FESTIVAL ROUNDUP



 

Sundance Film Festival

The hills and mountains on the highway from Salt Lake City to Park City are studded with groves of new buildings, making it look more and more like the Hollywood Hills, with houses creeping slowly to a higher, and pricier, precipice. This is an Alpine-like heaven, only at Manhattan rush hour.

While that architectural paradox has in recent years set the tone for the Sundance Film Festival, this year its sway felt far less concrete. With no breathtaking breakthroughs, commercially or aesthetically, the festival seemed more diffuse. And the programming of in-demand pictures at the enormous Eccles Theater, along with improved shuttle logistics, made it easy enough to get around and avoid the crushing crowds — if not all the cell phone shouters.

Mark Illsley's Happy, Texas went home from Sundance very happy.

Opening night in Salt Lake City brought the gentle Southern guff of Robert Altman’s unexpectedly sweet Cookie’s Fortune, tracking the machinations of idealized eccentrics in a Mississippi small town. In Park City, the two other opening night films were Nancy Savoca’s career-and-baby melodrama The 24-Hour Woman, which found few supporters, and the vomitous travelogue of a young-ish filmmaker, James Merendino’s SLC Punk!.

The Premieres offered a swell of English films demonstrating a diversity of directions and talents. At one end was Mike Figgis’ lush, luscious, almost indescribably silly art-film fugue, The Loss of Sexual Innocence. Figgis wanted to make this film since 1985, and its obtuse, shimmering style shows as much. Much less personal but perhaps more entertaining, Guy Ritchie’s cartoony Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels romped through its first groundswell of journalistic adjectives on these shores. Gillies MacKinnon’s delicious Hideous Kinky returns Kate Winslet to a more personal, less titantic role as a young mother with two daughters making her way in 1972 Marrakesh. Another fine actor, Tim Roth, directs his first film, The War Zone, an elegant, head-on story about familial abuse powerfully acted and directed with keen restraint. Errol Morris went one better than a premiere by screening his unfinished Dr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., which, although incomplete, felt stronger and more substantial than other finished entries. Returning for a third Sundance premiere was Gregg Araki with Splendor, a gentler kind of threesome comedy from the aging enfant terrible of the doom generation. Less admired American fare, however, showed up in the mostly dismissed Jawbreaker, a loud Heathers retread, the equally disregarded made-for-Showtime The Passion of Ayn Rand and the strong-yet-familiar urban thriller Thick as Thieves.

The Documentary Competition brought more excitement — or at least column inches — with journalists noting the presence of three entries with "American" in the title or a healthy smidgen of sex, notably in the not-so-hot hot-ticket, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, a too-respectful portrait of a woman who tried to break the one-day shot-on-video gang-bang record and her reasons why that was empowering. American Pimp showed the Hughes Brothers in irreverent-to-society, too-reverent-to-pimps form. American Hollow presents a portrait of an extended Appalachian family. And Chris Smith’s very funny American Movie makes us laugh at the notion of filmmakers’ ambition at the expense of art, reason and common sense. The beautifully edited On the Ropes charts the lives of three young boxers at the neighborhood gym where Mike Tyson once trained. And Barbara Sonneborn’s Regret to Inform takes a shattering look at the Vietnam War through the eyes of both American and Vietnamese widows.

The Dramatic Competition included Tony Bui’s beautifully made Three Seasons, a visually poetic yet attenuated trio of anecdotes in contemporary Ho Chi Minh City. High-concept comedy Happy, Texas took the Miramax trophy with the showiest sale of the festival, variously reported as $10 million or as $2.5 million with a sizable first-dollar gross for the makers. Such deals maintain the public impression that Sundance is as much a market as a festival.

More striking was the piercing female perspective of Guinevere, Audrey Wells’ neatly acted take on the way we look at the other person when we’re in love, starring this year’s "It" Girl, Canadian-born Sarah Polley. Best-known from The Sweet Hereafter, Polley is fresh and even divine in both the lead role of Guinevere and a small part in the bubble-gum-rush drug thriller Go. She’s about this close to being daubed with the clichés for fresh-faced, gifted young actresses — "radiant" and "luminescent."

