Intermission flew out to Utah last week for the 27th Sundance Film Festival. While it’s pretty much impossible to watch all the films, we did manage to check out a couple.
“Life in a Day”
There are only 24 hours in a day. They often feel wasted, lost in routine and repetition, squandered and bartered away. But there is something human and imperfect and beautiful about the way those common hours are spent, the choices we make without thought, the act of rising, of brewing coffee, of screaming and crying and kissing and laughing – and somehow, with the help of thousands of people around the world, director Kevin MacDonald has captured it in “Life in a Day,” a 90 minute documentary. We meet a man who has been biking around the world for nine years, a mother struggling with cancer, a boy without a mother, a boy who shines shoes for a living. We watch love and rejection and hope and frustration unfold on the screen, but it is not the monumental that cuts us deepest – it is the universality of, and beauty in, the banal that is most striking. “Life in a Day” is a gorgeous film that artfully combines footage from all over the world, captured by thousands of individuals who responded to MacDonald’s YouTube directive: to film one day – July 24, 2010 – in your life and submit the footage. From over 8,500 hours of film, MacDonald and his producers gleaned thousands of clips which, together, comprise a visual poem that is at once affirming, depressing, moving and ultimately wonderful, true to life itself.
“The Salesman”
When we first saw this movie, we laughed. We sat there, eyes glued to the grey landscape of a Quebec suburb in the dead of winter. We watched, bored, as a car salesman went about his business in French, with barely readable white subtitles scrawled across the winter landscape. We watched patiently as he extended his hand for gumballs from his grandson, we watched expectantly as he greeted his daughter with a kiss, we watched drearily as he sold cars, we watched sleepily as he closed shop, once more. In that first hour and 15 minutes, nothing extraordinary happened, nothing revelatory or even allegorical, just life as a cars salesman in a French Canadian town during the recession. Then, as is wont to do in indie films, tragedy strikes, and the last half hour of the film follows our friend the salesman as he lives beyond that tragedy: selling cars, eating leftovers, walking in the snow. We left the theater feeling a little perplexed and very bored, the Park City chill turning our exasperated sighs into little cold clouds. We laughed about the self-indulgent artsiness of the film, we joked about the lack of significance in the obsession with the mundane and we went to bed, unaware that this film had penetrated our consciousness and – in some undetected but indelible way – had moved us. “The Salesman” is a film that requires patience, a film that should be absorbed rather than analyzed, appreciated for the blank stare into reality that it offers.
“Happy Happy”
The poster for “Happy Happy” featured a bug-eyed woman in lingerie, flanked with two angels with the face of men, against a Pepto-pink backdrop. Which begged the question: What? For goodness sake, its tagline was “a comedy about infidelity, moose meat, blowjobs and cottage cheese.” I immediately wrote the film off, assuming it was going to be unbearably kitsch and contrived.
How wrong I was. “Happy Happy” is, in a word, real. The characters are tangible, the plot relatable, the emotions raw. And to top it off, it’s Norwegian. This foreign dramedy tells the story of a Kaja, a young wife living in an isolated suburb of Norway. Kaja, played by Agnes Kittelson, is incredibly charming and funny, but the two men in her life – her troubled husband, who cannot even feign sexual interest in her, and her troublemaking son, who, in one scene, tells her she is ugly – are deprecating and cruel. When the perfect young family moves next door, Kaja’s world is given a big kick of excitement, and we watch as the aforementioned blowjobs and infidelity unfold with humor and honesty. A racially-charged subplot of the film involving Kaja’s white son and the family next door’s adopted African son lends a dark and uncomfortable touch to “Happy Happy” that made many Americans in the audience positively squeamish, but for me, it epitomized the honesty of director Sewitsky’s vision. Children, like adults, are capable of great cruelty and even greater misunderstanding, and Sewitsky’s candor in capturing that brutal truth, on every level, is remarkable and brave. Similar to “The Kids Are All Right” in tone, but with an extra element of humor and a touch of the absurd (there is a Norwegian a cappella boy band that serves as a kind of Greek chorus for the film, singing American folk hymns between scenes), “Happy Happy” was a winner at Sundance, both for our audience and the festival at large, snagging the coveted World Cinema Jury award.