Sundance Film Festival

Sundance 1998 will not be remembered as a particularly memorable year in the Festival’s history. No distributor shoving matches, no scandalous star moments and few ground- breaking films came to pass. And yet, with a number of serious, intelligent films, a key new venue and much better production, organization and projection, the event quietly solidified its position in the world’s festival hierarchy.

Jonathan Stack and Liz Garbus' The Farm

This subtle triumph was reflected in the only important cinematic trend revealed at the Festival. Found in the sidebar American Spectrum section were a collection of films by and about young men, which share a distinct and fresh cinematic vision. Tony Barbieri’s One, Jesse Peretz’s First Love, Last Rites and Eric Drilling’s River Red share an almost reactionary disavowal of the cynical, jokey, shoot-’em-up approach that has been meant to encapsulate the life stories of young males throughout this decade. Instead, they look to a cinema of long takes, exquisite cinematic framing and understated performance to reveal the minutiae which in fact determine life’s course for their subjects. Yet these three are no Bressonians; they are far too contemporary for that. In their subtle intimacy, the films are closest to Atom Egoyan or Olivier Assayas at their quietest.

In One, a man released from prison for mercy-killing his grandfather moves in with his best friend, just fired from a baseball team for attacking the manager. Only discussed elliptically, their every action and gesture suggests the pain of making decisions under subtle duress. First Love, Last Rites chronicles a young man’s coming-of-age as a visitor in a small Louisiana town. Through an enigmatic affair with a local girl and his relationship with her father, he rethinks the nature of the freedom which adulthood brings. River Red details the sacrifices made by one brother for another when confronted by an abusive father and the eventual inability of the boys to live together in the wake of their actions to help one another.

None of these films is perfect. One teeters on the edge of overcooked melodrama when it shifts focus from the friends to an overbearing father; First Love, Last Rites inelegantly employs an annoying child to remind the young lovers of their recent past; River Red’s third act unravels in a baffling set of armed robberies. And yet there is something genuinely impressive about the control and seriousness of purpose which all of these first films display.

It is also difficult to express how welcome a cinematic trend this is. If such films can help create a market for a more reflective cinema – and there are a handful of stars in them that might help this cause – then the strong foreign-language films which are having such a hard time finding U.S. screens may have a chance.

It also must be said that none of these films exactly caught fire during the Festival, as critical and industry attention were focussed on the Competitions and their gala Premieres.

While for many years the acknowledged number-one spot to premiere new American films for media and distributors, Sundance has not really reaped the full credit it deserves for launching several important non-American English-language films in its Premieres section. Perhaps that was because one seemed to appear every year – Shine and The Full Monty being noteworthy examples – that burned so hot that the Festival’s contribution to the film’s success was discounted. (How could it not be a hit?) No single meteors like these flew the skies this year, yet the Festival felt like a much friendlier place for films outside the American independent "mainstream."

The great white hope for the Monty mantle was a British production featuring Parker Posey, Jeremy Northam and Craig Chester about a writer’s changing relationships while she writes a French sex farce. Billed as the work of a modern Mankiewicz, The Misadventures of Margaret was a flat disappointment; its leaden device of switching away from the main action to re-enactments from Posey’s novel drowned the work of its excellent cast.

The Premiere that ultimately delivered was Walter Salles’ Central Station, the tale of a cynical professional letter writer who accompanies a young orphan on his quest for his father. Astonishingly beautiful to behold, many felt its epic cinematography made its emotional core difficult to access. For those of us more suspicious of Kolya-like emotional sledgehammers, Salles’ restraint was welcome. Subject to a mini-bidding war after the screening for remaining territories – Sony Classics had already bought North America prior to the Festival – it seemed destined to be another classic Sundance success story. However, Central Station is a Brazilian film, and its characters speak Portuguese. No foreign-language film has enjoyed success of this kind at Sundance, making its accolades – which continued through its triumph at the Berlin Film Festival – all the sweeter for Festival organizers.

Other Premieres couldn’t hold a candle to Salles' film. These included the deeply uninteresting gangster thriller Montana, which flogged the (already flogged) Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead genre to death; Miramax’s uninspiring A Price Above Rubies; and the jet-black comedy The Opposite Of Sex, with a wonderful Christina Ricci and Lisa Kudrow. Director Don Roos’ script, about a bad-seed girl seducing her gay half-brother’s boyfriend, refreshingly updates the drop-dead banter and one-liners of Golden Age comedies in a way that the makers of Margaret could perhaps study next time. While many critics objected to its running cynical voiceover (by Ricci), this critic found its self-awareness quite refreshing until it (and the rest of the film) got sappy cutesy in its last act.

Many excellent films – such as David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner and Paul Schrader’s Affliction – already written about in this magazine made Premieres of a kind here as well.

For attending delegates, the Premieres were also associated with the very best new addition to the Festival: the Eccles Theatre. A large "gala-style" theatre, it served as a perfect launching spot for these glitzy, star-driven films and allowed for at least one large screening for the bulk of the Dramatic Competition, traditionally very difficult to access.

Darren Aronofsky's Pi. Photo: Matthew Libatique

This year’s Dramatic Competition had nothing as artistically rich and intellectually complete as last year’s In The Company Of Men. A few films came close. The young director of Pi, Darren Aronofsky, displayed a quite astonishing ability – almost absent in recent years – to not just quote from his easily identifiable influences, but to synthesize, transform and generally rethink them. The result is a daring and rich first feature about a mathematical genius who may have stumbled upon the "magic number" sought both by a gang of Orthodox cabbalists and powerful stock market analysts. His drawing together of narrative and non-narrative throughlines about mathematics feels like early Greenaway; his confrontational black-and-white futuristic cinematography like David Lynch’s Eraserhead; and his elegant cutting and dramatic pacing like Kubrick. The jungle-based score is also one of the best in recent memory. Very impressive.

