Editor’s note: Sophia Nguyen is one of three recipients of the Sundance Institute’s Roger Ebert Fellowship for Film Criticism for 2016. The scholarship meant she participated in the Indiewire | Sundance Institute Fellowship for Film Criticism, a workshop at the Sundance Film Festival for aspiring film critics started by Eric Kohn, the chief film critic and senior editor of Indiewire.
Sundance’s Next section used to define its purpose bluntly:
to highlight “no- and low-budget filmmaking,” and what Festival Director John
Cooper called, in 2010, “an emerging counter culture within our counter
culture.” Six years in, the program’s stopped talking money in polite company
(though dubbing its members “a ‘greater’ next wave in American cinema” throws
back to when staffers referred to the section internally as <=>: “less is
greater than”). The vague mentions of “digital technology” and “”innovative,
forward-thinking approach” don’t really clarify Next’s reputation as the
oddball, catch-all section where movies are sheltered (or quarantined) from the
main competition. But this officially-stated sensibility, and that little
inside joke, go some way toward explaining the section’s broad interest in
youth—as well as its subtler, self-referential streak.
With feature debuts and sophomore efforts taking up most of
the 2016 class, it’s unsurprising that so many of this year’s Next flicks are
coming-of-age tales. But it is striking that two hinge on drug deals gone bad.
Comparing J.D. Dillard’s “Sleight” and Steven Caple Jr.’s “The Land” feels as
inevitable as it is unfair; “Sleight” (sorry, because this too is inevitable)
is slighter. A street magician named Bo starts dealing to care for his moppet
sister and shiny-haired girlfriend, and pisses off the local kingpin. Dillard
palms the sci-fi from Christopher Nolan: pursuing ever-greater illusions, Bo
makes himself into a cyborg, tinkering with batteries and his body. Can he pull
off one last disappearing act? When the good-kid-in-over-his-head story turns
into a superhero origin tale, “Sleight” feels like a cheap trick. It feels,
actually, like a mislabeled Marvel audition tape—too calculated to be any fun,
and too “fun” to break in its premise.
By contrast, “The Land” never stops
taking its story seriously. It has characters, not a modular set of pre-fab
genre tropes; their home feels real, and their poverty has consequences. Even
though the plot winds up just about where you’d expect, following this quartet
of skateboarders through the run-down neighborhoods and abandoned buildings of
Cleveland leads, in a meandering way, to the movie’s core revelation: how
recklessness can spring from wild need, for something bigger and brighter.
Another two movies concern arrested adolescence: Andre
Hyland’s “The 4th” and Tahir Jetter’s “How to Tell You’re a
Douchebag” are comedies about guys who should know better but don’t. Jamie,
falling into very stupid and strangely hilarious mishaps right before a holiday
cookout in “The 4th,” can’t seem to catch a break. Ray, the womanizing lead of “How
to Tell You’re a Douchebag,” can’t shut up—especially not in front of the media
star he’s crushing on, Rochelle. Set on opposite coasts (Los Angeles and
Brooklyn, respectively), these movies feel intensely local, populated with
sharply-drawn secondary characters. Still, there’s some neighboring, if not
shared, emotional territory: a no man’s land of twentysomething adulthood,
seeded with the small explosives of self-absorption.
Lest anyone think Next was a boys club this year, a trio of
films turned their gaze on feminine experience. “The Eyes of My Mother,” built
around the relationships of a young woman who lives alone on a farm, refracts
that experience through a funhouse mirror of Gothic horror. Its histrionic idea
of psychology verges on laughable—and only a male director would dress his
monstress in little lace lingerie—but the atmosphere of deep dread and
desperate loneliness, cut through with religiosity, makes the viewer into a
believer.
“First Girl I Loved” returns us to our universe, intimately focused
on Anne, a high-schooler discovering her sexual identity; her best friend
Clifton; and her crush, Sasha. Their story consists of ordinary joys and
injuries, which led some to dismiss the film’s collage-like construction as
manipulative, ginning up an unremarkable plot. But the characters’ hazy
memories and shrouded secrets—clarifying only through earned confidences, in
quiet spaces—feel painfully true.
Also anchored by a stunning lead
performance, Anna Rose Holmer’s “The Fits” takes a more dispassionate approach,
which only breaks in the final minutes. Toni, an eleven-year-old boxer,
switches over to the drill dance team, and thus to the other side of a
sex-segregated world. As the older girls suffer fainting spells, she watches
with powerful curiosity and, later, envy. The film is rigorously confined,
keeping close to the local recreation center. It’s a puberty narrative without
adults, and a hysteria narrative couched in physical prowess, not delicacy. But
Holmer’s movie guards its central mystery, refusing easy, one-off revelations.
While the other three films in Next don’t dwell on the
agonies of youth, this doesn’t save them from having mild existential crises
about image-making itself. They share a restless, introspective quality that
sometimes tips them over into solipsism. “Dark Night” unfolds over a tense day
before a movie theater shooting. Going about their lives, the six, largely
unnamed, characters all seem dislocated by screens and lenses: their necks
crane over their iPhones, they plug into video-games, they contort themselves
for selfies. Though the director, Tim Sutton, coolly withholds the after-school
special moral, his film expresses a deep mistrust of simulated worlds, and the
flattening and fracturing of our own.
Meanwhile, Matt Johnson’s “Operation Avalanche,” playing the
moon landing conspiracy with a straight face, is more cheerful about suspicion.
This warmly-lit found-footage fiction, about CIA agents who film a false Apollo
11 mission to fake out the Soviets, is essentially a buddy comedy and caper
movie: lovable nerds steal special effects from Kubrick out of patriotic duty,
messily documenting their process. The story stalls when it tries to take a
sharp right turn down “The Parallax View.” With a mentality owing more to
today’s technophiliac maker culture than to 1960s’ post-assassination paranoia,
it makes for an unconvincing political thriller.
The other movie making its DIY aesthetic into its story is
Bernardo Britto’s “Jacqueline (Argentine).” The mockumentary follows an unnamed
director and narrator (played by a mordant Wyatt Cenac) down to Argentina,
where he’s filming Jacqueline, who claims to be blowing the whistle on a plot
to assassinate an Arab politician. The plot is about whether there is one—is
Jacqueline ex-French intelligence, like she claims, or is she a fraud? And is
the movie crew also a target of the conspiracy, or are they just incompetent?
It’s a deadpan shaggy dog story, following their half-hearted efforts to invest
random events with significance and edit meaning into incident-free footage.
When, after their equipment goes missing, the intern-turned-cinematographer
grouses, “We’re shooting this on a f–king iPhone,” a knowing chuckle rippled
through the theater I was in. When the voiceover asks, midway through, “If the
world didn’t need it, and the world didn’t want it … what was the point?”—the
exercise began to feel more painful than playful.
This year’s Next offerings are loosely threaded
together by a common theme: individuals struggling to define themselves, and to
find meaning in what they do. The future of independent film, the so-called
“next wave in American cinema,” rarely leaps fully-formed from makers’ heads and into the world. But the growing pains are
interesting to watch.
