Ray Pride

"Don't give away the astonishing beginning!"

A slogan that could fit Christopher Nolan's momentous "Memento," a twisty thriller starring Guy Pearce as a detective who doesn't have amnesia, but a fifteen-minute window of short-term memory. Less astonishing than inevitable, that's how eleven days at Sundance unfold, with all the movies, great and awful, and nonstop conversation and logistical mayhem. Where did it begin?

There's always much to dispute with Sundance jury choices, but the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for "Memento" was apt, as was the Dramatic Audience Award for rock opera, "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," which also earned writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell the Dramatic Directing Award. A consummate confusion of genres, "Hedwig" is Mitchell's adaptation of the long-running off-Broadway success, charting the journey of a 1970s American rock-loving East Berliner, whose failed loves strand him in the U.S. after a botched sex-change. Camp yet pinpoint funny; it's Grimm gone dizzy. Mitchell is homely as Hedwig with her galvanized crimson metal-flake lips of flame, but charismatic with lovely wide haunted eyes, a gratified smile that blooms dimples and a beak that could end a swordfight with a single parry. The bawdy balladry by Stephen Trask is elevated by Mitchell's stirring, soaring voice.

I was cool toward Henry Bean's Dramatic Grand Jury Prize winner, the oft-schematic Jewish-boy-turns-skinhead drama "The Believer" (although its lead turns in a bravura performance of conflict and self-loathing.) Mostly, documentaries thrilled me this year, including Kirby Dick's "Chain Camera," in which ten video cameras filter through a west L.A. high school over the course of a school year. Touching, intimate and fresh, it's topped only by Maysles Films' "Lalee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton," by Susan Froemke, Deborah Dickson and Albert Maysles, with customarily adept cinematography by the 73-year-old veteran (who took best documentary cinematography honors). Maysles watches compassionately the plight of the extended family of Mississippi Delta resident Laura Lee Wallace, or "Lalee." The directorial triumvirate made several journeys south to chart the ups and downs of the weary but irrepressible Lalee's dozens of kids, grandkids and great-grandkids, whom she toils over all the hours of the day. As with the best Maysles Films' documentaries, much love is demonstrated through the simple act of listening.

Video and video projection filtered through the festival, including Bruce Wagner's gorgeously transferred intercut trio of monologues, "Women in Film." A woman on film who hypnotized is in "Maelstrom," Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve's lush, lovely, playful, outrageous second feature. While mannered and elliptical and sometimes downright perverse in its details, its look is immaculately cinematic. But video-as-video offered one of the fest's best, Daniel Minahan's "Series 7," a stirring satire of unreality television, a pre-"Survivor" script about a show in which seven good citizens are selected (unbeknownst to them), given weapons, and are followed by a camera crew through their stalk-and-kill paces. Funny, authentic to the inauthentic devices used to hype human drama on TV, even touching in spots and boasting an epic, cranky lead performance by Brooke Smith; it's grandly savage.

Barbet Schroeder's possibly-great "Our Lady of the Assassins" is serenely mature work. A story of impossible love against the backdrop of teenage contract killers in Medellin, Colombia, is a gem of magical miserabilism. Middle-aged writer Fernando (German Jaramillio, intense and wry) returns to home after many years, and he's startled by the mad daily life, its random shootings and absurd events. He meets a teenage boy, Alexis, and begins an affair. Violence escalates. Fernando blasphemes, speaks in cynical poetry of what he sees around him. But his lover's impulsive shootings fascinate him. The horror of living where life is unlivable is a grandiose spectacle, yet the film is as cool as its characters. "Our Lady" is one of the great portraits of how the writer talks, lives, and invents the greatness of their romantic others.

Michael Cuesta's Long Island-set suburban comedy of terrors, "L.I.E.," ventured into similar territory. Nervy and almost foolhardy, its themes could pass for a variation of Audrey Wells' "Guinevere," with an older person using adolescent "awe" to their own pedagogical, seductive advantage. Utterly unsentimental about teenage cruelty among its alternately dopey and clever kids, the story is also about the practice and pathology of pedophilia, inhabited by the great Brian Cox as predatory retired marine "Big John." With only a single line of self-reflection, Big John remains a sympathetic character, despite explicit dialogue that will likely drive the self-serious out in the open. A kind of "L'il Rascals" for a cold millennium, it shows up Todd Solondz's "Happiness" for the pretentious fraud that it is.

"Dream is destiny" is one of the first lines of Richard Linklater's remarkable "Waking Life." A philosophical cartoon, it is a daring and loopy singularity. More than an experiment, it's a psychedelic breakthrough. Wiley Wiggins plays a young dreamer whose thoughts spiral across the inner lives of seventy-four other characters. Shot in hand-held digital video, with eccentric, spacey animation digitally rotoscoped atop it, the effect is indeed lysergic and more charming than one might expect. Although everyone in Linklater's idealized Austin speaks like a fervent 25-year-old filled with knowledge, caffeine and hormones, it is a world, his world, and it speaks to everyone's dreams.

(02/01/2001)


What do you think? Sound off in the boards >

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment