The West Indies

February 8, 2001 | This article appeared in the February 26, 2001 edition of The Nation.

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SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

About the Author

B. Ruby Rich

B. Ruby Rich, author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Duke) and correspondent for...

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Films (Arts and Entertainment)

The article focuses on two films "AmÃ©lie," directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and "Mulholland Drive," directed by David Lynch. These fantasies by directors at the top of their game depict invented universes where happiness and unhappiness trade places in a flash and the world as one knows it can be transformed by a fall down a rabbit hole. AmÃ©lie owes its incredible success in no small part to the immense appeal of newcomer Audrey Tautou in the lead role. It introduces its heroine as a little girl, imprisoned in a childhood ruled by a remote father who barely touches her and a warped mother who dies when hit by a suicide-bent tourist outside Notre Dame.

B. Ruby Rich

Twin Peaks (Politics)

Lifestyle sections have lately been detailing the public's renewed appetite for comfort food. If that rice-pudding desire translates to the big screen, then cinematic fairy tales that offer the reassurance of a bedtime story should benefit accordingly. Two such concoctions have arrived, one light as brioche and one grimmer than Grimm: Amélie, the latest fable from French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children), and its evil twin, Mulholland Drive, by America's own David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks). Visually dazzling and full of imagination, these fantasies by directors at the top of their game depict invented universes where happiness and unhappiness trade places in a flash and the world as we know it can be transformed by a fall down a rabbit hole.

Amélie owes its incredible success ($40 million in France alone since spring) in no small part to the immense appeal of newcomer Audrey Tautou in the lead role. Her very name invokes the actress with whom she's most likely to be compared--Audrey Hepburn at her Roman Holiday or Breakfast at Tiffany's stage, innocent still and ripe for discovery. For Frenchness, think Juliette Binoche--minus the sex appeal. Add a Louise Brooks haircut, the biggest eyes this side of cartoonland and a sense of prankishness borrowed from the Eloise books. Give the character a Mary Poppins way with magic and a sweetness that her surname ("Poulain" is a brand of chocolate) promises and, bon, there you have her: a child-woman for the ages.

Amélie introduces its heroine as a little girl, imprisoned in a childhood ruled by a remote father who barely touches her and a warped mother who dies when hit by a suicide-bent tourist outside Notre Dame. She quickly grows up into an adorable but shy young woman who works as a waitress in a quintessentially Parisian cafe packed equally with irritable and amiable characters. At home in her garret, she leads a solitary life reading, dreaming, watching television and spying on a neighboring recluse who endlessly repaints Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party. On her day off, she visits her daddy, who dotes on a garden shrine to his departed wife, topped by a colorful gnome.

On August 31, 1997, everything in Amélie's oddball universe changes with a thunderbolt: the death of Princess Diana! It is at this very moment that Amélie discovers a small tin box that's been hidden in her apartment for forty years. Inspired by Diana to make a difference in the world, she sets out to track down its owner. Her search is reminiscent of another French film, When the Cat's Away, in which a Parisian damsel sets off on a quest that leads her through the Bastille neighborhood and its picturesque characters. Where that film showed gentrification and evictions, though, this one's a magical mystery tour.

Voilà! Amélie is off and running when her once-upon-a-time boy is reunited with his beloved box of toys. When his destiny changes, so does hers: She commits herself, saintlike, to a life of good deeds. It's impossible not to be charmed by Amélie's missions, like her secret campaign for justice, centered on her mean neighborhood greengrocer who loves to demean his shy Algerian assistant in front of the customers. Amélie secretly copies the merchant's key, then sneaks into his apartment and subtly changes things in a manner calculated to drive him mad--such as replacing his beloved slippers with an identical pair, one size smaller. Amélie's more benign interventions--on behalf of a jilted widow, a hypochondriacal cashier and the reclusive painter--are equally inventive.

Unfortunately, Jeunet doesn't leave well enough alone. Dissatisfied with these minor intrusions, he dictates that Amélie must find love herself. But with whom? Whimsy takes over. Enter one eligible guy, Nino, whose hobby is hunting for torn-up pictures under photo booths in the Paris metro stations when he's not gainfully employed as a porn-shop assistant and funhouse spook. (Nino is played, incidentally, by Mathieu Kassovitz, director of 1995's gritty hit La Haine, a decidedly un-Amélie-like drama about racial tensions in Parisian projects.)

