Sundance wanted to return to a fully in-person festival for its January 20th-30th run, but the coronavirus pandemic had other plans. Luckily, when it became obvious that the omicron variant was spreading uncontrollably, and a 40,000 person gathering in Park City would have been a non-stop superspreader event, there were already plans in place to repeat the virtual programming the venerable film festival instituted last year.
After two years of rolling pandemic shutdowns, the film community is used to online festivals. Even in non-pandemic times, the virtual option is great for cinephiles who can’t attend in person. But that doesn’t mean all the kinks have been worked out yet.
Sundance is embracing virtual reality, with a program of various VR works and a festival village inside a virtual space station. This glimpse of the metaverse future is less Ready Player One and more Second Life. The biggest lesson from the festival’s opening weekend is, don’t cross the streams of cinema and VR.
The opening feature, 32 Sounds, is an experimental documentary by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Green that does what it says on the tin. It’s an exploration of sound as a phenomenon that is designed to be watched while wearing headphones. Much of the sound was recorded using binaural technology, which uses multiple microphones and physical models of the human ear to create recordings that sound more authentically “wild” than even stereo. It’s a fascinating concept, once you get into the movie’s headspace, so to speak. The problem was the opening program was presented in a virtual recreation of the Egyptian theater in Park City, a real-life festival hub. Technical issues delayed the beginning of the program, which meant that when the virtual screening period ended, everyone was unceremoniously kicked out of the virtual theater before the film was over. We got 25 sounds, tops! There are a several more potentially interesting VR events on the schedule, but after that experience, I have not been back to the metaverse.
Luckily, the vast majority of Sundance’s offerings are presented in a more conventional streaming format, with both limited-time premiere slots, designed to increase audience participation by ensuring everyone is watching at the same time, and longer, second-run slots to catch up on films you missed because of conflicts. This flexibility was great for me, as I was juggling a huge work project at the same time. It has not, however, been great for my sleep schedule. But I guess staying up way too late is an authentic film festival experience.
My takeaways from the first weekend are that the documentaries have so far been better than the narrative films, and that the foreign narratives have been much better than their American counterparts. Take the case of Jesse Eisenberg’s feature directorial debut When You Finish Saving The World. It has a crackerjack cast including the great Julianne Moore as the burned-out head of a nonprofit who runs a shelter for domestic violence victims, and Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard as her son, a streamer who has attracted a small but growing audience with his folk-rock songs. The actors struggle to create well-rounded characters, but Eisenberg, who also wrote the film, doesn’t know what to do with them. The struggle between mother and son to communicate through the teenage years ultimately goes nowhere, and the impression you’re left with is that both of these people are kind of jerks, anyway.
Call Jane is by director Phillis Nagy, most familiar as the writer of Carol, which is one of those films whose list of accolades is so long it merits its own Wikipedia page. It gets off to a promising start, with Joy (Elizabeth Banks), a housewife in 1968 Chicago, diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition. She’s also pregnant, but carrying the baby to term will almost certainly be fatal for both of them. When the all-male hospital ethics board denies her physician’s request to authorize an abortion, Joy seeks out the services of Jane, an underground organization of feminists who arrange abortions for the desperate. After Jane, led by a flinty Sigourney Weaver, helps Joy, she gets sucked into helping other women in similar plights.
The tension of suburban good-girl Joy leading a double life as an illegal abortion doula propels the first two acts of the film, but when it’s time for a climax, Nagy whiffs. The real-life Jane collective operated in Chicago for years until it was finally busted, and its leaders were awaiting trial for murder and conspiracy when the Roe v. Wade verdict was handed down. That’s some high drama, especially considering in this film it would be Sigourney Weaver in peril. But Call Jane instead omits the police raid (it’s mentioned as having happened off screen during the epilogue) and opts instead for a useless adultery subplot between Joy’s lawyer husband (Chris Messina) and their widow neighbor, played by Kate Mara. What could have been the feminist version of Judas and the Black Messiah instead fizzles into banality.
Much more successful is the Norwegian import, The Worst Person in the World, by director Joachim Trier. It’s a flight-footed romantic comedy, shot through with magical realism and a heavy Bergman influence that sometimes put me in mind of Ira Sachs. The film is grounded by a generous performance by Renate Reinsve as Julie, a young woman in Oslo who falls in love with a graphic novelist named Askel (Anders Danielsen Lie) 15 years her senior. The episodic film is told in 12 chapters, with a prologue and epilogue, which map out vital events in the course of their relationship as they meet cute, grow apart, break up, and reconcile in the most melancholy way. The film is funny and sad, and all the characters feel like real people.
Speaking of real people, the documentary side of the equation has a pair of killer biographies. Nothing Compares is the story of Sinead O’Connor’s meteoric rise to fame, and the painful history behind her songs. O’Connor is best remembered today for getting canceled after a protest at the end of a performance on Saturday Night Live, where she ripped up a picture of the Pope. But as the film reminds us, the specific thing she was protesting was the Catholic church’s ongoing cover-up of pedophile priests preying on congregants. Time has proven her absolutely right on that issue, just as it has about everything else she says in the film’s wealth of archival footage. O’Connor paid the price for being ahead of her time.
The first big sale out of Sundance’s film market was Fire Of Love, a documentary about volcanologists Katia and Maurice Kraft by director Sara Dosa. The Krafts devoted their lives to studying volcanos, but they seemed to be just as drawn to the insane risks they were taking as they filmed lava rivers and pyroclastic flows at point-blank range. Fire of Love is a great combination of idiosyncratic love story and spectacular footage of fire fountains, It’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser when it sees wide release.
Last year’s festival was a hotbed of great music docs, including the transcendent Summer of Soul and the inventive The Sparks Brothers. Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s chronicle of the millennial Brooklyn music scene, Meet Me In The Bathroom, doesn’t approach those heights. There’s no shortage of great footage of The Strokes, Interpol, and LCD Soundsystem in the film, and the directors effectively make the case for the scene’s enduring influence. Specifically great is the treatment of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O, which pairs explosive performance footage with a confessional interview. But the film is plagued by bad choices, such as inexplicably throwing Frank Sinatra’s “When I Was Seventeen” and Ace Freley’s “Back In The New York Groove” into the middle of a film about indie rock.
The find of the festival for me so far has been Neptune Frost by poet Saul Williams and director Anisia Uzeyman. I’m not even sure I can put this one in a clean category, but I’ll go with “Afro-futurist cyberpunk musical.” Shot on location in the countryside of Rawanda, it concerns a group of refugees from the harsh realities of war and economic exploitation who retreat into an alternate dimension to wage guerrilla war on The Authority. At least that’s part of it. It’s complicated.
Neptune Frost’s budget was minuscule, but it does everything right. It’s visually stunning, thanks to some incredible costumes and set design, as well as cinematography that punches way above its weight. The opening image literally made me say “wow” out loud. The directors stage full-on musical numbers with live singing in places like the jungle and a strip mine where rare earth elements are extracted to produce the electronics you’re reading this on right now. The songs are great, combining disparate elements like synth-pop, hip hop, high life, soca, Sondheim, and juju, with lyrics in five languages. The whole project’s perspective is bracingly revolutionary, but one banger after another makes it go down smooth. You’ll be bopping along and suddenly realize they’ve got you chanting “Fuck Google!” In the mixed bag of Sundance 2022, Neptune Frost is the first bona fide masterpiece
