The films themselves have changed a lot since 1987. If there was a stereotypical independent movie that year, it could be described as a dewy, decent and deadly story about the coming of age of a sensitive Midwestern farm girl. This year the images, in both the best and worst films, were almost entirely urban, often multiracial, and charged with dread, violence, sexuality and absurdity. At the end of underground L.A. filmmaker Gregg Araki’s “The Living End,” made for a mere $20,000, two gay lovers on the run, both infected with HIV, have sex on a deserted beach, the man on top holding a loaded gun to his mouth as he reaches orgasm. This was strong stuff in a town where until a few years ago you couldn’t even order a drink unless you proved you intended to eat.
Two years ago, Sundance was buzzing with the emergence of new black directors. This year was remarkable for the unprecedented number of young gay directors intent on creating a radical “queer” cinema that has little concern for creating positive role models. In the chilly, elegant “Swoon,” Tom Kalin re-examines the case of killer/lovers Leopold and Loeb in the context of 1920s homophobia. The best of the gay films in competition, which won a special jury prize for artistic excellence, was Christopher Munch’s “The Hours and Times,” a 60-minute black-and-white gem that dramatized a weekend trip to Barcelona in 1963 taken by John Lennon (Ian Hart) and Beatles manager Brian Epstein (David Angus). Exquisitely written and performed (and shot in only six days!), fraught with erotic tension between an urbane, longing Epstein and an acerbic, sexually ambivalent Lennon, Munch’s understated vignette announced the arrival of a young but fully mature talent.
Festival juries can be bitterly contentious. Not this time. The four of us judging the dramatic features-New York filmmaker Beth B., “Thelma and Louise” screenwriter Callie Khouri, actor and director Bill (“A Rage in Harlem”) Duke, and I-found ourselves remarkably in sync. In the end we gave the Best Picture award to Alexandre Rockwell’s magically quirky black-and-white comedy “In the Soup.” The plot doesn’t bear close scrutiny-it’s a tall tale of a naive young New York filmmaker (Steve Buscemi) taken for a ride by a gregarious old mobster (the blissfully exuberant Seymour Cassel)-but each scene sparkles with unpredictable comic twists and hilarious minor characters. Cassel got a special prize for his performance.
The winner of the screenplay award, and the film voted the audience’s favorite, was “The Waterdance,” codirected by Neal Jimenez and Michael Steinberg. Screen-writer Jimenez (“River’s Edge”), who was paralyzed from the waist down several years ago, tells the story of his recovery with astonishing humor. The cast is uniformly impressive: Eric Stoltz quietly plays the filmmaker’s alter ego, and Wesley Snipes and William Forsythe provide fire as his hospital-ward mates. Made for $2.3 million (one of the bigger budgets), “The Waterdance” transforms its TV-movie subject into moving, honest cinema.
One came away from Sundance with a list of new filmmakers who bear close watching. In addition to Munch, Rockwell, Kalin, Jimenez and Steinberg, one can add 28-year-old Quentin Tarantino, whose stunning, ultraviolent heist movie “Reservoir Dogs” stirred heated debates about its brutality and guaranteed him a Hollywood future; Allison Anders, the writer/ director of “Gas, Food, Lodging,” a fresh and beautifully observed look at a mother (Brooke Adams) in a small New Mexico town, trying to raise her unruly, manhunting daughters, and Anthony Drazan, whose marvelously acted “Zebrahead” (which won the filmmaker’s award) deals movingly with a high-school interracial romance in Detroit. None of these films was perfect, but they taught a valuable lesson that Hollywood ignores at its own peril: you don’t need $25 million budgets to make good movies. Indeed, it seemed for 10 heady days in the Utah mountains that the less these committed filmmakers had to spend, the more they had to say.
