Sundance Weekend
First reactions to new movies from two days at the Sundance Film Festival
Watching
One for the Road (2021)
A slick and occasionally clever buddy movie that peaks in the opening credits, when a GoPro is strapped to the end of a cocktail shaker for five seconds of glory. Boss (Tor Thanapob), a moderately sleazy New York City bartender, is beckoned home to Thailand by his once-best friend Aood (Ice Natara), who, dying of patrilineal leukemia and in need of a chauffeur, has opted out of chemotherapy to travel up and down the country making amends with his exes instead. The first hour of the movie sees the pals hit the road with a bit of the energy (if higher resolution) of nineties Wong Kar-wai flicks (Wong is prominently credited as producer). Aood’s father, a onetime radio D.J., left behind years of tape recordings, which supply the soundtrack with the likes of the Rolling Stones and Cat Stevens in between jazz standards and Thai pop. Each tape appears like a chapter title corresponding to the name of one of Aood’s exes, a trio of women written with varying degrees of realistic responses to Aood showing up on their doorsteps. Both cancer and reconciliation are a little too painless in director Baz Poonpiriya’s hands, at least in the first half.
The second hour parks into the origin story of Aood and Boss’s friendship. Boss comes from married-into money—but like, a lot of it. Boss first met Aood on the streets of New York in his student days, outside the Thai restaurant where Aood worked with Boss’s lover Prim (Violette Wautier), a charismatic bartender waiting tables at the only place in town that will hire a Thai immigrant without a work visa. Here the movie gets into a vastly more interesting story of immigrant life and class conflict, though it doesn’t quite get the latter (or, unfortunately still, women) right. Poor, sick, single Aood has chosen to spend his dying days apologizing to a wealthy kid and all he gets in return is a weekend at a resort hotel before trekking back to the hospital for more rounds of chemo. Meanwhile Boss gets to reunite, after years apart, with Prim at a beach with a fully-stocked vintage mobile bar. If you don’t come from privilege, having even a single loved one by your side as you stare down death is apparently too much to ask for.
Searchers (2021)
Last summer, filmmaker Pacho Velez enlisted friends, kindly strangers, and his mother to help him make a movie about app-based dating. Instead of defaulting to straightforward interviews (though there’s some of that too), Velez sets up his subjects, a truly diverse group ranging from ages 20 to 75 and representing all different races, sexualities, and gender identities, with the dating app of their choice on a large, off-camera monitor. A technician (also off-camera, except in one instance) helms the app, scrolling, swiping, and sending messages as the subject dictates. In post, Velez superimposes a low-opacity, non-mirrored, partial view of the app interface over the subject so that the viewer can see what they’re seeing. Something about this feels unethical; some identifying details have been censored (notably in a sequence where two girls, whose names uniquely among the film’s subjects are given only as their screen names, respond to offers from older men on an escort-seeking service), but I’m sure someone is going to recognize themselves…or be recognized.
Contrary to Velez’s intentions, probably, the straightforward interviews in the last half hour of the movie are much more engaging than the dating app overlay stuff. Notwithstanding that many of these apps share an algorithm, the perspectives on online dating aren’t all that different from one person to the next and the amateur ethnography (“So when somebody writes this, what they really mean is…”) all starts to sound the same after a while. Far more interesting is the fact that Velez includes B-roll that visibly identifies the film as being shot during the pandemic, with masked New Yorkers out and about, carrying on as if thousands of people hadn’t died just out of sight a few months before. In the post-show Q&A, Velez dismissed the idea that Searches is in any way an intentional pandemic movie, but while it’s still novel to see the last year onscreen it will be hart not to watch it that way.
Strawberry Mansion (2021)
Someone who is not me—and may not be you, either!—will love this wackadoodle fantasy adventure, set in the improbably near future of 2035 and shot on location in scenic Maryland. James Preble (Kentucker Audley, who co-wrote and co-directed with Albert Birney), a dream auditor for the federal government (again, ambitious timeline here) pays a scheduled visit to a fruit-pink victorian at the end of a meadow where the eccentric old Bella Isadora (Penny Fuller) lives with her pet turtle and thousands of cassette tapes. Preble won’t be leaving until he’s gone on a journey for which I personally was not high enough to entirely groove with. A dream-invading fried chicken advertiser, a man wearing a giant papier-mâché frog head playing the saxophone, a dancing skeleton beckoned out of the grave by the violin playing of a comely young Bella (Grace Glowicki), a talking fly, and a blue-maned sea demon are just some of the denizens awaiting you in this miniature Hieronymus Bosch by way of Jo-Ann Fabrics.
