South Mountain
In my last dispatch from Austin I pinpointed the Visions section as a shortcut to South by Southwest’s generally more adventurous programming, if only to facilitate sifting through a number of arcane plot summaries. High-profile acts are bound to the festival thanks to tradition, release date timing, and in some cases city loyalty (think Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Terrence Malick’s Song to Song; both were shot in Austin and both ultimately premiered at SXSW). It would seem that some worthy but inconspicuous titles could easily fall between the cracks, though pioneers like Barry Jenkins prove otherwise (a relatively unknown talent at the time, his 2007 South By debut, Medicine for Melancholy, marks one of the festival’s greatest premieres).
This year’s Global section I found particularly fertile, with titles ranging from X&Y, artist Anna Oddell’s experimental film inquisition of public personas and gender roles, to Marlén Viñayo’s Cachada: The Opportunity, a documentary about a group of working-class Salvadoran women that stage a performative re-enactment of their traumatic life stories. Of the eight films in the section, half were from Latin America—I imagine an intentional decision for the Texan programming team, and a refreshing one at that.
Worth singling out is Colombian director Catalina Arroyave Restrepo’s debut film, Days of the Whale, a deceptively conventional coming-of-age romance set in a modern Medellín liberated from the associational trappings of Pablo Escobar. An inoffensively plain story about restless teens that turn to art as a source of community, solace, and protest, the film glints lyrical beauty in its artful moments of respite from the dramatic hustle and bustle of adolescent feels and looming backyard dangers. While the film’s grounded lo-fi approach bears no resemblance to the saturated magical realism of Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego (for audiences outside of Latin America, perhaps Colombia’s best known contemporary filmmakers), the film does make occasional nods to the country’s Márquezian tradition with an intriguing, if slightly awkward animal motif.
Speaking of country-specific films, I found myself unexpectedly taken by a Narrative Spotlight selection that by design divests its characters of nationality. Jeremy Teicher’s Olympic Dreams is a sufficiently endearing romantic comedy that dallies in a modest story of intentional uneventfulness against the high voltage backdrop of one of the world’s greatest sporting events. Two strangers meet and flex their excellent chemistry; one is an Olympic cross-country skier (Alexi Pappas) fresh off a disappointing run and consequently skeptical of the value of her lifelong competitive efforts. The other is an older man, a longtime Olympics enthusiast (Nick Kroll) who comes to the games as a volunteer dentist after being dumped. Filmed during the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, Teicher (thanks to frequent collaborator and former Olympian, Pappas) was granted unprecedented access to the athlete’s village, where the bulk of the events take place. Teicher’s debut feature, Tall as the Baobab Tree (2013), a lovely documentary about arranged marriages in Senegal, was followed by Tracktown (2017), an earnest but generic indie romance also starring Pappas. Both of these older films revel in sweet simplicity, and Olympic Dreams’ lullaby mumblecore romance follows this trajectory while carving out a thoughtful counter-narrative to the guts and glory of the sports movie.
But my fiercest discovery amongst the outliers is perhaps the least ostentatious of the bunch, Hilary Brougher’s graceful portrait of a matriarch in transitional crisis, South Mountain. As with her most celebrated work, Stephanie Daley (2006), Brougher’s fourth feature film is a majestic character study, less psychologically flashy than the Amber Tamblyn and Tilda Swinton infanticide drama, but comparably brimming with turbid interiority.
The story of a free-spirited family of artists coping with profound change over the course of a summer, South Mountain takes place entirely at the modest home of Lila (Talia Balsam) and husband, Edgar (Scott Cohen), shrouded like an Eden in the foliage of the Catskill Mountains. The film opens to the family lounging outdoors with friends, nonchalantly chatting through bites of fruit and sips of beer; plastic chairs planted into the dirt, kids scurrying in and out of laps and the property’s outdoor sauna. There’s a warm, breezy harmony to this set-up, which tiptoes in and out conversations, recalling hazy summer memories with flashes of exposed skin, and itchy tufts of grass spotted with dandelions. Change is palpably on the horizon—Lila’s eldest daughter is planning to take a long sailing trip around the world with no clear end date, and Lila’s best friend is days away from starting chemotherapy. The film’s central drama, however, swiftly reveals itself when Edgar excuses himself from the get-together under the guise of work to witness the birth of his lover’s baby by video chat in a locked room. Shortly after, he makes the decision to leave Lila with the intention of raising his newborn son in Brooklyn.
Part of the film’s magic lays in its unabashedly homespun appearance, its lovely micro-budget open seams that complement the tousled realism of the script. While the typical “divorce drama” so often plays out with procedural impetus, Lila’s is not a story of the grieving wife coping with the shock of betrayal, but rather that of a woman struggling to reaffirm her self-worth independent of others. Thus the film veers into piquant sensuality in one moment, teases macabre intrigue in the next, and anticipates clear-headed sanguinity in its final notes. Shifting easily from eye-shaking vulnerability to coy hunger, Talia Balsam proves she’s severely underworked as an actress, more than capable of acing the types of roles historically given to someone like Kate Winslet.
Brougher’s films are too far and few in the over twenty year span between South Mountain and her first feature, an odd tale of time-traveling lesbian women, The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997). This should serve as a testament to the industry’s penchant for neglecting female voices, though South Mountain marks for Brougher a fed-up resolve to take things into her own hands. In an interview with FilmmakerMagazine, the director confirms the creative freedoms afforded by the DIY approach: “At this point . . .no more waiting for decades. I’d like to leave a body of work.”