Bien sûr, this is a fairy tale, and so Nino's the one with whom Amélie must fall in love. But then there's the mystery of the stranger whose torn photo keeps turning up. And the mysterious notes delivered to Nino, stipulating mysterious rendezvous. And the paranoiac who stalks his ex-girlfriends with a tape recorder. Oh, there are dozens of zany pranks to escalate the irritation--oops, I mean charm--of Jeunet's conceit.

"Eurodisney in Montmartre" was one European critic's verdict. Actually, it's more like Jeunet let loose in the Disney archives. Piling cartoon references on top of his childhood visions of Paris-then, Jeunet has used a toolbox of stylized sets and special effects to create a world as quirky as his characters. Equally original but less phantasmagorical than the worlds he invented with former collaborator Marc Caro in Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, Jeunet here jettisons the nightmarish creatures that made them tick. Amélie's more reality-based world is magical in part because every trace of modernity has been erased. No Pompidou Center or Louvre pyramids intrude on the cityscapes. Virtually no immigrants, either. A glow of burnished memory polishes Montmartre, as its Frencher-than-French denizens, seemingly lifted straight out of some classic prewar French film, go about their pre-2001 lives.

Nobody is going to Amélie, of course, for a taste of realism. Rather, what it offers is a determinedly cinematic world in which references pile upon references to assemble a synthetic universe that resonates emotionally, reeking of familiarity and nostalgia. It is safe to speculate that Jeunet, who returned to France after an unsatisfying Hollywood stint on Alien: Resurrection, felt nostalgic himself for a golden age of French cinema unbeholden to the American movie juggernaut. With the trademark stylistic excess that he honed in his earlier features, and contentedly reunited with a screenwriter and cinematographer from his past, Jeunet has found a way to re-enter his own lost Paris.

For anyone loath to sign on to the Godiva-voltage sweetness of Amélie, there's a simple antidote: Mulholland Drive. Playing dark knight to Jeunet's virginal white one, David Lynch returns here to the pre-Straight Story vein of perversity that he mined for so long. It's a place where sweetness is preyed upon by maggots, where the dice are loaded and no one's hands are clean. Lynch polished his theme of innocence confronted by unspeakable evil in Blue Velvet, where youngsters Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern battled to free Isabella Rossellini from the grasp of psychotic evildoer Dennis Hopper. Twin Peaks introduced the moral and supernatural parlor games that Lynch has pretty much owned ever since: small towns in the grip of conspiracy, characters with secret lives, and forces of evil that might somehow be circumvented but probably never defeated. Basically, everyone's lying and nobody can escape.

Mulholland Drive is a fable of two women beset by mysteries. One blond, one brunette; one innocent, one not. The dark locale to counterbalance Montmartre? Los Angeles, of course--equally magical but dangerously so. Instead of sunshine, we get noir. Lynch wastes no time in having fun as he sends the luscious brunette Rita (Laura Harring) on the road to near-death in a car driven by hit men working for an unknown client. An amnesiac survivor, she takes refuge in an empty apartment. Of course, it's not empty for long. Along comes Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), a corn-fed blonde straight out of Deep River, Ontario, trailing the faint scent of Lynch's Twin Peaks ingénue Laura Palmer. Betty seems as innocent as Amélie and just as ready to throw herself into helping to sort out someone else's fate. And Rita? Well, her hair color alone marks her as untrustworthy for this particular sort of coded intrigue. Like a couple of sexy, breast-enhanced Girl Scouts, the pair sets off to solve the mystery. What happened to Rita, and why? Who was after her, and are they still? Like Rita and Betty, the audience has to play detective. And be prepared for the red herrings.

Mulholland Drive was originally meant as a television series, where Lynch might have spun its narrative into multiple complications week after week. Here, truncated into the ruthless logic of a finite cinematic form, it builds its meaning into a jigsaw puzzle of cinematic references. The brunette's name, Rita, is filched from a Gilda poster. Betty could be straight out of Hitchcock's Vertigo. An elderly, excessively enthusiastic, suspiciously helpful couple who share a taxi with Betty from the airport must be on loan from Rosemary's Baby. Betty's apartment, on loan from Aunt Ruth, could have been lifted from any postwar LA film noir, the kind peopled by unsavory men and untrustworthy women. For authoritative cinematic history, look no further than Coco, the landlady of the apartment complex. She's played by veteran actress Ann Miller. A living footnote, Miller was an RKO contract player from the age of 14, an ingénue in Stage Door in 1937, a dancer at MGM in its golden age of musicals and a star on Broadway. Her presence functions as legible commentary: With what she knows, no wonder her character is suspicious and prone to offering unsolicited advice.

