I say it every year, but NEXT is my favorite competition at Sundance. It’s a place where the boldest, most experimental voices often lurk, giving us a chance to imagine the possibilities of what could be promising careers. In this dispatch is a coming-of-age statement, an erotic thriller, and a queer rodeo documentary. Each feels fearless in their artistic approach and aesthetic sensibilities.
The most accomplished of the three is Walter Thompson-Hernández’s gorgeously composed South Los Angeles coming-of-age film “If I Go Will They Miss Me.” An adaptation of his same-titled short, the lyrical narrative is defined by a bracing sense of wonder and an evocatively delivered humanism that, initially, is an ode to Charles Burnett’s thoughtful social realist dramas.
During the film’s soaring opening montage, Lil Ant (Bodhi Dell), a perceptive teenager whose father Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson) has recently been released from prison, tells us via voiceover about his father’s first brush with trouble. While Jon Baptiste croons a cover of “This Bitter Earth,” Lil Ant recalls that his dad was once a fun-loving kid, who found problems when he threw a brick at a janitor from a rooftop. While Lil Ant imparts this tale, Thompson-Hernández and his co-editor Daysha Broadway nimbly intercut scenes of his father’s past frivolity with contemporaneous images of his father and mother Lozita (Danielle Brooks) shouldering the weight of Big Ant’s absence. The latter sentiment is visually transposed over Big Ant and Lozita engaging in a stiff slow dance that recalls Henry G. Sanders and Kaycee Moore’s burdensome swaying in Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep.”
As Thompson-Hernández’s film progresses it delves deeper into Lil Ant and Big Ant’s shared anxieties about their father-son relationship. Lil Ant looks up to his dad, even brandishing a smaller version of his dad’s gold “A” necklace over his white t-shirt. Lil Ant’s sensitivity startles Big Ant, who worries that his artist son has placed him on too high of a pedestal. Lil Ant, in fact, literally sees his father as a Greek god by drawing his dad as Poseidon and his horse as Pegasus (a nod to Burnett’s own depiction of Black people’s Western heritage in his short “The Horse”). Big Ant, conversely, is haunted by visions of Black kids, such as his son, standing outside in unison with outstretched arms as though they’re flying. Escaping one’s surroundings via the air—Lil Ant wants to be a pilot when he grows up—recalls African-American folkloric art and stories, which conceived of Black people escaping enslavement by soaring away. Consequently, Thompson-Hernández includes copious scenes of Lil Ant staring at jets in the sky and playing with his own toy airplanes.
Thompson-Hernández combines these poetics elements with an innate sense of time and place, often capturing the South Los Angeles area and the many changes that have occurred in Watts over the decades to depict a community that is both caring yet precarious for young Black men. Big Ant, in fact, rejects Lil Ant’s devotion when the latter starts engaging in increasingly dangerous behavior. The father also begins to drift away from Lozita’s love. Their difficult marital trial finds potent life in Nicholson and Brooks’ organic chemistry, which is defined by Nicholson’s ability to project fragility within his physical frame and Brooks’ capacity for folding her easeful presence into his volatility.
Thompson-Hernández bolsters Nicholson, Brooks, Dell, and the film’s other delicate characters by crafting piercing portraits that give a visual voice to the inherent joys and unique rhythms of Black life. The film has several waves of these montages, hitting closer to one’s emotional heart with each instance. In that and in many ways, “If I Go Will They Miss Me” is both the kind of new, vibrant pursuit that has often defined Sundance, and is also the announcement of an exciting, impactful voice in director Walter Thompson-Hernández.
Georgia Bernstein’s erotic comedy “Night Nurse” doesn’t beat around the proverbial bush either. Heck, the film begins with a woman sexually role playing as a granddaughter begging for help from her grandfather. The camera travels up, down, and across the spiral telephone cord that slenderly wraps itself around her body. This steamy prologue culminates in ecstasy.
