Magazine Dreams (Elijah Bynum, 2023).
The Sundance Film Festival returned this year for its first in-person edition since the oblivious winter of 2020, when Zola was the talk of Park City and the coronavirus still seemed like something that Purell could contain. During two consecutive years of virtual iterations, Sundance managed to launch visionary, critically-praised narrative features onto dissimilar post-festival trajectories. Rebecca Hall’s Passing, a provocative adaptation of Nella Larsen’s novella, rode out awards season on the considerable strengths of its lead performances, only to fizzle out come Oscar time. Conversely, the Academy Awards triumph of Siân Heder’s CODA, now the first festival selection to win Best Picture, is surely fueling the daydreams of many past, present, and future Sundance-stamped filmmakers. Acquired by Apple for $25 million and showered with a $10 million awards campaign that equaled its production budget, CODA seems to offer definitive proof that no matter how visually flat and emotionally manipulative one’s mediocrity may be, they might one day be able to thank their agent while sharing a stage with Jimmy Kimmel. It is a shame that the name “Sundance” is so closely aligned with CODA and rarely associated with recent selections like Passing or Jane Schoenbrun’s genre-agnostic We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which may very well age into cult stature; or Amalia Ulman’s tangy, monochromatic mother-daughter comedy El Planeta; or Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s Utama, a majestic Bolivian drama about an elderly Quechua couple facing a dying way of life.
Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams is a film that will certainly be floated for awards contention in the months to come, if only for its leading man, Jonathan Majors, among the more promising stars to emerge in the past five years. Majors’s ripped, bulging physique is the film’s primary landscape, a site of visual fascination that the camera endlessly traverses and inspects. The actor pushes his magnetism and musculature to the brink as Killian Maddox, a supermarket worker hellbent on making a name for himself as an amateur bodybuilder. Killian, the lone caretaker of his elderly grandfather (Harrison Page), spends his spare hours in the gym and gorges himself on calorie-busting meals (one of his lighter spreads involves a dozen eggs) in the hopes of emulating the elite models whose scantily-clad physiques paper the walls of his bedroom. But what begins as an intriguing exploration of a severely disturbed misfit’s monomania and history of violence soon devolves into strident bombast and heaving, empty-headed hysteria.
The archetypes and main beats of Bynum’s screenplay are indebted to Taxi Driver, which is not in and of itself any kind of demerit; after all, Scorsese’s film famously drew from The Searchers. The trouble is that the writer-director glibly ties Killian’s story to noncommittal treatments of mental illness, police brutality, sexual coercion, and gun violence that further emphasize the shallowness of his Travis Bickle mimicry. (He also tasks Haley Bennett and Taylour Paige with vivifying two of the paltriest roles for women in recent times as, respectively, Killian’s checkout-counter crush and a barely-there sex worker.) In Bynum’s hands, Killian becomes a grotesquery and a truly monstrous force, a choice that requires Majors to rehash the same thuddingly obvious outbursts and breakdowns; the actor’s teeth-gnashing, ear-splitting effort is not a means to a deeper embodiment of the character but the sum total of a performance that seldom dials itself down from 11. Bynum’s shameless commitment to puerile shock value means that gay sex registers as the sordid nadir of the character’s debasement, an act too humiliating to even be glimpsed onscreen, and a contrivance that reveals no complexity to Killian but only augments his rage, peppering it with some homophobic revulsion. This is what two decades of Darren Aronofsky’s frenetic maximalism have wrought on American independent cinema: a self-consciously kinetic style that embroiders characters whose suffering says little about their lives and everything about the directors who have backed them into these corners, only to watch them squirm.
Sometimes I Think About Dying (Rachel Lambert, 2023).
A similar gussied-up vagueness afflicts Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying, in which Daisy Ridley makes for an absent center as Fran, an introverted office drudge who is prone to aesthetically pleasing suicidal ideation, like lying unconscious in a picturesque woodland or washed-up on an Instagrammable shoreline. This changes when Fran strikes up a courtship with her new coworker Robert (Dave Merheje), a sweet, twice-divorced, corny joke–telling cinephile. But Lambert’s drama—adapted from both a 2019 short film by Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead and a 2013 play by Kevin Armento, all of whom are credited cowriters here—mistakes introversion for emptiness and a bundle of quirky predilections for a fully formed character. Uninterested in locating, much less investigating, what generates Fran’s despair or her bleakly embellished visions of self-harm, the film’s trio of screenwriters treats her joyless, friendless life as a given for a single, working woman in her twenties. Fran is the type of socially inept female character who is ultimately blind to all of the things that make her unique, until her memory is jogged by the suitor who really sees her.
