Opinion

Four film highlights from Sundance

All the lonely people: Daisy Ridley plays Fran in “Sometimes I Think About Dying.”
All the lonely people: Daisy Ridley plays Fran in “Sometimes I Think About Dying.”

Sundance has returned as a full-fledged, in-person festival for those willing to make the climb to the upper elevations of Park City, Utah. I'm unable to attend in person this year -- a loss on many fronts, not the least of which, a chance to see old friends and spend quality time in the shadows of the beautiful Wasatch mountains -- but that does not deter me from watching as many of this year's selections as possible from the comfort of my own couch.

Here are some selections from the first batch of screenings from this year's fest, a grab-bag of genres, from indie-drama, to doc, and back again.

"Sometimes I Think About Dying": Rachel Lambert's quiet film ekes out its small victories on the strength of its committed cast and strong visual poetics. Daisy Ridley plays Fran, a quiet, detached woman who works at the port authority of the small Oregon town she grew up in and enjoys dinners of microwaved patties with a dollop of cottage cheese on top, which she eats standing up in her small apartment. The quintessential introverted dreamer, she fantasizes about an office space in the basement with a python slithering through, or lying dead and decaying in a wooded grove, her feet splayed out and rife with small bugs.

She's the kind of coworker who can't bring herself to sing "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow" along with everyone else for a staffer who's retiring, but rather snatches a piece of cake from the table and scurries back to her desk. Naturally, what eventually breaks her out of this miserably reticent existence is the new hire to replace the retiree, Robert (Dave Merheje), a gregarious, generous man who adores movies and seems open to the world around him in a way that Fran finds herself strangely attracted to.

It sounds like a sort of romcom set up -- and, in fact, certainly could have gone that route, with a few basic modifications and enhancements (cottage cheese!), but Lambert (working from a script by Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Kevin Armento and Katy Wright-Mead), instead has crafted a more serious-minded character study. Fran, we come to learn, isn't so much shy as self-protective, a woman who harbors some serious anti-social leanings -- she becomes increasingly hostile when Robert, a kind-hearted sort with a streak of genuine empathy, asks her even basic questions about her past. She's not reserved and distant out of fear, but a kind of self-contained narcissism.

With a main protagonist who often doesn't speak, the film relies a lot on atmospheric resonance -- the opening shots establish the quaint small coastal town in a few deft strokes, and Fran's observational dissonance allows for a great deal of shots of inert objects -- which help keep it visually engaging. By the end, it doesn't turn overly dramatic, to its credit, but it's not exactly earth-shattering either: It's the kind of film that turns a very small pebble into a subtle, gradual sort of ripple.

"The Pod Generation": The winner of this year's Alfred P. Sloan Foundation prize for celebrating scientists and science in film, Sophie Barthes' film is set in the near future (well represented by the enhanced automation of day-to-day tasks, such as making breakfast, the ubiquitous presence of AI bots, including in the therapist's chair, and the fast-forward fashion of the characters), where much of nature has been regulated to hologram status and burned-out city workers can pay to climb into a sort of treehouse pod and enjoy a technical representation of staring out at the ocean.

New York couple Rachel (Emilia Clarke), who works a high-paying tech job, and her husband Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a botanist, have talked about having a baby, but rather than go through a traditional pregnancy, with all of its physical complications and time-sucking medical appointments, they opt for a pod, in which their zygote is raised in an egg-like orb they can carry around with them (at least while on "bonding" loans from Pegazus, the corporate overseer they have contracted with), until the baby comes to full term.

At first, Alvy, who prefers real trees and actual dirt to the holograms and 3D printed fabrications this society has become accustomed to (in this world, people's lack of connection with nature isn't due to some global climate event, but rather a choice built from a growing aversion to the real thing in favor of a "safe" fabrication of same), rails against his wife's decision, but soon comes to care deeply for the orb, and the growing child within it. Only nearing the end of the "pregnancy" do the couple come to realize they want their child to experience the natural world at the moment of their birth, a feat they can accomplish by going to their secluded island cabin some hours away, which they almost never visit. This runs afoul of Pegazus' standard procedure, naturally, which at last forces them to make a choice as to what sort of world they want their child to take part in.

