Sundance 2006;
The Continental Divide

By Mark Peranson

According to the grizzled Sundance Kid himself, possibly transferring his own perceptible decay to the weathered film festival he founded, the Sundance festival is at its “breaking point,” and the majority of the press seems to be in agreement, with Variety as its standard-bearer. Redford’s argument that there are “two Sundances,” one for the star-loving industry, and one for the filmmakers (“we’re showing the same kinds of films we always were”), aren’t exactly echoed by the media, whose excoriation of the cinema on display have taken on scratched-record ubiquity. Despite the atrocity of the 10 million dollar purchase Little Miss Sunshine—a film that even my customs agent on the way back home had heard of—I doubt a record was broken for the number of awful movies shown in 2006, and, in fact, there were many good ones. That Sundance’s two best films went on to win awards at Rotterdam and Berlin, while being largely ignored in Park City, is indicative of the worthlessness of any such death knells, by the media or the festival itself. (Of course, you could have just gone to Rotterdam and Berlin, but I’ll let that slide.)

Calls for the death of Sundance—and, at the same time, the death of American independent cinema, exacerbated by the news that the Weinsteins pulled the plug on Wellspring’s operation as a theatrical distributor—are more than just premature: they’re  off-base. American independent cinema is healthier than it’s been in a decade, though by health I’m just talking about the upper tier of films produced in the past few years that seem energized by the political situation as well as the possibilities of digital cinema. The best thing some American filmmakers have learned from Sundance over its existence is that bigger isn’t necessarily better, and the two standouts from 2006—Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy and So Yong Kim’s In Between Days—are direct participants in this debate, their means (and methods) of production being antithetical to the Hollywood paradigm, thanks to the palpable influence of, among others, contemporary Asian cinema.

More crucially, in the days of Little Miss Sunshine, both Old Joy and In Between Days are examples of what is known for now as “filmmaking”: like almost half of the Sundance feature-length films, and over half of the Narrative Competition, both works were presented on HD (though Old Joy was shot on Super 16, the transfer and quality of presentation—at Sundance, at least—is so good that it signifies that the film-video debate is in its waning stages; see davekehr.com more on this topic). Most crucially, both films are very much of the present, and are attuned to all five senses, as well as that sixth sense so rarely elicited in narrative, independent, filmmaking: the sense of place. (With a few exceptions, Scott MacDonald’s The Garden in the Machine discusses place mainly in the context of experimental cinema, but certainly can provide a framework for an elaboration of this trend.) Old Joy and In Between Days point to the collapse of the myth of one “America” in a way that the red-state/blue-state debate has heightened, and the types of narratives that will follow in their wake will expand on these fissures (caused by political, social, and geographic difference). The result will be to an entirely different American independent cinema beyond both the Cassavetes inspired cinema of personal crisis, and the Tarantino-inspired aesthetic fireworks.

Based on a short story by Jon Raymond (that has not arrived from amazon.com as of writing), the action of Old Joy begins in Portland, then moves to Oregon’s lush Cascade Mountains, its two leads in search of a quasi-mystical oasis, the Bagby Hot Springs near Mount Hood.* The camping trip in Old Joy is a kind of Edenic descent, imbibed by an almost Malickian transcendentalism. The two actors in the Cain-Abel story inhabit their characters in a way that transcends their blatant types: Kurt (Will Oldham), the slightly paunched post-hippie with the receding hairline, bushy beard, and never-present promise; Mark (Daniel London), the once-wilder, now-responsible father-to-be, intent on putting the Kurt part of his life behind him, but also silently nostalgic for the days when he could throw everything aside on a second’s notice and head off to Burning Man, or maybe protest against an unjust war, the spread of nuclear power, or the tearing down of paradise to put up a parking lot (though he still finds the time to help erect a community garden).

Far more than the lo-fi indie riff on Brokeback Mountain or Sideways that many have already played it up to be, the intricately layered Old Joy is many things, among them an elegy for that last true cinematic revolution in American filmmaking, the over-enshrined and mythologized Seventies. It’s a male-bonding on-the-road picture, which features the boys getting lost and camping out (see Easy Rider), regrouping the next morning for breakfast in a roadside diner: a scene unfurls that’s shades of the Oregon-shot Five Easy Pieces, but without the machismo or testosterone—Reichardt’s touch? While Oldham does his best to remain laid-back, a spicy bit of Jack sneaks through in his mildly aggravated reaction to London’s order of “dry toast” as he runs off to take a call from the wife (…“not too wet…make it damp”), punctuated by a perfectly inserted close-up. The scene is pitch perfect from both actors (as they are for most of the film), and it’s the closest thing that Old Joy has to an Oscar clip (it was the one shown, actually, at the Tiger awards ceremony in Rotterdam).