Despite the film's considerable length, time flies as the audience is kept busy poring over the clues littering the subplots. One involves a self-important movie director named Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) who lives high off the hog until he's betrayed by his wife (with Billy Ray Cyrus, for gawd's sake) and threatened by the mob to hire a particular actress, or else. Then there's the Winkie's diner that one terrified guy has seen in his nightmares so many times that he finally goes there to eat. And there's a nightspot that Rita somehow remembers, El Club Silencio, where she and Betty witness a full-throttle rendition of Roy Orbison's "Crying" lip-synched in Spanish. This over-determined show-stopper is vintage Lynch, combining the pleasurable and the ominous with the savoir-faire of a bartender who knows full well that his cocktail is lethal.

Mulholland Drive has all the trappings of a fairy tale, from the monster hiding out back to the princess who's in danger. There's even a magic key and a magic box. When the two are combined, everyone is thrown into an alternate reality, where the actors are the same but their characters are completely different. There, good and evil are scrambled. The rules change, time runs backward and our hard-earned holdings fall subject to fraud. Have I mentioned that the film manages to seduce us and humble us, one after the other, with its cleverness?

If, in the end, Mulholland Drive is too clever by half (the final section really, really doesn't make sense), no matter. Lynch's superb command of mise en scène makes his images and situations their own reward, rendering even the simplest gesture creepy and imbuing any innocence with evil. Lynch's ending even takes the audience by surprise, leading moviegoers to ascribe its crossover plots to the effects of parallel universes or the unreliable testimony of self-serving narrators. So what if it ultimately makes a terribly imperfect sense? God is in the details, and its details are sublime.

B. Ruby Rich

The Sundance Film Festival has been dominated for so long by a circus of cell phones, models, agents and celebrity-hunting media hounds that it has become difficult to locate worthy films amid the crush of tabloidesque media coverage. Adding to the problem has been the spread of indie films aimed at

industry standards, a subset dubbed "Indiewood." This year, thanks perhaps to dotcom crashes and economic sobriety, the streets of Park City, Utah, were lined with a bit less gold, and Sundance reclaimed its birthright as the soul--not merely the platform--of independent film, delivering a full slate of entries concerned with meaning, truth and real-world issues. Over and over, films rejected formula in favor of new styles, production tools and narrative strategies. There were even political broadsides on Main Street, courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls and "Alice Locas." Agitprop messages targeted the film profession: The U.S. Senate Is More Progressive Than Hollywood, proclaimed one; Female Senators: 9%. Female Directors: 4%. The stickers were a welcome addition to the usual huckstering aimed at getting folks to a movie.

As usual, some of the most thought-provoking and soul-stirring work was found in the World Cinema section. The Back of the World ("La Espalda del Mundo"), by the Madrid-based Peruvian director, Javier Corcuera, is a trilogy of injustice that takes its time getting to know, and introducing us to, its central characters: a child laborer and his family and friends in Peru; a Kurdish exile in Stockholm; his Turkish village; and death-row inmates and their families in Texas. They all have names, details, faces. Tilting at the windmills of child labor, ethnic repression and capital punishment, Corcuera wisely favors the individual over the polemical. Utterly free of didacticism, The Back of the World brushes its subjects with the luminosity of an oil painting. It's impossible to exit the theater unmoved.

Far different is the dramatic film Without a Trace ("Sin Dejar Huella") by Mexican director Maria Novaro. She's concerned with freedom, not restraints. Her fanciful script follows two women on the run across Mexico, from Juárez to Cancun. A red car is after them, but is it the angry drug dealer or the corrupt policeman at the wheel? In this breezy road movie, Novaro finds plenty of opportunities to poke delicious fun at the state of affairs in her country, from Vicente Fox's cowboy style to the idealization of Subcomandante Marcos. Its shared Sundance award for best Latin American film should help the movie in the United States, where it's bound to be compared to Thelma & Louise; after all, they were heading for Mexico when they ran into the Grand Canyon.

Of the US films, the most audacious and risk-taking was Waking Life, an extraordinary animation from Austin-based director Richard Linklater, whose previous films (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise) hardly prepared the audience for this foray into philosophy and psychic phenomena (he was represented by a second film in the festival as well, of which more later). Linklater teamed up with Bob Sabiston and Tommy Pallota to make a live-action film with digital footage of seventy-five people--actors, academics and experts--walking and talking, then engaged a team of artists to animate the footage using Sabiston's new type of software. The result is a film peopled by remarkable hybrids that look like cartoons but move and speak like real folks.