Before long, we’re introduced to the recently hired Eleni (Cemre Paksoy), a nurse assigned to care for Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), a troublesome sex pest who supposedly has dementia. In reality, Douglas is a con artist. Rather than having cognitive decline, he cunningly coerces his nurses to call other helpless elderly residents in this gated retirement community to pose as their granddaughter. In this scenario the granddaughter is usually in jail or being held hostage and needs their grandfather to send $10k. The confused old men always send the money, helping to furnish Douglas’ extravagant lifestyle. As the opening teases, this con, of course, has a sexual component too. When Douglas “bends” Eleni to his will, he lustfully pins her against the fridge. Parksoy’s performance, particularly her wide eyes, at this moment is incredible. Initially you can’t discern whether she’s enjoying this assault or is frozen by fear. Nevertheless, as Douglas rises to Svengali-like heights, we come to find that Eleni doesn’t simply want to please her patient. She is obsessed with him.
At times, “Night Nurse” recalls both Steven Shainberg’s “Secretary” and Cronenberg’s “Crash.” The former arises from Eleni and Douglas’ complex relationship that blends her occupation with her submissiveness. For the latter, it’s the presentation of psychic fixation as a kind of sexual subculture. Nevertheless, the film somewhat loses its intrigue by rendering Eleni as a cipher. While people who are susceptible to cults are often empty vessels waiting to be filled with the personality of a dominant figure, Eleni is a tad too abstract. There are even points where she seemingly disappears. The unsteady focus on her is certainly indicative of Douglas’ wandering point of view, visually furthering the angst she feels when she’s ignored. Still, that intent doesn’t wholly work dramatically, to the point that when we arrive at the coy ending, its tenderness appears to be forced.
That lack of commitment doesn’t undo the eloquent framing and uneasy close-ups that gives this film its haunting verve. Nor does it diminish Parksoy and McKenzie’s imposing performances and the film’s wonderfully awkward comedy. The ending is just too giving for a film that succeeds best when it cedes nothing.
Dreamlike and frank, Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig’s “Jaripeo” is a clear-eyed survey of the queer culture that exists within Michoacán’s hypermasculine rodeos. From the outset, “Jaripeo” has a clear direction, literally. The opening scene features a white toyota truck winding through the hills surrounding Michoacán, reaching a crest where a vast expanse of corn fields can be seen. Mojica is the driver, while Zweig occupies the back seat. From this spot, Mojica recalls their experiences visiting the rodeos where drunkenness, partying, flirtation, and queer desires take hold. Mojica and Zweig also speak to the many gay men who parse their lustful fixation on masculinity, either in themselves or in their flings and partners.
“Jaripeo” isn’t a long film. It runs at a controlled 70 minutes. Nevertheless, it accomplishes a great deal via its aesthetic tastes—which mixes grounded vérité sequences with stylized Super 8 delights—and its ability to embed us within a community by way of its graceful curiosity rather than any anthropological fascinations.
Because Mojica hails from Penjamillo, the filmmakers locate substantial, oftentimes immersive images of rural rodeos. In one scene the camera is in the bucking chute with the rider as they try to mount a bull, and often absorbs the balletic sensuality of the male form as they hope to remain locked to the muscular body bucking underneath them. The onlookers are a mix of queer fem and masc men, and heterosexuals. The rodeos here serve as liminal spaces where the separation between closeted discretion and open frivolity is as tight as the jeans on these many cowboys. In several of the one-on-one conversations between Mojica and these subjects, they discuss how often they’re approached by “straight” men who only want to hang out at night, preferably wasted—further establishing these daylight rodeo excursions negotiated instances of presentation and acceptance.
Mojica and Zweig also offer opportunities for their shared imagination to flourish in the film’s many fantastical stagings. In one instance, a man in a charro suit boldly occupies the frame. The camera elegantly whip pans around him as vivid hues of pinks and blues flash across his face. At some point, he is enveloped in stars before the camera, coyly, reveals that he’s in a dry desert on a mechanical bull. In another, more overtly erotic sequence, cowboys in a cornfield are heard moaning and groaning while red strobe light envelopes their bodies. The ability to do that kind of balancing between the real and the fantastical, notating their shared presence in a small town that sometimes requires a person to modulate their personal presentation, is what makes “Jaripeo” a funny and slick celebration of rural queer life.