Two strong films – Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66 and Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art – exhibit directorial control so impressive that underlying problems in both films may well be glossed over. Buffalo 66, with another knockout Christina Ricci performance, concerns a man (Gallo) just released from jail. He wants to accomplish two things on the outside: prove to his parents that he was actually away becoming successful, and assassinate the football star whose missed field goal in 1966 sent him to prison in the first place. A young tap dancer (Ricci) assists in the first and thwarts the second. Gallo is a visual obsessive: every shot is electrifyingly composed and the actual quality of the film stock – he apparently created a new process to mimic the great football highlight films from the 1960s – is something completely new. But there is a violently aggressive tone to the film – from its faux-rape and gay-bashing opening scenes, through the encounter with his parents – that feels suspiciously like confrontation for confrontation’s sake.

High Art also displays a beautifully realized mise-en-scene. Its every element – performance, design, camera – feeds into the false comfort and softness of its drugged-out milieu. A credible and sexy lesbian love story played out against the New York art-and-heroin world, High Art is strong, funny and powerful at its core, tripping up only when it uses minor characters to further its plot. This is especially true for Bill Sage’s inelegantly conceived "friend" role; he only seems to appear when there is crucial information to be imparted, dulling the impact of each revelation.

The dark horse of the Competition for me was Under Heaven, a decidedly unfashionable rethinking of The Wings Of The Dove featuring a masterful, subtle performance by Joely Richardson. The transformative power of sex – only embarrassingly acknowledged in James and the Softley adaptation – is forthright here; credit is due to Richardson and Aden Young, the powerful and enormously attractive Australian actor who invests Buck with the wonder of a young man in love. Miss Monday also didn’t make much of an impact, but its explosive deconstruction of the psychological world of a "power bitch" marks an impressive debut. In general, the Festival seemed less interested in elegant character studies such as these and the male trio mentioned above than broader cinematic gestures.

Thus, a huge buzz greeted Mark Levin’s Slam and Tommy O’Haver’s Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss. Slam is a ghetto story with a spin: the drug dealer is a poet. He saves himself in jail and comes to terms with larger society through the power of his words, especially when recited on stage. Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss is a light gay romance in which a photographer falls for a straight musician and introduces the beautiful young man to a circle which ultimately steals him away.

Both of these movies play to the balcony. Audiences hoot and holler when Slam’s poets square off in friendly competition – the scenes are electrifying – and cheer and applaud when one of many way-too-didactic political speeches issue forth. O’Haver, with great wit and style, manages to make the fundamental gay issue of straight-boy obsession a universal lesson in thwarted love – Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss came closest to eliciting the warm, ribald laughs of The Full Monty – but ultimately loses emotional depth in the process. In his depressed moments, lead actor Sean P. Hayes seems more cartoon sad than fundamentally distraught, and the final emotional resolutions in the film are distractions from the jokes.

Oddly, the other buzz film of the festival was Next Stop, Wonderland, a quirky romance set in Boston without much wit or charm. Miramax spent a great deal of money on the movie, so perhaps I missed something.

The Documentary Competition received more attention than usual this year. Cognoscenti were especially chattering over Todd Phillips'’ and Andrew Gurland’s Frat House, an intriguing film which displays some of the perils of making an expose-style documentary. These filmmakers are unabashedly focused on the kind of film they want to make, which is welcome in the current "glue-a-Hi-8-to-my-forehead" documentary climate. But the ugly episode that characterizes their first attempt at pledging never pans out in the longer, second half of the film that takes place in a different house. Unfortunately that means we get a fully-realized, brilliant documentary that lasts 25 minutes and then a still-intriguing sequel.

Also hot was The Farm, a look at a particularly oppressive Louisiana prison. Agitprop to its core, the filmmakers have made an intellectually slick and beautifully edited prisoner- rights film. But they seem to resist being up front about their motives; never do they explicitly weave tell-tale political analysis into their method. While happily subtle, the approach seems a touch deceitful.

Out Of The Past marries the struggle for a gay and lesbian student club in a Utah high school with a historical collection of marginalized gay rights leaders. The two strands do not fully come together, but the film has an honest political energy which is enervating and spurs reflection.

Also of note was Vicky Funari’s harrowing biography of a Mexican maid, Paulina, and Iara Lee’s forthright, hip explication of the current electronic music scene, Modulations. I also loved Human Remains, Jay Rosenblatt’s short-form meditation on the private lives of this century’s cruelest dictators.

Grand Prize Winners were Slam and The Farm. The Filmmakers’ Trophies were awarded to Native-American drama Smoke Signals and Divine Trash, a documentary about John Waters’s muse. The Audience also chose Smoke Signals and voted for Out of the Past as their favorite Documentary. Directing awards went to Pi and Moment Of Impact, about a daughter’s relationship with her comatose father. Cinematography awards went to Jimmy Smallhorne’s 2by4 and Barbara Kopple’s stultifying Woody Allen film, Wild Man Blues. The Waldo Salt screenwriting award was won by High Art and Andrea Hart, the star of Miss Monday received Special Recognition from the Jury.

Sundance Film Festival Sundance Film Festival by Noah Cowan
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International Film Festival Rotterdam by Stephen Gallagher
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International Havana by Film Festival by Marco Masoni
CineQuest by Beth Kinsolving