa Cruz Film Fest on October 16th at the Santa Cruz Cinema at 5 pm, the Twin Cities Film Festival on October 18th at 2 pm at the Marcus West End Cinema and available to stream via the festival platform, and the St. Louis Film Festival between November 5th-15th.