I saw A Wait in the air-conditioned upstairs of a south London pub. After two years in the city I’d burst onto the scene as a lackey for the Clapham International Film Festival and I still view this role as perhaps the most important thing ever. I watched the film while photographing the back of people’s heads and felt the need to confess to Macdonald over an anxiously anticipated phone call that, a week later, I was still thinking about bike locks. Specifically the bike lock which Beau, A Wait’s fourteen year old heroine, struggles with for twelve very patient seconds—a not insignificant amount of the film’s thirteen minute runtime. We sit, patiently, and watch as she struggles to align the lock, as she focuses and threads it through, as it jams, as she studies the combination, as she tweaks the discs and then finally we watch her face as she succeeds. I think this moment resonates so strongly because Beau spends so much of the film trying to be cinematic, trying to capture some aesthetic or idea of an aesthetic in which she is not what she is: quite a vulnerable, tentative, and uncertain girl coming of age. Very little comes easily to Beau. She sits defiantly on a table but struggles to light a candle, she forgets her wallet in front of a strapping cashier, she can’t lock her bike; I think when we mine for sincerity we overlook these moments, these quieter dramas, in favour of something more spectacular. Macdonald’s not only inclusion of these moments but her foregrounding of them is emblematic of her narrative approach: she is remarkably sensitive to and patient with her central character and from this patience comes a real sense of compassion.

There’s a great sequence at the start of the film which sees Beau, freshly informed of her grandmother’s delay, and thus, her freedom from perception, throw herself into this world of empty aesthetic and imitation; she pairs hair clips with feather earrings, uses lipstick as blush, and we hear a crackle as smokes an unlit cigarette. Arthur Jeffes’ synths are introduced for the sequence and act as this grandiose insertion of mood that builds to Beau, arms wide and Christ-like, falling dramatically into a lake; giving herself over to the water with a real majesty. You understand what she’s doing. We all have these ideas of revelation and what it should look like; we’ve all tried to conjure drama, to invoke cinema, to seek experience and seek life but Macdonald does ground her protagonist eventually, after letting her try. With the splash the synths abandon Beau and we cut to a close-up of her lying on a towel, hair stuck to her chin. Sometimes the revelation is that if you throw yourself in a lake you’ll get wet. That cut doesn’t feel judgemental though; we sit in the moment a while longer, we see the sky and we see Beau lay under it—it's not an unimportant lesson. Throughout the piece she continues her search for whatever she believes she should be searching for and in its conclusion something compels her to return to the lake. She rows out under a grainy sky to the song of cicadas and by morning finds enough of something to smirk slightly upon the sound of her grandmother’s return. I think what she finds is hers and not ours and Macdonald has the restraint to let that be.

So many words for a film of so few feels unfitting. To get a true sense of the film sit on the grassy shore of a lake at dawn and bask in the silence as a mist hangs and swirls over the water. Sit there for a long time and then try, if no one’s watching, to be a person. Then go and lock your bike—see if you get it first time.