Waking Life's protagonist, a drawn-upon Wiley Wiggins (Dazed and Confused's long-faced star), meanders through town looking for the meaning of life, the nature of consciousness, the difference between dreaming and being awake. People give him advice. "So whatever you do, don't be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting." Stuff like that. Meanwhile, colors and lines mutate on screen. Nothing is as it seems. Linklater and his animation collaborators have clearly had a lot of fun, morphing characters into their own conversational subjects, destabilizing their environs, throwing the material world into question. To extend the fun, the film's promotional packet was a coloring book. Get it? Color outside the lines, or something like that. A fervent tour de force, Waking Life augurs well for the new technologies. If it becomes a hit on college campuses, it just might spark a revival of existentialism, which one character insists has been unfairly pegged as negative when it's actually quite an optimistic philosophy.

After years of seeing juvenilia touted as hip, it was a treat to discover dramatic films made with maturity and restraint, performed by splendid actors at the peak of their careers, written and directed by filmmakers who knew just what they were doing because this wasn't their first time out of the gate. The Deep End by Scott McGehee and David Siegel and The Sleepy Time Gal by Christopher Münch were two such films, prompting their viewers to think hard about both film and life itself.

The Deep End was inspired by Max Ophuls's classic noir, The Reckless Moment. McGehee and Siegel went back to the original source, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's novel A Blank Wall, and made it their own. In their version, the brilliant Scottish actress Tilda Swinton plays a mother who will do anything to protect her gay son--even if that entails confronting a sleazy Reno gay-club proprietor, disposing of a corpse, diving into Lake Tahoe and standing up to a blackmailer. Finessing all her actions with a stunning display of spunk, Swinton carries the film lightly on her shoulders. The Deep End easily deserved the award for cinematography that it won, too: One shot, an image of Swinton reflected upside down in a drop of water falling from the kitchen faucet, aptly captures the watery universe dragging her down.

Writer/director Christopher Münch's task in The Sleepy Time Gal is considerably harder, as he deliberately places his film outside the confines of genre. Much of the pleasure of viewing The Sleepy Time Gal lies in the transcendent performance of the great Jacqueline Bisset, who plays the eponymous heroine, a onetime radio DJ fascinated by the early history of New York City, where she grew up and where she takes her son (Nick Stahl) on a nostalgic visit to upper Washington Heights near the start of the film. As the story proceeds, Bisset's character discovers she has cancer. No, she doesn't find any miracle cure; it's not that kind of movie. No, the daughter she gave up for adoption (played by the undervalued Martha Plimpton) probably won't show up in time for a sobfest finale; Münch isn't that kind of filmmaker. Instead, the film is about what matters in life, what we can and cannot do or undo, the difficulties and mistakes in relating to one another. Ultimately, it ponders how death rearranges all our certainties. Bisset's deathbed scene takes the breath away, especially for anyone who has ever sat vigil watching a loved one breathe their last.

Both The Deep End and The Sleepy Time Gal are evidence of a new intelligence that, given half a chance, could reanimate American independent cinema. Will they be seen? The Deep End was picked up by Fox Searchlight and will certainly be coming to a theater near you. The Sleepy Time Gal still lacked a distributor by festival's end.

The festival's Grand Jury Prize for best dramatic film was awarded to The Believer, a traditional but well-made examination of one Danny Balint, a disgruntled yeshiva student turned skinhead thug. "Love your enemy" is his reply to those who question how he happens to know so much arcane Judaica. In one scene, the increasingly confused Danny is busy simultaneously trashing a synagogue and rescuing a Torah from his gang's defilement. Inspired by the true story of a neo-Nazi unmasked as a Jew, director/writer Henry Bean peoples his tale with a frightening cast of characters meant to compose a right-wing salon of New York intelligentsia, elegant yet all too happy to deploy messengers like Danny.

Judaism turned up in documentary, too. Where The Believer gave us a character torn between faith and ideology, Sandi Simcha DuBowski's Trembling Before G-d documents real-life characters torn between religion and sexuality as they struggle to combine their faith as Orthodox Jews with their identities as gay men and lesbians. Happily, the film has a hero: Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, whose joyousness stands in marked contrast to the pervasive suffering. In what has to be a Sundance first, DuBowski and Rabbi Greenberg invited believers and nonbelievers, Jews and gentiles, to a Sabbath dinner. Some fifty Sundancers took time out from chasing the next hot title to break bread and discuss something other than movies. It was to its credit that the meal felt more like a spiritual respite than a promotional tie-in.

