Posey's Waltz: Thoughts on the Sundance Tradition

It was a late hour on Thursday night when Parker Posey began tearing up the dance floor in Sundance's filmmaker lounge. Nobody can deny the obvious metaphorical connotations of the festival's prototypical indie starlet showing off her legwork for a crowd mainly comprised of newbie auteurs. It felt like a gesture of optimism: Celebrate, fellow devotees of the moving image cult, for this is your moment.

Or something like that. The paradox of the Sundance Film Festival is that its galvanizing spirit can seem at once inspiring and obnoxiously cheesy, an issue reflected in the typically hit-or-miss program. My mind has been spinning over the last week and a half as dozens of movies whiz through my consciousness, but only certain ones stick out as distinctly, unabashedly part of the Sundance routine. Marching to the beat of the Posey metaphor, these cinematic offerings clearly define the standards associated with the festival: Two art house tendencies, one a little older than the other, both occasionally grating but nonetheless admirable.

Veteran director Eric Mendelsohn's 3 Backyards focuses on the isolated experiences of several suburban households on the same block, using lush visuals and an enigmatic storytelling technique to tie them all together. An alienated businessman misses his flight out of town and decides to crash in a hotel rather than go home. A woman giddily offers a lift to her famous neighbor and learns about the element of humanity beneath the celebrity facade. And so on. The movie feels like an attempt at expressing an emotional foundation beneath the mundane quality of a settled blue color existence, but it's mostly just a bore. Hitting the restroom as the closing credits rolled, I overheard some chatter that pretty much sealed the movie's fate: "This is one of those arty films that nobody will ever see." Which is not exactly a shame, because 3 Backyards loses its emotional staying power to cumbersome, formally aimless exposition—but one has to wonder exactly how many other movies at the festival for which my anonymous urinal companion offered the same verdict.

Douchebag, by contrast, never loses momentum, but its formal properties do occasionally seem strained. Drake Doremus' story of two warring brothers who embark on a road trip to find one of the guys' fifth grade girlfriend tries super-hard to embody any number of newly formed indie clichés, from its shaky-cam style to the playfully improvised dialogue and ultra-whimsical humor. As a colleague astutely observed, "It's Humpday-lite." The comparison fits the product because Douchebag essentially functions as a kind of Sundance clip reel. Road trip? Check. Quirky familial conflict? Check. Dopey pop soundtrack and romantic confusion? You get the idea. Douchebag has a title that intends to provoke, but actually conforms to tradition by operating under the pretense of a fuck-the-establishment vibe when, in fact, it simply fits into the typical indie tendency to defy commercial appeal for no particular reason at all. In that sense, Douchebag is less an epithet than Doremus' form of a warped self-compliment. The aspiring indie auteur lives on! And the Posey waltz continues through the night, for better or worse.



Posted by ahillis at January 29, 2010 12:16 PM