All Light, Everywhere (2021)
Baltimore-based filmmaker Theo Anthony’s extremely disturbing film follows the pattern he set in his 2016 breakout, Rat Film. All Light, Everywhere is an inquisitive patchwork documentary of 5 years of traditional camera footage, screen recordings, and B-roll of historical documents accompanied by didactic narration about sight, surveillance, and the history of the camera’s relationship to policing and state-sponsored violence. Anthony’s free-associative filmmaking takes us from an eclipse watch in the Carolinas; a bewilderingly translucent tour of the Arizona headquarters of Axon, the leading manufacturer of tasers and body cameras; a community hearing in a West Baltimore church basement with the inventor of an aerial camera that was used, after the killing of Freddie Gray in 2015, to take photographs of the city at a rate of one photo every second every day for months; and a body cam training at the Baltimore Police Department.
In this last location, Anthony and a second cameraman are shown setting up and recording a powerpoint-driven presentation, given by a trim white officer to a room of mostly Black officers (whom Anthony’s cameras dwell on pointedly). The movie cuts in and out of this scene, pairing the white officer’s description of how the Axon cam works with Anthony’s own footage testing it out himself at a mall. (The narrator drones: “the wearer of the camera is seeing not for himself, but as an extension of the state” thank you, captain obvious.) Suddenly in one sequence at the police department, the presenting officer tells Anthony and his assistant to cut their video while he presents a clip from one of the body cams. Anthony covers the lens but keeps the audio on so we can hear the demonstration. There are sounds of an altercation, but without access to what is being shown, we’re at a loss to evaluate the accuracy of the officers’ subsequent description of what they saw (in their words, a street confrontation where an officer was not at fault for any wrongdoing). When Anthony’s cameras come back on, he puts the footage from each side by side on screen for an expanded view of the room and a very “both eyes wide open” sort of effect.
Visibility proves to be one of the animating concepts of Anthony’s film, whether it turns up in the form of this unnervingly and drawn metaphorical black curtain or in the literal opaque wall at the Axon facility that turns into see-through glass at the flip of a switch. In an epilogue, Anthony reveals a lacuna he built into the film of his own accord, an entire unforeseeable storyline he decided to cut from the final film. Anthony seems to have learned what so many of his subjects knew too well: one person’s blind spot is another’s means of protection.
Coming Soon
The big sales story out of Sundance: Apple dropped $25 million for CODA, Siân Heder’s film about the hearing child of deaf parents, starring a mostly deaf cast. This record seems to get broken every year, but in any case this is the most expensive acquisition in the festival’s history.
Just in this morning: Yorgos Lanthimos will return to screens this fall with Emma Stone for an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things, about [squints] a woman stopped from drowning herself by an emergency surgery replacing her brain with that of the fetus she was carrying. Well.
Guillermo del Toro will also bring the goods this December with Nightmare Alley, from the William Lindsay Gresham novel, starring Bradley Cooper as a carnival worker who meets his match against a deadly psychiatrist played by Cate Blanchett. Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen, Richard Jenkins, and David Strathairn round out the cast.
More adaptations! Terence Davies will make a movie out of Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl, due out sometime next year, while his immediate next film, Benediction, should arrive this fall.
Although I skirted around formal discussion of it last year, I am craving interlocutors around Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut film Beginning. It’s now streaming exclusively on Mubi. (Okay so this one is less of a coming soon than a “here now.”)
Michael Koresky, editor of the Museum of the Moving Image’s online publication Reverse Shot, has a book of biographical criticism coming out this May: Films of Endearment, in which he is joined by his mother in rewatching movies that were pivotal to their relationship as he was growing up in the 1980s and forming his consciousness as a gay man.
Now taking bets on which happens first: (a) Tim gets vaccinated (b) Dune is released in theaters (c) Tim finishes reading Dune