If the search for truth, faith and life's meaning surfaced early in the festival, another, more specific subject soon presented itself. The theme of rape showed up in a number of films--another festival first. While the act of rape is unfortunately nothing new in Sundance offerings, the exploration of rape as a brutal experience demanding investigation and even retribution is very new indeed.

The Business of Strangers, a tense chamber-piece starring Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles as unlikely business associates thrown together by a plane cancellation, uses rape as a crowbar to pry open the psyche. Channing is terrific as a tough businesswoman whose defenses crumble when she thinks she's been fired. She hasn't been, but the momentary vulnerability sets her up for an encounter with Stiles, playing a wild-card beauty who's captivating and unreliable. Writer/director Patrick Stettner focuses his story on an allegation of rape and enactment of revenge. But did a rape ever occur? That's a question that soon comes up again.

Richard Linklater conceived Tape, a much smaller production, as a low-budget exercise in using the new digital cameras. On his one-room set, one man confronts another with his memory of a long-ago rape, and they thrash out their arguments with Beckett-like intensity. Linklater manages to make us pay attention to the story, perhaps because stars are involved: Ethan Hawke as the accuser, Uma Thurman as the alleged victim who refuses victimization and Robert Sean Leonard as the accused rapist turned, yup, filmmaker. It's a wonderfully tense tale, played out with humor and sarcasm.

Unlike Business, with its lush 35-millimeter look, Linklater played up the digitality: His camera swoops and pans all over the room while camera angles stretch the limits of what we're used to seeing. Why? Because he can. Tape was one of the films brought to Sundance by InDigEnt, a new outfit established to finance low-budget films ($150,000-$200,000) shot with digital cameras and intent on exploiting the cutting-edge styles and basement economics that the so-called digital revolution keeps promising. Like it or not--and many filmmakers and critics don't--digital production is already a reality and was ubiquitous at the festival. The documentary category is almost completely converted, as many filmmakers in that world have long since been forced by economics as well as production necessity to give up film for video.

The theme of men confronting one another over rape reappears in Things Behind the Sun, the new opus of Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging, Grace of My Heart), which draws on her own experience of rape at age12 to create a powerful film detailing how such an act can deform everyone involved for years to come. Actress Kim Dickens is sensational as the promising singer-songwriter driven to self-destruction by a rape in her youth. A young rock critic tries to remind her of what she's tried hard to forget, then goes on to confront his imprisoned brother, the perpetrator. Anders takes a hard look at questions of memory, guilt and recuperation. Anders shot her film, too, in digital video and credited the intimacy of the medium with achieving such emotionally powerful scenes.

The most controversial rape debate centered around Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, a documentary that makes the fictions look tame. Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman look at an infamous 1999 University of of Florida incident: A Delta Chi fraternity party went bad, and the exotic dancer hired for the night, Lisa Gier King, went to the police charging rape. After viewing videotapes of the night in question, though, the cops arrested King instead of the frat boys and charged her with filing a false report, claiming the tapes showed consensual sex [see Jennifer Baumgardner, "What Does Rape Look Like?" January 3, 2000]. The Campus NOW chapter argued that the tapes proved rape. The state attorney sold the gamey videos for $20 to anyone who was interested. Once Raw Deal played Sundance, the New York Post splashed it all over its front page, further blurring the hazy line between investigation and sensationalism. In the film, the explicit footage is so rough that voyeuristic pleasure would seem unlikely; Raw Deal is sure to spark debates about date rape, coercion and the limits of individual responsibility. At least as scummy as the alleged rapist is the sanctimonious fraternity brother who speaks contemptuously of King, disses her social status, then is seen engaged in sex acts with her. It's a dark, dark view of both frat life and contemporary morality.

It took a fiction film--Series 7: The Contenders, by first-time director Dan Minahan--to top that toxic level of contamination, this time in the form of parody. Minahan learned the vocabulary of the new "reality" TV so well that Series 7 is a pitch-perfect satire of the genre: It takes the form of a TV show that selects contestants at random, arms them and instructs them to fight to the death. In its Darwinian universe, the survivor is, well, the winner. Series 7 is brilliant irony, complete with television-style promos and wild video-camera chases (yes, digital again) meant to convince viewers that it's "real." At least this year, for once, Sundance itself didn't look like a franchise of just such a program.

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