Memory and time
More from Sundance, the known and newly discovered, the best and brightest
The beautiful and gifted: Lily Collias is a major discovery in India Donaldson’s Good One. (Photos at top and bottom courtesy of the Sundance Film festival.)
PARK CITY, Utah—
Sundance is a brand, a type, a platform. From the high seven-thousand foot altitude of the mountains to Salt Lake, the selling of “Sundance,” is explicit, pronounced, inescapable.
That colors everything, for better and worse. As much as I naturally want to fight that impulse, I just begrudgingly learned to accept it as a part of doing business. Sundance has always functioned as a dream maker and idol factory—behind and in front of the screens.
Who am I to shatter the illusion?
The festival started, in Salt Lake City, at the end of the nineteen-seventies as a regional alternative to a Dallas festival. The festival shifted to Park City in 1981. "If your film had sprockets, you could get it shown," the great independent director and novelist John Sayles once told me here in an interview.
Robert Redford's Sundance Institute formally took control of the festival's operations and programming. Redford gave the festival cache, injecting it with star power and legitimacy.
The festival's popularity yoked together media, technology and culture. It was striking, during those first couple of years I attended, to witness the explosive growth and popularity. Technically the festival was pretty Third World during my first half decade. The theaters were small and cramped, and the projection systems were not anywhere near the standards of a major festival.
(I’ll never forget the sight and sounds of the director Miguel Arteta pounding his fists on the window of the projection booth for his first feature, Star Maps (1997), because the first reel was being shown out of focus and in the wrong aspect ratio.)
“Memory believes before knowing remembers,” William Faulkner famously wrote on the opening line of chapter six of Light in August. As a milestone year at the festival—the 40th anniversary—the history was both central and contemporaneous.
I was curious to see how my own memory conformed to my personal history of the festival. Was I at that screening, or did I see that film? The sense of recognition was often uncanny and emphatic, a way of reimagining and revisiting my own life and work during the time I have been going to the festival. I was taken back by how fully the history of Sundance overlapped and mirrored so much of my own.
The festival assembled an extensive gallery montage highlighting a couple of photographs from every year over those four decades. The gallery played on a loop before each screening, press and public. (I never knew that Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters and Robert Mandel’s F/X had their commercial premieres at the festival in 1986.) The press office that year consisted of a single corner desk.
By design or wholly providential, the festival organizers hit on one great idea, staging the festival in January, making it the first major festival of the calendar year, beating to the punch Rotterdam and Berlin.
It’s a significant reason, I’ve always felt, why Sundance has generated an outsize importance. It sets a tone, a bellwether, or clearing of the decks, that anticipates the year to come.
Speaking of Light in August, Faulkner wrote in the opening passages of chapter seven: “And memory knows this; twenty years later memory is still to believe On this day I became a man”
In the post-pandemic era of the festival, the breadth and scope of the major programs have been significantly scaled back, with the possible exception of the premiere sections.
As I wrote the other day, the 2020 iteration was the last recognizable program tethered to the past, where the two primary competition sections, the US Dramatic and US Documentary, typically were made up of 16 to 18 films.
(The 2020 main slate had 15 US dramatic competition titles, 16 documentaries, and ten films slotted in the Next sidebar.)
Since the two exclusively remote and now hybrid versions of the festival, those numbers have been significantly reduced across the board, with ten films in the dramatic and documentary competitions, and just six in Next.
The first rule of any festival is you never get to see all the films you want. The math just isn’t possible, and that realization. As much as any festival, Sundance is about making personal choices, marked by commercial value, aesthetic interest, the director or talent involved, and buzz.
Historically I have gravitated toward the competition and formally insurgent Next section. I saw nine of the ten dramatic competition titles, with the exception being Love Me, by Sam and Andy Zuchero. As I’ve done in the past, I’m indicating how I saw the different films.
Presentation matters, and there’s a demonstrable difference of seeing a film projected with theater sound, as opposed to my iPad or home theater system—state of the art, with 1.5 gig speed, 55-inch 4K Sony television.
Over the coming days, I’ll have some thoughts about the films I saw, and what I liked or didn’t. I will start off positive, talking about some of the best competition titles.
A Real Pain
Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg
(iPad screening online, with a second viewing on my home theater system)
Jesse Eisenberg’s debut feature as a director, When You Finish Saving the World, opened the remote festival two years ago. (The distributor barely opened it last year to the day, and it promptly sank without a trace.)
