sundance-first dance

Sundance first draft

So I have seen at Sundance a vast display of the many potential treasures you'll be hearing a lot about for the next 2 years.

Such as  a madmen 24's Zola, based on the viral Twitter thread about a wild encounter between two strippers.

Here are a few first scribbled notes on some out of the box vibes, as many @Sundance 2020, one of the gothiest I ever imagined.

 I Carry You With Me 
Director: Heidi Ewing
Cast: Armando Espitia, Christian Vazquez, Michelle Rodríguez.
There's a reveal at the heart of I Carry You With Me that I'm almost hesitant to talk about here. 

And yet I feel like I must, because it's central to what this movie is trying to do.

Though it's being billed as documentarian Heidi Ewing's first narrative feature 

is not exactly that.

There's a lot of truth to this story, 

more than you initially realize 

as you watch love blossom 

between two men in 1994 Puebla, Mexico 

unfold on screen.

Actors Armando Espitia and Christian Vazquez play Ívan, a dishwasher with dreams of being a chef, 

and graduate student Gerardo as 20-something men. 

They meet one night at a gay bar and begin a romance, 

defying the homophobia of members of their families.

In this section, Ewing's camera is constantly in movement, almost as if in a dance.

By the end of the film, the style has shifted into something that looks more like a documentary. 

That's because, eventually, it is.

The visuals are no longer heightened, 

and the actors have been replaced 

by the people who they were playing.

I Carry You With Me doesn't wear on its sleeve that it's based on the real lives 

of two of Ewing's friends.

For some, the experimental nature of the filmmaking will sound flat, 

yet it's hard to deny the raw power 

of this tale.

The Mountains Are a Dream That Call To Me
Director: Cedric Cheung-Lau 
Cast: Sanjaya Lama, Alice Cummins
You can view the natural beauty of the Annapurna Mountains in Nepal 

by simply doing a Google Image search 

of the region 

and clicking on different vistas.

But a movie like The Mountains Are a Dream That Call To Me, 

the debut feature 

from filmmaker Cedric Cheung-Lau, 

provides more than a series of Instagram-worthy shots. 

This meditative travelogue, 

which explores the dynamic between an elderly Australian tourist (Cummins) and a young guide from Nepal on his way to a promised job in Dubai (Lama), 

chases a serenely contemplative, 

occasionally supernatural tone. 

(A ghost-like figure hides in the shadows in crucial moments.)

With patient long takes, 

naturalistic performances, 

and frequent silent passages, 

Cheung-Lau establishes a hypnotic rhythm 

that some viewers might find painfully dull or too relaxed.

Personally, I found it transfixing.

Like a great piece of ambient music, 

The Mountains Are a Dream That Call To Me rewards and encourages contemplation.

 

Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always
Director: Eliza Hittman (Beach Rats)
Cast: Sidney Flanagan, Talia Ryder, Théodore Pellerin, Sharon Van Etten
There's a scene in Eliza Hittman's drama Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always that is nearly impossible to shake. 

Teen Autumn (Flanagan) has traveled to New York with her cousin Skylar (Ryder) 

in order to have an abortion, 

prohibited in her home state of Pennsylvania.

She sits in an office in a Manhattan Planned Parenthood as a counselor cycles through a series of mandatory questions.

The camera holds on Autumn's face 

as the questions grow more and more personal.

The young woman doesn't reveal much in her answers, but you can read the pain in the cracking of her voice 

and the glistening in her eyes.

A lot goes unsaid in Hittman's follow-up to her 2017 story of burgeoning sexuality, Beach Rats.

We never hear Autumn and Skylar hatch a plan to go to the city. 

They just pack an unnecessarily large suitcase and leave. 

Autumn never talks about her feelings with regards to terminating her pregnancy 

and Skylar never asks.

But nothing ever seems missing 

in this silence.

Hittman has made a film about the grim pacts women make with each other 

in a world that is hostile to them 

set in an unromantic New York. 

