The crowds were thinner, the temperature warmer and Barack Obama's name mentioned so many times that you might have thought he had assumed leadership not just of the free world, but the Sundance Institute too. Otherwise, it was business as relatively usual as the Sundance Film Festival turned 25. If the highs weren't as high as those of some Sundances past—no radical, out-of-left-field debut features or eight-figure sales deals to write home about—neither were the lows as dispiritingly low.
To no one's surprise, the movie many cited as an ideal one for the Obama moment, Lee Daniels' Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, swept the festival's closing-night awards, taking both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award of the U.S. dramatic competition for its erratic but unflinching portrayal of an obese, illiterate Harlem teenager's struggle to break free from a cycle of domestic violence and crippling self-doubt. Yet Sundance's most au courant offering turned out to be a movie that hadn't been expected to show at the festival.
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Shot over 16 days in October 2008, Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience is a scintillating whir of half- and fully formed ideas about sex, politics and money that strongly recalls, both in subject and impishly fragmented style, the Jean-Luc Godard films of the 1960s. So it's only fitting that the star of Soderbergh's $1.7 million whatsit is none other than Sasha Grey, a 20-year-old adult-film ingénue who originally wanted to call herself Anna Karina. Grey plays Chelsea, a high-end New York City escort who spends her time in between clients developing a promotional Web site and diversifying her assets, while her live-in boyfriend angles to advance his own career as a personal trainer. Not surprisingly, Soderbergh manages to find an analogue for the filmmaking process even here, when Chelsea has her services "reviewed" by a self-appointed escort critic.
Screened outside the main Sundance competition, in a slot coyly advertised as "An Evening With Steven Soderbergh," The Girlfriend Experience struck some as "cold" (a charge also leveled against Che), though that's just a marker of how well Soderbergh manages to capture a zeitgeist in which everyone is selling (or for sale) and anesthetizing pleasure is but a click away. In any case, the film would certainly make for a superb double bill with director Ondi Timoner's Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary We Live in Public, which follows obsessive self-documenter Josh Harris on his decade-long odyssey from multi-millionaire Internet pioneer to Manhattan art-world cause célèbre to bankrupt, mentally unhinged exile. In 1999, Harris launched the underground art project "Quiet: We Live in Public," in which 100 like-minded exhibitionists lived for 30 days in open cells under the constant scrutiny of video cameras and Orwellian interrogators. Timoner (DiG!) was there from the start, and she stuck around for Harris' equally catastrophic second act, in which he and his then-girlfriend equipped their apartment with wall-to-wall surveillance cameras and proceeded to live their lives, for your viewing pleasure, at the Web site weliveinpublic.com. Harris' gradual implosion is both repellent and mesmerizing, Timoner's film unsparing in its scrutiny.
A fame-seeker of a different sort occupies the central role in Pusher director Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson, a blistering biopic of the notorious British felon Michael Gordon Peterson (aka Charles Bronson), who has spent most of his adult life in solitary confinement, where he has managed to become a physical fitness expert and an award-winning poet and artist. With a grab-bag of visual and sonic tricks, Refn stages Bronson as a kind of sociopathic vaudeville, as Peterson recounts his life before an audience, while a series of abstract formalist flashbacks illustrate his violent journey.
Another standout in the festival's often middling world-cinema section was director Sebastián Silva's darkly comic The Maid, which depicts life in a bourgeois Chilean family from the perspective of its longtime housekeeper, whose violent mood swings might put a chill in even Michael Peterson's blood.
Meanwhile, that forlorn indie-cinema movement known as "mumblecore" showed unexpected signs of life as Sundance's dramatic jury awarded a special prize for "excellence in independent cinema" to Lynn Shelton's Humpday. An improvised relationship comedy starring Mark Duplass and The Blair Witch Project's Joshua Leonard as two straight friends who decide to go gay for a Seattle amateur pornography competition, Humpday is an undeniably amusing enterprise. But why single out for excellence Shelton's meandering meditation on male bonding and amateur filmmaking when it doesn't really bring anything new to a table already occupied by the Duplass brothers' own The Puffy Chair and Baghead, to say nothing of Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy?