Hermetically sealed off from any semblance of an outside world, Lambert’s film propels its woeful lack of particulars to a trite thesis about Only Connecting. The isolation of the pandemic came up aplenty during the introduction and Q&A for the film’s opening-night premiere, a reminder of how many of these festival talkbacks blur the line between illuminating the making and personal meaning of a movie and blatantly ventriloquizing an audience’s coveted response. Curiously, the most compelling moment of Sometimes I Think About Dying bears little significance to Fran’s narrative: late in the film, Lambert trains her camera on Marcia DeBonis, playing a retired colleague of Fran’s, and refuses to budge as the veteran character actress nails a naturalistic monologue that exposes how vulnerable our envisioned futures are to life’s painful vagaries.
The Starling Girl (Laurel Parmet, 2023).
Certain fiction features were likewise redeemed or, in the case of Alice Englert’s amorphous mother-daughter dramedy Bad Behaviour, made bearable by a single performance. Englert’s exasperating debut offers the novelty of seeing Jennifer Connelly attempt a crunchy, unidealized role, which unleashes something feral and soul-broken in an actress usually called upon for glacial composure. Penélope Cruz is the playful, powerful, and always prepossessing highlight of Emanuele Crialese’s Venice holdover L’Immensità, portraying a housewife who has no use for the rigid, rule-bound company of adults who merely enervate and misunderstand her. And although Anne Hathaway is reaping deserved praise for her sauntering, scintillating Hitchcock blonde in William Oldroyd’s adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, it is Marin Ireland who really holds the audience and the film captive with a climactic monologue of unhinged potency.
None of these films inspired the emotional involvement of Laurel Parmet’s dramatically familiar but admirably tough-minded The Starling Girl, which premiered alongside Bynum’s and Lambert’s films in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. Eliza Scanlen stars as Jemima “Jem” Starling, a Christ-devoted 17-year-old who defies the high-minded parishioners of her rural Kentucky town by pursuing an affair with her married youth pastor (Lewis Pullman). Free of the easy ridicule that accompanies most depictions of fundamentalism, Parmet’s first feature is distinguished by its ruminative sensitivity towards its characters’ relationships to God, its respectful regard for teenage sexual curiosity and age-inappropriate romantic infatuation, and its self-abnegating lead performance. The Australian Scanlen invests tremendous, febrile feeling in this multidimensional heroine who strives to be good in the all-seeing eyes of the Lord but is emboldened by rising, inextinguishable desire.
Parmet possesses a clear-eyed view of a protagonist whose faith is in near-constant flux, as well as those within her orbit. Rather than position this churchgoing community as a scapegoat, she frames it as a milieu ripe for critical inquiry. Through Jem’s story, Parmet alights on the ways in which shame is instilled in young, pious minds by adults who insist on making so much space for God that there is little room for oneself, in turn squelching any capacity for individual expression. The film’s secondary and tertiary characters contain layers, from Jem’s close-minded but fiercely protective mother (Wrenn Schmidt) to her pitiful father (Jimmi Simpson), an alcoholic former musician unable to cope with his distance from the secular world. But it is Jem who remains the film’s focus, her turmoil vividly captured in the flickers of doubt that disrupt the wonder in Scanlen’s gaze, in the brush of her flushed cheek against clasped hands as her character kneels by her bedside in soul-saving prayer.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Raven Jackson, 2023).
On the whole, the strongest narrative films I saw at Sundance this year didn’t overreach for real-world relevance outside the scope of their events—say, by gesturing obscurely to the upheaval of COVID or the pressures of Toxic Masculinity—but rather channeled their concerns directly into stories capable of speaking for themselves. They were films, like The Starling Girl, that informed our perception of the outside world, rather than relying on the outside world to lend them added import. Their makers weren’t holding up mirrors to society or assembling ostentatious empathy machines, but crafting narratives with ample breathing room for their characters, offering them necessary freedom to exist without intent.