Much of the action takes place in and around Port Authority, 

where Autumn and Skylar would otherwise be faceless commuters 

in pallid surroundings.

Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always is an unforgiving movie, 

and it's nevertheless stunning.

The Painter and the Thief
Director: Benjamin Ree (Magnus)
Norwegian documentary filmmaker Ree 

paints a remarkable portrait of two lives that become intertwined. 

Instead of shunning the person who stole two of her pieces from a Norway exhibition, painter Barbora Kysilkova befriends the man, a career criminal named Karl-Bertil, 

a junkie who threw the art 

in the midst of a bender 

and has no memory of where he abandoned it. Barbora is desperate to know what became of her dark, hyper-realistic works, 

but she also finds a muse in Karl-Bertil, 

who is deeper 

than his "Crime Pays" T-shirt suggests.

Ree allows both of them to tell their sides of the story 

while following their burgeoning friendship over the course of years.

It's easy to imagine Barbora and Karl-Bertli as characters in a narrative feature, 

as we see their fortunes shift.

After a low point, Karl-Bertli starts rebuilding his life just as Barbora's starts to fray, 

her obsessions with turning misery into art becoming a burden.

The Painter and the Thief mostly lets the viewer just live with these people 

and the tension that exists between them 

as it weaves in questions about muses, 

pain, 

and the act of creating art.

Shirley 
Director: Josephine Decker
Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Michael Stuhlbarg, Odessa Young, Logan Lerman 
Aping the general structure of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Shirley finds a young couple Fred and Rosie (Logan Lerman and Odessa Young) arriving at the home of Shirley and her husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) on the Bennington campus.

Fred is working for Stanley, 

and while Rosie is supposed to be auditing classes, 

Stanley quickly enlists her 

to serve as housekeeper and caretaker 

for the coarse and agoraphobic Shirley.

Shirley sees right through Rosie, 

but their antagonistic relationship soon develops into something symbiotic 

(or possibly parasitic).

Jackson gradually thaws around Rose, eventually allowing Rose into her creative inner sanctum (real and imagined), 
especially once the agoraphobic Jackson realizes Rose could function as a useful factotum 
and occasional muse 
for her latest, 
largely undefined book project.

The house itself feels like one of Jackson's haunted creations, 

moaning with the anxiety of these characters.

An abstract, experimental filmmaker by temperament and choice, 
Decker’s approach emphasizes fragmentary ambiguity 
over objective "realism" 
with this straightforward screenplay.

This is a remix of Jackson's (Elizabeth Moss) sensory experiences, 
creative fantasies, 
her difficult, complex, often contradictory relationship with her tyrannical husband, Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), 
a Bennington College professor in English literature, 
and this other young couple.

Shirley triples a certain critique of mid-century academia, 
filled with self-obsessed egotists 
like Stanley a
nd self-involved narcissists like Fred, 

a cramped culture
bound by the rigid gender norms 
of the time 

that put men and only men 
in positions of power 
and women in secondary, support roles.

Jackson stands out for being 

an unapologetic, outspoken woman 

who freely expresses her often deliberately provocative opinions 
to anyone.

Her literary genius, of course, 
gives her the necessary freedom to express 
an otherwise idiosyncratic personality. 

Rose just as deliberately functions 
as a shadow version of Jackson: 

A younger Jackson 
minus Jackson's literary gifts, 
defined, redefined, and defined again 

by the suffocating pressures 
of social and cultural conformity 
typical of '50s America.

The Director richly marries style to substance 

in ways otherwise unattainable by conventional, linear filmmaking.

The score from Tamar-kali, 

who has three (!) films at Sundance 2020 
is stunning. 
She gives each of the central three women 
a theme, 

which overlap or combine at times.

In Decker's hands, 

Shirley rises to the level of film as art, not pure commerce. 

Decker's talent, her willingness to take risks with the underlying material, 
and a metaphorical, metaphysical filmmaking approach 
may be too "arthouse" for some, 

but perfectly "arthouse" 
for everyone else.

By Giulia Dobre, February 2020.