The film looks terrific -- the aforementioned futuristics seem perfectly believable and on-point -- and Clarke and Ejiofor do fine work together, but Barthes, whose previous film, an adaptation of "Madame Bovary" that came out almost a decade ago, seems content to craft a social satire without much actual story attached to it. It proposes interesting social conundrums and suggests the further dissociation of humans from their natural habitat (very likely), but doesn't bother with the conventions of drama to turn that into, you know, any real sort of conflict.

"The Longest Goodbye": If humans indeed do accomplish a manned mission to Mars by the mid 2030's, as former president Obama once predicted, there will have to be the expected leaps of science and technology to help get us there, but, as Ido Mizrahy's doc points out, there will also have to be serious consideration given to the psychological burden of the astronauts being separated from Earth for years at a time.

Dr. Al Holland, a NASA psychologist, has been tasked, along with many others, to come up with a workable system for these brave souls to endure the isolation and sensory deprivation of such a long-term flight. As the film points out, it's an extremely big component of humankind's continued pursuit of space-travel. We meet several astronauts who endured long-term stints in the International Space Station orbiting outside our atmosphere, including a mother of a then-7-year-old son, who spent some months away from her family, to her son's growing discontent, contending with technical communication glitches and feeling powerless to connect with her family; but also Kayla Barron, one of the early astronauts in the Artemis program, whose enthusiasm for space travel is built into her marriage.

The film makes a strong case for the difficulty of this endeavor. Notably, NASA's attempt to run a simulation of such a mission -- out in the desert with a carefully selected crew, expected to live in total isolation for eight months -- barely lasted seven days before internal conflict and raging disagreement about procedure resulted in its termination. At one point, the proposal of the kind of hyper-sleep depicted in many a sci-fi flick is put forth, but, even then, participants would miss enormous chunks of time with their families and loved ones, putting them again into psychological distress upon being awoken, as if from a long coma.

No easy answers or solutions, but Mizrahy's film asks important and intriguing questions about the physical cost of such a mission. The men of the early Apollo missions, it's pointed out, were absolutely against the idea of opening up to such psychological probing, preferring to keep everything internal, as was the style of the time, but it becomes pretty clear we will have to make mental health a huge priority for such missions going forward.

"Shayda": An anxious mother, Shayda (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), and her 6-year-old daughter Mona (Selina Zahednia) walk through a crowded airport in Australia, along with a kindly caseworker, Joyce (Leah Purcell). As they walk, Shayda looks nervously around her, while Joyce keeps pointing out to Mona what to recognize if she's ever brought here again.

The situation is at first a bit unclear in Noora Niasari's abusive husband drama -- are they planning to fly out? Have they just arrived? -- but things become clear soon after the three of them return to the women's shelter where Shayda has had to flee with her daughter. She has left her manipulative, domineering husband, Hossein (Osamah Sami), after being repeatedly raped by him, despite the entreaties of her Persian community -- who see her as an ungrateful harlot -- and her own parents, back in Iran, who implore her to go back to him to protect her reputation.

Things are rough enough as it is, but after a court order allows Hossein limited visiting rights with Mona again, Shayda becomes increasingly worried that he will finish his studies and abscond with her daughter back to Iran, where she will never be able to get custody.

Over the course of several weeks, coinciding, symbolically enough, with Nowruz, the Iranian New Year festival, Shayda has to forge a new sort of life, even as her brutal ex-husband works to undermine her at every turn. When she makes friends with a gentle young man named Farhad (Mojean Aria), the cousin of one of the few friends she still has outside the shelter, the possibility of hope gets thrown into tumult by Hossein's continued aggressions. After an affably low-key first couple of acts, the story gets considerably more contrived toward the end, as everything predictably comes to a boiling point.

Still, Amir-Ebrahimi, fresh off an equally devastating performance in last year's "Holy Spider" brings an enormous amount of warmth and discomfort to the role -- her chemistry with the adorable Zahednia is palpable -- and Sami, sporting what must be said is fabulously irritating hair, exudes a particular kind of smarmy menace. It's not groundbreaking, exactly, but as a testament to female empowerment in a culture deadset against such movements, it does reverberate.

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