A Love Song (2022 | USA | 81 minutes | Max Walker-Silverman)
Without a doubt, there is nothing at this year’s festival that will ever quite be like A Love Song. The serene beauty of the film’s vision rips the breath away, showing the detail in everything from the dazzling landscapes to the etchings in the faces of the kind people that inhabit them. It is a story about love, loneliness, and what life is like when you find yourself on your own.
Getting long-overdue leading roles, veteran character actors Dale Dickey & Wes Studi are beyond brilliant. Both give career-best performances, a mighty accomplishment given their large body of work. Dickey is Faye, a woman who sets up camp in the Colorado Mountains alone while seemingly waiting for someone. She observes various people pass through, checks to see if she got any mail, and ultimately meets up with Studi’s Lito. It becomes clear that the two had a shared bond in their past that they are hoping to rekindle after both have lost those closest to them.
In his debut feature, writer-director Max Walker-Silverman has made a wondrous work of art by showing the full scope of his characters’ lives as they spend their days in tranquility with each other. The film is precise in its atmosphere, letting long stretches pass while the two sit and talk. Much is left unspoken between Faye and Lito as they have such a deep connection that they are forever tied through memory. As they try to support and love each other, there is still the persistent feeling that may not be possible as both have still changed much over the years.
The film is a gorgeous piece of cinema as Walker-Silverman displays all the natural beauty of the world before you with a sharp eye for capturing the scope of the setting. It is a stillness that overwhelms, mirroring the awe and fear of life stretching out from the characters as they both have faced down mortality head-on from the deaths of those closest to them. Through it all, the actors instill their characters with a sensitive vulnerability crossed with a steely resolve that makes for a complex portrait. As they try to find a path forward, you don’t dare look away for even a second because of how arresting their every move and expression is. It is truly a masterclass in acting by some of the very best to ever do it.
If ever there was a film that could be both quiet and brilliant at the same, it would be this one. The slow pacing is entirely the point of it all as the people of this world seem to be both running away from and toward something. They almost seem to be stuck in limbo, trying to shake off the pain of their past. What haunts them varies between Faye and Lito, though they are united by a shared sense of aimlessness. That feeling of upheaval is crushing, though it is in finding solace through each other that they are given something resembling temporary respite from the looming future bearing down on them. A Love Song is a real gem of the festival that doesn’t come along all that often, making it crucial you experience it when it does.
A Love Song premiered at the Sundance Film Festival; it has a second festival showing through this weekend and is expected to be released later this year by Films Boutique.