His second feature, A Real Pain, is far more likely to register more forcefully in a public and critical consciousness. Kieran Culkin and Eisenberg play sharply contrasting cousins of stability and professional achievement. The two undertake a family pilgrimage to Poland.
A meditation on grief, loss, memory and Western privilege, the story examines their adventures on a Holocaust memorial tour.
Eisenberg, I know for a lot of people, is an acquired taste with his stylized speech patterns and manic movements. Here he plays the straight man to Culkin, a “Lord of Misrule,” or pure id, a mercurial presence who upends and breaks apart all social order. In the key moment, talking to the other members of the group, Eisenberg admits, “I love him, I hate him, I want to kill him, and I want to be him.”
The emotionally charged experience achieves a deeper, melancholy and sorrowful emotional register after the cousins break off to see the childhood home of their grandmother, who has recently passed away. The acting is sensational, expertly balancing the rueful and the abrasive, the colorful and playful.
The movie has some fascinating connections to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Both are shot in Poland with primarily Polish crews, and financed in part by the Polish Film Institute.
The new movie was shot by Michał Dymek, the exceptionally gifted cinematographer who also shot Jerzy Skolimowski’s extraordinary, EO. Eisenberg’s command and stylistic fluency is much sharper, attuned to landscapes, objects and movement. It’s concise, lyrical, and in the final movement, devastating.
Good One
Written and directed by India Donaldson
(Projected public screening at the Egyptian Theatre)
The actor Lily Collias had a small, crucial part in Jamie Dack’s Palm Trees and Power Lines, a brilliant, emotionally discomfiting exploration of young female sexual expression.
I’ve seen few recent films that were not French that were so skilled, authentic and imaginative at capturing unease and desperation.
Now the same actor is the protagonist of this very impressive first feature by India Donaldson, suggestively connected with and thematically bound to the early works of Kelly Reichardt.
Collias has an expressive, open and beautiful face. She does marvelous work of capturing the tumult, ecstasy and interior consciousness of a young woman. She is alternately open, daring, imaginatively playful and defiant.
On the verge of starting her freshman year of college, Sam (Collias) goes on a camping trip in upstate New York with her father (James Le Gros) and his best friend (Danny McCarthy).
The coming of age story is a Sundance staple, linking many of this year’s competition titles. Donaldson goes deeper and harder, showing a very intuitive and relaxed feel for dialogue. Collias is the protagonist, but the director’s subject is male bravado, its wounded vulnerability and damaged masculinity shaping character, mood and tone.
Like Julia Loktev’s great The Loneliest Planet, the story turns on an act of unimaginable male cowardice and violation. Despite the vertiginous rock formations and intricately laced mountains, Good One is a deeply interior work, compelling, magnetic, and thanks to the expressive and sharp work of Collias, very much alive.
I am very excited to see and closely follow the future works of India Donaldson and Lily Collias.
In the Summers
Written and directed by Allesandra Lacorazza
(iPad screening online, with a second viewing on my home theater system)
This debut feature by the Brooklyn-based independent Allesandra Lacorzza won two major prizes, the Grand Jury and the directing prize.
Told in four movements, covering different blocks of time in Las Cruces, N.M., the story charts the complex interaction between a single father and his two daughters that spend their summers with him.
Different sets of actors play the girls at different points; Lacorazza is sensitive and discrete, never revealing too much, or stacking the deck emotionally.
She is also very good at rhyming actions, like the game of pool as a very interesting parental initiation, or more tragically, a playful and thrill seeking brand of driving that turns deeply irresponsible and tragic.
Time is elliptical, fractured, haunting, the past always superimposed on the present, a plangent reminder of past grievances and resentments, the sins of the father, and the emergence emotionally (and sexually) of the two young women.
Lio Mehiel (a revelation in last year’s Sundance premiere, Mutt) is the adult queer daughter, Sasha Calle plays her distracted, adventurous counterpart. They’re fantastic.
René Pérez Joglar, the Puerto Rican musician professionally known as Residente, is riveting as the father, at once intelligent, prideful and volcanic in his moods and temperaments.
Some years I’ve done full-length trade or general circulation reviews of films out of the festival. I’m somewhat glad that is no longer the case. These were all first views (with sometimes a second look).
I’m eager to see each of these again.