While true experimental filmmaking is prized on paper, many festival-goers are annoyed when it winds up as a feature, such as with Scott King’s Treasure Island, a recreation of a Z-grade 1940s movie that allows the psychosexual obsessions of its characters to burst through. Less experimental but no less effective were many of this year’s acting performances. Hampton Fancher’s The Minus Man has the gift of Owen Wilson’s gentle blank of a serial killer at the center of its purposely flat narrative, and Frank Whaley’s Joe the King, a low-key reprise of The 400 Blows, has standout roles from Noah Fleiss as the 14-year-old protagonist, and Val Kilmer and Karen Young as his angry parents. The bubble-gum gay-romance Trick amused, and English actress Janet McTeer’s performance as a working-class Southern woman who hits the road was the great virtue of Gavin O’Connor’s Tumbleweeds.

American Spectrum presented Tony Gerber’s Side Streets, a mosaic of multiethnic life in New York City, as well as the popular Genghis Blues, the story of blind bluesman Paul Pena’s discovery of the ancient throat-singing technique of Tuva, a small region between Siberia and Mongolia.

With World Cinema offering some of the best films, I was disheartened to see such small audiences in the cavernous Eccles for films like Emir Kusturica’s magical delirium of gypsy madness Black Cat, White Cat. or Tom Tykwer’s witty, propulsive Run Lola Run, especially when movies that seemed to have little reason to be at Sundance, such as Fox’s big-budget black-humored Ravenous drew packed houses. But then just as I often feel trapped in the future at Sundance – knowing that five years from now, unable to sleep, I will be clicking through the same unmemorable, no-budget pics on the Sundance Channel – I find something wonderful and unique. From abroad, there was Japanese director Kore-Eda Hirokazu’s haunting and serene Afterlife, Gaspar Noe’s corrosive French drama I Stand Alone and John Curran’s engaging, if ultra-quirky, Australian romance Praise. Young American filmmakers also showed up with some idiosyncratic films. The Midnight selection held one of the other big sales, the clever, jagged horror film The Blair Witch Project. Known for its films rather than sales, the Frontier section presented a glimpse of visually strong American work. Julian Goldberger’s distinctively crafted Trans provides an episodic portrait of the nocturnal wanderings of a young juvenile delinquent in Ft. Myers, Florida. Another look at young men was James Herbert’s Speedy Boys, a study of the naked and the nude with his protagonists lounging about as if in a narcotized version of pretty-boy gay porn. In Dresden, Ben Speth creates a lovingly photographed love letter to contemporary Manhattan and an utterly modern woman.

When the envelopes were opened, Tony Bui’s Three Seasons took home three awards: the dramatic competition Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award, as well as the cinematography award for Lisa Rinzler’s luscious images. Chris Smith’s American Movie won the documentary competition Grand Jury Prize. The Documentary Audience Award went to Roko Belic’s Genghis Blues. The first Audience Award for World Cinema was given jointly to Run Lola Run and Radu Mihaileanu’s Train of Life. The Jury Prize in Latin American Cinema went to Alejandro Springall’s Santitos and a Special Jury Award in Latin American Cinema was added for Fernando Perez’s Life is to Whistle. Regret to Inform won two Documentary awards: Barbara Sonneborn won for her direction, and Emiko Omori won the cinematography award (although he was also noted for shooting another documentary, Rabbit in the Moon). The Sundance dramatic competition directing prize was awarded to Eric Mendelsohn for Judy Berlin, while Frank Whaley (Joe the King) and Audrey Wells (Guinevere) split the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Stanley Nelson’s The Black Press: Soldiers Without Words, took the Sundance documentary competition’s Freedom of Expression Award; the Filmmakers Trophy went to Jon Else’s Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle. Dramatic filmmakers recognized Tumbleweeds as their favorite, while the documentary jury gave a Special Jury Award to Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen’s On the Ropes, and the dramatic jury confected a Special Jury Award for Comedic Performance to Steve Zahn for Happy, Texas, as well as a "Special Jury Award for Distinctive Vision" in filmmaking to Treasure Island. Mark Osborne’s More won Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking, and Michael Burke’s Fishbelly White received a Special Jury Award for Short Filmmaking.



 
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© 2005 Filmmaker Magazine