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ESSAY BY GARY MAIRS

David Fenster's Trona is most powerful at its most puzzling. A moustached man stares idly at a desert wasteland from his airline window, then finds himself standing on a sand dune. There's no crash, no science fiction, no miracle, nothing: the man is in the air, and then he isn't. Next scene.

This elision defies narrative logic, but it's the essence of the film's larger point. The man has simply willed himself out of the airplane, out of his old life and into a new one. It's an odd sort of wish fulfillment - in a film haunted by sex spied upon in hiding, the man propels himself into a peculiarly arid, frustratingly sexless dreamscape. Left to wander the desert in his tighty whities after his clothes are stolen, taunted by locals and hustled by a preschooler, he's slipped from a world of nagging and responsibility to one of open hostility. The most prosaic of fantasists, he leaps from one world to another and gains only the chance to be indolent.

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