Sherbet: Rage and Tenderness Near the Finishing Line

Danny Gibbons’s Sherbet is a 26-minute journey through connections made in pits of despair, and the irreversible changes they leave in their wake. The story of a cab driver and a young passenger as they ride to the airport late at night takes the backseat in light of the film’s low-budget innovation on virtual production.

Using actual LED televisions to mimic passing traffic, the film makes a peculiar blend of a realist walk (drive)-and-talk drama and a cinematic 90s mood. They do not always match but every now and then, make for a lovely mix. Often, these liminal spaces in dated colours (a gas station in that very specific video camera footage green) seem intent on transporting the entire car, and therefore the narrative, inside a temporary heterotropia while the driver and his passenger become entwined in each other’s personal narratives. In a few rare instances, when the camera looks in on the characters from the outside, the city lights make you think of the mood in Lost in Translation (2003).

Rene (Jay Simpson) is a gruff cab driver with little patience to spare. Isa (India Brown), his latest—very chatty—passenger, has even less patience for Rene’s gruffness. The usual push and pull results in the usual compromise: Rene begrudgingly opens up. Of course, learning Isa is a teenager with terminal cancer running away from home might have played a role in that. The film largely rolls with the life is short, grab it by the balls, or more politely, carpe diem principle. Isa, its tragic poster girl, will judge you if you don’t, as Rene learns the hard way. Unlike, the moody blue-green passing traffic, the mood inside the car is kept warm, ideal for earning a friend and some life lessons. And so Rene does. This standard fare aside, the genuinely warm moments are when the characters just sit back and listen, or when, in one particular instance, Rene helps his newfound friend/life coach with her medications. The quasi-paternal act of care more effectively establishes character than many lines of dialogue. Simpson and Brown suit their characters, Brown especially shining in her character’s mellow moments; Simpson’s comic delivery teams naturally with Rene’s sincerity.

At the end of their ride—it feels inaccurate to call it the destination to a journey that happened in a nowhere—the two part ways, Rene more fatherly than ever (in the laid back parent with an angsty child way) as each leaves the other with parting wisdom. In the back, the airport glows blue, almost but not quite like the iconic Twilight blue.

The title suits the film to a T. The tenderness of it is put through the thorned wash of Rene’s ill-humour and Isa’s impatience and enthusiasm for life, but it does eventually settle down. Their bond, temporary and indelibly associated with urgency, leaves each with something to do, a remedy to quietly passing through the shadows of the dying light.