No feature at Sundance this year better embodied this mode of cinematic storytelling than Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, a sensory experience that elliptically unfolds the setbacks faced by several generations of a Black family in rural Mississippi, as witnessed by the wide-open eyes of one of its kin, Mack, played at various ages by Kaylee Nicole Johnson, Charleen McClure (like the director, a multitalented poet), and Zainab Jah. Assembled with time-bending verve by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s trusted editor Lee Chatametikool, Jackson’s first feature leaps and lands across decades, making associations that are determined less by logic than the tug of memory and the pangs of a grief-stricken heart. Instead of spoon-feeding us exposition, Jackson often embeds us with characters without rushing to identify them so that we dwell in scenes of many moods—joyous, sullen, aroused, despondent, content. All of this comes alive in lushly textured visuals that root Mack’s family among the elements; the camera of DP Jomo Fray luxuriates in caked clay, sodden soil, the murk of a riverbed, the slimy gills of caught fish, and the dirt and dust to which Mack’s flesh and blood return. Sound invites and enfolds us, from cacophonous thunderstorms, to the music of cicadas, to the breath-catching seconds of idle chatter that separate Gladys Knight’s husky belting from the crackling fire of Roberta Flack’s cover of a Leonard Cohen lament.
The latter effect manifests in a stunningly sensuous scene in which Mack’s mother (Sheila Atim) and father (Chris Chalk) attain bliss on the dance floor during a house party. Planting herself in Mack’s child’s-eye view, Jackson illustrates this duet in a symphony of objects and movements: the charge of eyes spotting each other across a room, the slippery interlacing of fingers, the dull gleam of a gold tooth, the milky white of a pair of pearl earrings, the ebb and flow of two bodies that keep finding new ways of stepping, swaying, and fitting together. The filmmaker’s rigorously considered framing ensures that All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is as much a film about arms and hands, which incarnate the holding and letting go of those eternally loved, as it is about faces that carry and convey the sum total of a life. Jackson’s film stares attentively at the past yet points to a potential future of American independent narrative cinema, one in which everyday stories are told intentionally and inventively with all of the medium-specific instruments at an artist’s disposal.
Passages (Ira Sachs, 2023).
Certain images from All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt—a burning house, an uninterrupted embrace between lovers—endure in the mind with a tangible clarity that the festival experience’s hodgepodge usually prohibits. The same can be said of Ira Sachs’s Paris-set Passages, a beautifully bilious piece of work that sees its rejuvenated writer-director drawing inspiration from Pialat, Godard, Pasolini, and other formative European auteurs. In his strongest and most gripping film since Love Is Strange (2014), Sachs dramatizes the fluctuating dynamics between the temperamental Tomas (Franz Rogowski), a film director; his long-suffering partner Martin (Ben Whishaw), who runs a print shop; and the well-adjusted Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a primary school teacher who sparks up a sexual-turned-domestic relationship with Tomas. From this triad, Sachs and cowriter Mauricio Zacharias spin a tale that throbs and shivers with eros and envy, a drama wholly attuned to how unpredictable our desires are, but also how expansive. These desires come alive in Passages in scenes of rough and rapturous coitus between ruddy, panting, and at times comically clumsy partners, including a single-take rut that stands as one of the franker and hotter representations of gay sex in contemporary cinema.
The intimacy on display here is nuanced so that pockets of calm break up the fever pitch: in one scene, Tomas and Agathe sit in the morning light and sing to each other, inspired to share as much as they can of themselves, in both body and soul. If Sachs and editor Sophie Reine assemble their scenes like fragments in a busted mirror—the latter’s abrupt cuts escalate some nasty narrative twists that not only alarm but unmoor these characters—then Rogowski’s performance is the crack running through it. As Tomas, first glimpsed on set punctiliously and then irately micromanaging the movements of his extras, Rogowski makes yet another compelling case for himself as the finest actor of his generation, fervently exposing every wart on this ravenous, pleasure-guided narcissist while also conveying his fragility. Whishaw, as Rogowski’s foil, is a measured and increasingly moving presence, while Exarchopoulos’s gorgeously direct approach defines Agathe as a woman free of illusions and pretense, one slowly realizing that physical attraction is not a solid enough foundation on which to build her future. The film’s sole sore spot is Ahmad, played by Erwan Kepoa Falé, a sensitive Black novelist who becomes involved with Martin yet ends up feeling tangential to a narrative in which he could have easily been a more active quadrant; aside from one pointed kiss-off, Falé’s character is regrettably underdeveloped.
In an era of independent narrative filmmaking bogged down by The Discourse’s incessant obsession with unlikable characters (and “gratuitous” sex scenes), Passages feels like a revelation whenever Tomas is on screen. Sachs and Rogowski capture the multitudes of the character—his pettiness, his beauty, his arrogance, his heart—with a pointillism that amuses, enthralls, and finally devastates. Sachs is uninterested in protecting his protagonist or his audience from danger; we feel, as Tomas does, the fear of not knowing. Awash in red light in the film’s final close-up, Rogowski’s dazed face captures the overwhelming uncertainty of suddenly finding oneself a solitary man. Loneliness has at long last seized him—and it has seized us, too.