Lining up in crisp winter air is part of the Sundance experience, but film after film repays the wait
The former mining town of Park City, Utah, sits in a steep mountain valley surrounded by ski-runs. At night these runs are illuminated by chains of silver lights and start gleaming in the darkness like ice slides from Valhalla. An intrepid skier could conceivably slalom all the way from the summit to come crashing into the cinemas of the Sundance film festival. Except that first they'd have to walk the line.
The line is everywhere at Sundance. Outside each venue sits a big plastic marquee and inside each marquee is a caterpillar of delegates, trailing back and forth inside the metal stands. It is not uncommon to queue for up to an hour for a screening and woe betide the latecomer because too bad, they're probably not getting in.
This constant waiting should by rights be irksome – and yet somehow it isn't. The line, I come to realise, is a vital component of the Sundance experience. If the festival prides itself on being as much a talking shop as a movie showcase, then the queueing system is its boardroom and video conference combined. People talk in the line in a way they never do at Cannes or Venice; it's seen as weird if you don't. The delegates chat about the films they have watched and want to watch; the films they've made and have yet to make. The mood is garrulous and democratic. Midway through the second day, I have learned to love the line.
After all this festivity there's a worry that the actual movies might come almost as an afterthought. Happily that's not the case. The pictures at this year's Sundance are variously brilliant, shonky, confident and bungled – but they are never without interest. Debut writer-director Gillian Robespierre springs an early surprise with Obvious Child, a screwball comedy that clears the decks for a breakout performance from Jenny Slate as Donna, an oversharing stand-up comic who will joke about everything from the stains on her pants to the abortion she has booked for the following day. "You're going to kill up there," her friend informs her. "I think that's happening tomorrow," Donna shoots back. Robespierre's comedy runs full tilt at a volatile issue and emerges unscathed. Along the way it establishes Slate – with her wounded eyes and sailor's mouth – as a performer to watch.
I also enjoyed God Help the Girl, a kind of social-hyper-realist Scottish musical from Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch, inevitably described in some quarters as The Umbrellas of Glasgow. Emily Browning is the (suspiciously perky) depressive who strikes out as a singer; Olly Alexander the geeky guitarist prepared to ride on her coat-tails. One has the sense that both characters are surrogates for Murdoch himself and that this baggy, sentimental but deeply charming film is just thinly veiled autobiography. How else to explain the fact that Browning's heroine records her songs on old C90 cassettes and references TV shows like Bod and Minder? Both were probably off air by the time she was born.
Elsewhere the programme bounces us from documentaries on Republican candidate Mitt Romney to internet activist Aaron Swartz; from John Michael McDonagh's wonderfully impish Calvary (showcasing a superb performance from Brendan Gleeson as a priest in peril) to Marjane Satrapi's ghoulish The Voices, in which Ryan Reynolds's grinning psycho-killer receives career advice from a satanic pet cat by the name of Mr Whiskers. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon stage a jocular Q&A after a screening of The Trip to Italy, while a man walks his goat on a leash along the Poison Creek trail. Ahead of the premiere of the sporting documentary The Battered Bastards of Baseball, a publicist pulls me from the line and announces that I can have a few minutes to ask the actor Kurt Russell all about the movie. This would be great, were it not for the fact that I have not yet seen the movie. "Me neither!" admits Russell cheerfully.
The festival is progressing quite nicely, and then along comes Boyhood to shove the rest of the competition into the shade. Richard Linklater's coming-of-age drama is astonishing, a gorgeous film in flux, blending Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life with John Updike's Rabbit novels. The director shot his movie under the radar over an exhaustive 11-year period, so that we see little Mason (Ellar Coltrane) grow from infancy to manhood and watch the world change around him. This monumental feat of logistics might well have dwarfed the human element, and yet Linklater keeps the movie buoyant, loose and warm; never straining for profundity and letting the process shape his story. Bedding down for the night, Mason asks his wayward father (Ethan Hawke) if elves really do exist. His dad concedes that they probably do not, but then tells the boy about a race of vast sea monsters, called whales, which move about using sonar power and possess hearts as big as cars. Boyhood is full of such everyday magic.
Has the Sundance film festival grown too big, too fast? That seems to be the feeling of Robert Redford, the event's founder and figurehead, who has announced his intention to quietly bow out. Over the past three decades, Redford has watched his grassroots project bloom into a behemoth, with hundreds of films on the schedule and an estimated 50,000 visitors on the streets of Park City. And yet, out west, the country still feels open and rugged enough to accommodate the influx. If Sundance lacks the red-carpet glamour and celebrity wattage of Cannes, it compensates with an airy, outdoorsy vibe and a fine array of films. It's a festival that plays out to a soundtrack of amiable chatter, crunching snow and the bump of ski-boots aboard city buses.
At night, away from the bustle of Main Street, the sky is crowded with constellations, bigger and brighter than we've seen them before. Each step up the mountain is a step up to heaven. Who needs fake stars when Orion itself is prepared to pull in so close?
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/26/sundance-stuart-murdoch-slate-robespierre
No comments:
Post a Comment