SunBreak at Sundance: Take One

I had to stop and think about it, but this is actually my fifth year at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s funny how every year, I immediately get back into the same Park City routine. Every Sundance, I go to the same BBQ joint, the same Mexican restaurant, the same hotel coffeeshop. And always, by the end of the first day, it feels like I’ve been here forever already. 

Yesterday was just like that. My first film of the fest was the world premiere of the highly-anticipated Blue Valentine, starring the equally dreamy Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as an unhappily married couple. The film is structured such that you’re viewing scenes of them fighting side by side with scenes from happier times. Because sometimes what brings a pair together can also tear them apart. Blue Valentine is heavy, but it’s real, and the commitment that Gosling and Williams brought to the film is palpable. Not only is their acting solid (both gained weight and got ugly, relatively speaking), but the two also serve as executive producers, thereby demonstrating their belief in the film. 

They’re in capable hands with director Derek Cianfrance–truly, Ryan Gosling’s Florida hick by way of The Bronx and Pennsylvania is his impression of Cianfrance–and good, understated use of a score by Grizzly Bear. It’s hard for me to see this film going mainstream, considering the weighty subject matter, but it more than deserves it. 

Then I headed up to Main Street for the Washington Film Works party. I was there long enough to get my free drinks and see Lynn Shelton and Ben Kasulke, Warren Etheredge and Monica Guzman, and Sean Nelson (it is next to impossible to miss Sean Nelson [Ed. note: Because he's tall]). But I left before The Moondoggies and Beach House performed, in order to see another film. I like to balance my festival experience between the big pictures that will eventually end up theaters (or at least continue on the festival circuit) and those that I may never have the chance to see again.

So that’s how I ended up at Sundance’s first Estonian film, The Temptation of St. Tony. The black-and-white film is poetic in the way that Fellini is poetic, in that it opens with a slow-moving funeral procession along a beach interrupted by an alcohol-fueled car crash. Welcome to Estonia. What follows is also like Fellini, in that it oscillates between being spot-on absurdist and making no sense whatsoever. I was with the film for the first half, in which our titular protagonist tries to be a saint in every situation, only to have bad things happen to him, but in the second half the train goes off the tracks, and the film loses any point it was trying to make about the ills of capitalism and the sins of the bourgeoisie.

My first film on Monday was Gasper Noe’s latest, Enter the Void. If you know Noe, you can expect him to assail your senses with acts of depraved brutality. And that’s the case here, in the story of a small-time Tokyo drug dealer, his stripper sister, and their friends. But in this case, Noe also assaults the viewer with computer animation, lights, and sound. Some of it is quite lovely (and the editing is near-seamless), but if you have a seizure disorder, you will definitely want to avoid this film. And did I mention it’s two and a half hours long? You know you’ve got a problem when the verdict is: That film could’ve been okay, had it been an hour shorter. At that bloated length (that’s what she said), Noe has made the ultimate arthouse porno laser show.