Sing To Me Sylvie (2021 | USA | 105 minutes | Jannette Bloom)
A chance encounter on the streets of Portland brings Sylvie’s estranged-for-the-last-decade former bandmate, David, suddenly back into her life. The two can’t stop making googly eyes at each other, but since they last saw each other, Sylvie’s gotten married. But her husband is away for the weekend, and when she realizes David is living rough on the streets (by his own choice, he insists, bringing up “minimalism” and the “tiny house movement”), she invites him to stay at her home for a few nights.
This kind of film lives or dies on the chemistry of the leads, and (writer/director/co-star) Jannette Bloom and Christopher Kozak do, fortunately, have plenty of that to spare. Their long looks and furtive glances tell plenty of their emotional story long before their expository dialogue does.
The film could almost be mistaken for a new entry in Richard Linklater’s Before series, as we follow these two characters spending a few days together roaming the city and just talking through the mysteries of life and reminiscing about their old times together, and playing cute and catchy folk music for and with one another. As things wend their way toward an inevitable emotional showdown, the limits of the performers’ skills start to show some seams, but on the whole, this is a gentle, naturalistic, intimate drama about two people with a heavy history finding one another again, enjoying each other’s company while also ripping open some old wounds, and testing out that old friendship to see what fits now that they’ve each long since entered into a new phase of life.
Maxie (2020 | USA | 103 minutes | Jarrett Bryant)
There’s a second two-hander romantic drama in the Local Sightings 2021 program that’s set in Oregon over the course of one weekend, concerns an unhoused young man, and is titled after one of the lead characters, although that’s about where the similarities between Maxie and Sing To Me Sylvie end. In Maxie, not just one but both of the film’s lead characters – Maxie (Miles Dixon) and his girlfriend, Sid (Liv Tavernier) – are living rough on the streets of Eugene, and they’re caught in the never-ending hamster wheel that is drug addiction. Sid seems to be leaning toward a readiness to seek help and move on, but Maxie, who comes from a wealthier background and has been through failed treatment programs before already, is staunchly resistant to the idea of changing their circumstances.
This is no Linklater-style conversation-heavy wander; these are characters in a much grittier milieu, with serious problems, including unstable mental health, which compounds their housing insecurity and addiction issues. Things start out dark and just get darker. The scabs on their faces and their hangdog expressions and postures broadcast their situation to anyone who glances their way. A dramatic climax brings things to a head with a nearly Shakespearean level of tragedy, an inevitable outcome as soon as the wheels of this story are put into motion.
Not everything about this film, which is Jarrett Bryant’s feature directorial debut, feels natural – it tends to stray into the area of miserabilia or “poverty porn”, just throwing in as much unhappiness and misfortune as the boundaries of the story can hold – and a majority of the actors’ line readings feel a bit stilted, amateurish. But there is some interesting sound design (the noise of a plane taking off layered into a crescendoing argument, for example), and the leads, especially Dixon, do pull off believable work in their physical portrayals of addiction. Dixon’s self-conscious over-blinking and Tavernier’s end-of-her rope bodily desperation do a lot of heavy lifting when their dialogue falls flat. It’s not the first or the most artful or impactful portrayal in cinema of young addicts struggling to get by and break their cycle (and why did only one of these two clearly co-lead characters get to be named in the title?), but in taking an empathetic eye to a problem that’s facing the Pacific Northwest now as much as ever, it’s worth looking out for.
Sing To Me Sylvie and Maxie played in-person on September 19th and 23rd, respectively, at the Local Sightings Film Festival, but are both available virtually through September 26th.
Follow other updates from this year’s festival via our Local Sightings 2021 coverage.