Last year’s Sundance was all online, but this year’s festival was supposed to be hybrid: part of the program was supposed to be in person, and part of it was supposed to be online. With only a few weeks to go before the festival, they decided to do it all online. The ticketing model was different this year, too. Last year, the pass we bought was all-you-can-eat, and we watched over 20 movies. This year, the most permissive pass only allowed for ten films, which is what we ended up watching, in addition to the free pre-screening. But despite the worry that we might be missing something amazing, it turns out that watching ten films is much more manageable.
TL;DR: The best things I saw, in order:
- AFTER YANG
- MY OLD SCHOOL
- A LOVE SONG
- GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE
- LIVING
Here are all the films we saw, in the order we saw them:
THE INCREDIBLY TRUE ADVENTURE OF TWO GIRLS IN LOVE (1995) – Like last year, there was a free pre-screening of a previous Sundance movie to test everyone’s tech. This was a romantic comedy from 1995 about two young women, high school students, who fall in love. Nice enough, but slight. As Roger Ebert put it, it seems like the director had a hard time figuring out an end to the story. Also, none of the adults were particularly believable; they were all drawn too broadly.
WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD – Directorial debut of Jesse Eisenberg, and starring Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard (STRANGER THINGS). A story about a mother and son who are each idealistic about their own things, but have nothing in common and struggle to connect. Moore, playing the mother, runs a shelter for abused women, and Wolfhard, playing her son, plays twee folk songs on TikTok for a large group of fans. Neither character is particularly likeable, but they’re both well-written and well-acted. Moore in particular does a great job.
A LOVE SONG – In a campground on Colorado’s Western Slope, two lonely people, childhood friends each now widowed, meet after many years. Will they start a relationship, or is there too much water under the bridge? Beautiful photography, some quirky characterizations, and genuine if understated emotions. This was a good film.
GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE – Emma Thompson plays a widowed retired schoolteacher who has never felt sexually fulfilled, so she hires a sex worker and meets him in a hotel room. Their relationship develops in unexpected ways. Structured like a stage play, this is all about the interaction between the two characters, and they both do a great job. We liked this one a lot. I expect it’ll be in theaters.
DUAL – A young woman learns that she’s dying, so she commissions the creation of a clone as a gift to her loved ones. Then she learns that she’s not dying after all, but her clone doesn’t want to be decommissioned, so she now has to fight her clone to the death. This is the first film of the festival that neither of us liked. It was supposed to be a “dark comedy,” but aside from the idea that people liked the clone better than the original woman, there was really nothing funny about it. Instead, I got lost in questioning the movie’s entire premise – why would there have to be a duel to the death? The screenplay wasn’t very good and most of the performances were robotic. The best thing about the film was Aaron Paul (BREAKING BAD) as the woman’s combat instructor.
BRIAN AND CHARLES – Brian, a lonely Welsh inventor, creates Charles, a 7-foot-tall robot who eats cabbages. Of course I would want to see this movie. Very cute premise – a combination of Frankenstein, Wallace & Grommit, and buddy films. Apparently based on an earlier short film about the characters, and also on a series of British sketch comedies, it was new to me. I had hoped that this would delight me as much as last year’s STRAWBERRY MANSION, but it wasn’t up to that standard. We enjoyed it, although it wasn’t the most memorable thing we saw.
AFTER YANG – A beautiful film by director Kogonada, who also directed COLUMBUS, last year’s pre-screener at Sundance. About a hundred years in the future, a family’s android robot, Yang, who has essentially been their seven-year-old daughter’s older brother for her whole life, breaks down. The family tries to repair Yang, but it’s not so simple, and in the process of trying to repair him, they learn a lot about his past and his inner life, and about how Yang’s experience reflects on their humanity. With a very soulful performance by Colin Farrell as the father. This was probably our favorite thing at Sundance. I really hope this makes it to theaters and people can see it.
LIVING – In London in the early 1950s, a buttoned-up civil servant (played by Bill Nighy) learns that he has an incurable disease and six months to live. He starts to question his life and wonders if there’s more to it than just being a cog in a bureaucratic machine. The film follows the various ways he explores better ways to live. A remake of Kurosawa’s 1952 film IKIRU, with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro and the feel of a 1950s British melodrama, this was a quality film that I think I admired more than I actually enjoyed – although I did think it was pretty good.
BLOOD – A film about a young woman who loses her husband and goes to Japan to stay with a friend, and tries to figure out whether she’s open to love again. This was a frustrating film for a number of reasons: the storytelling was elliptical and lacked both backstory and resolution. The photography was distanced, and therefore served to distance us from the characters and their predicaments. And, finally, it was far too long for the story it tried to tell. It was a slice-of-life film that tried to be something more profound and didn’t succeed. I don’t recommend it.
ALICE – The film starts out as an antebellum plantation drama and then segues into being a 1973-set Blaxploitation film centered around the same character. Inspired by true stories about slavery in the South as late as the 1960s, the film has a great performance by Keke Palmer as Alice, who escapes from slavery at a Georgia plantation and finds herself lost in 1973. It’s an interesting mashup of genres, and calls to mind similar revenge fantasies like DJANGO UNCHAINED.
MY OLD SCHOOL – We finished with a documentary about a scandal that was well-known in Scotland in the 1990s, although little-known elsewhere. A Glasgow high school student made a big impression among his classmates, but he turned out not to be what he seemed. While it was apparently a big deal in Scotland, in retrospect it seems to have been an extremely small-bore scandal, but that’s ok. I don’t want to give away what the scandal was, which is half the fun of this movie, but the story is told in a very innovative way, including interviews with the now-grown classmates, animation inspired by the series DARIA, and, most interestingly, interviews with the protagonist that were lip-synched by the actor Alan Cummings (since the protagonist was willing to be interviewed and recorded, but not to be shown on camera). The film is about a lot more than the ostensible scandal: it’s about memory, trust, high school, and the British class system. It’s really a lot of fun, and a great way to end the festival.