Just in the way that American filmmakers of the ‘70s imbibed the influence of Jack’s friend Antonioni, to invoke one name, Reichardt also has her eyes, ears, and mind squarely on the art cinema that the Wellsprings of the world were intent on bringing to American theatres. Old Joy may be a stoner Blissfully Yours, which I say in the best sense: essentially a Cascadian nature film, Reichardt’s film is sensatory and full of room for interpretation. (Reichardt has elsewhere acknowledged the influence of Apichatpong’s film.) It begins with a bird perched on an eave, though it might as well be a wire, as Old Joy also concerns itself with the question of what it means to be free in Bush’s America, throwing two interpretations of individual freedom together, watching the very muted sparks fly, and wondering if there is some common ground—in, among other things, the American left. (Mark’s radio is tuned to Air America.) Old Joy made some news at Sundance for the festival’s decision, strangely criticized by its own director, Geoffrey Gilmore, to shuffle the film out to the boondocks of the Frontier section, rather than compete alongside the latest works from Joey Lauren Adams and Bobcat Goldthwait. Yet Old Joy’s narrative could not be more classical, the three acts divided by musical driving interludes courtesy of Yo La Tengo, and an epilogue which whispers volumes about some of the dreams the country has left behind.

An equally tactile experience, the Sundance-standard coming-of-age film In Between Days exults the real, in the political way that the Dardennes do the same, in the way that Akerman sometimes does it, in a way that’s immediately recognizable to anyone who has grown up in Toronto (the film, I’ll argue, can be read as a documentary about Toronto bus shelters; this, I am impelled to add, is one very minor reading). Director So Yong Kim and producer-cowriter Bradley Rust Gray didn’t grow up in Toronto, really have spent little time there, and the film isn’t even set in Canada, if you want to get picky about it—the film is loosely based on Kim’s experiences as a Korean émigré in Los Angeles, and that the film was even made in Canada was purely a financial consideration. (Reichardt, I should add, grew up in Florida, not Oregon.) And despite the lack of any subway footage, their film has this (paradoxical) alienated specificity—the sublime crunch of snow underneath her lead actor as she impassively trudges, Rosetta-like (but without Émilie Dequenne’s invisible jet-propulsion pack), beneath her hooded jacket on frosty, treeless North York parking lots, speaks to their ability as filmmakers, but also to the universality of that in-between period known as adolescence. (Gray’s prior film, Salt, shot in Iceland with Icelandic-speaking actors and finally receiving a Canadian release in 2006, is evidence of very much the same undeniable tautology: artists are artists.)

Though the DV shooting is both concise and poetic, Kim’s film doesn’t draw attention to itself, just like its main character: Aimie (Jieson Kim), recently arrived to North America from South Korea with her divorced mother, who, we find out, has fallen for Tran, her best male friend, though he’s a classic teen waffler. Sex is a subject left undiscussed between mother and child, and Aimie isn’t sure how to handle the situation, or, really, what she wants (when Aimie is willing to give it up is a matter of intentional debate). Strung together like a chain of narrative pearls by semi-improvised episodes of hanging out in Koreatown coffee shops, snow-trudging, fooling around, and that teen film stand-by, the party scene, the film observes her reaching her own conclusions, gaining confidence (epitomized in a dynamic karaoke scene), and, one can say, beginning the first steps towards something like Americanization. Unlike Little Miss Sunshine, with its pat pull-moral—“Life is one fucking beauty pageant after the other”—In Between Days refuses to answer anything, preferring to present genuine emotion. Almost prototypical in its subtlety, it’s the kind of film that some critics (see, Variety) assume audiences will hate, complaining about its lack of action, but nothing could be further from the truth: show In Between Days to a bunch of kids who are familiar with The Cure, and they’ll find more in the film than anything else that was ignobly unfurled in the Dramatic Competition (it did win a Special Jury prize for Independent Vision, which I suppose is a pseudonym for “film not likely to get distribution,” before going on to take the FIPRESCI prize in Berlin, where it screened in the Forum).

Is In Between Days an American film? A Canadian film? A Korean film? A Sundance film? A film that Wellspring could have distributed? All of them, and this resistance to easy categorization is what makes In Between Days (and, likewise, Old Joy) truly exciting. It’s also an East Coast film. And just like last year’s Seattle Sundance critical favourite Police Beat, I doubt Old Joy could have been made anywhere other than the West Coast. (And 40 Shades of Blue could not have been made anywhere other than Memphis.) Such regional specificity might run its course once Cascadia secedes from both unions, but this focused attention on place, combined with the fertile possibilities of cultural interchange is the true future of independent cinema. Just as Kim, whether consciously or not, looked northwards—and made a film better than anything else produced in Canada in the last year—Canadian filmmakers would be better served to look outwards at places other than Hollywood. Canada, of course, has infiltrated Hollywood from the very beginning, and continues to do so surreptitiously; the other Sundance competition stand-out, Half Nelson, while also speaking to a miasmatic sense of the American left, could easily have turned ridiculous were it not for the performance of Ryan Gosling (at times sporting an American flag Band Aid on his face—a bit too much), the supremely talented Londonite who has better watch out he doesn’t get typecast as the sensitive, intelligent, junkie/Nazi/fuck-up. Watch out America: the revolution’s already begun, and it’s being projected.

*For those inclined to a Sideways-like Old Joy jaunt, see www.nwhotsprings.net/bagby.htm for details and directions. The wayward Kurt apparently lacks a decent Internet connection.

In Between Days

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