Sundance 2007 - day one

Ben Walters enjoys 'Son of Rambow' but is less impressed by bestiality documentary 'Zoo'.

Jan 25 2007

The sky is deep, deep blue, the temperature is 10 below and there's an air of chummy, conspiratorial bonhomie among the 130 people queuing for return tickets for the film about the man who was fucked to death by a horse. It will be a tight squeeze, so to speak…

Yes, it's Sundance, where the spirit of boundary-stretching independent American cinema goes hand in hand with assiduously cultivated buzz and rampant corporate ballyhoo. On my arrival in the festival's home of Park City, Utah, Robinson Devor's 'Zoo' – an impressionistic, self-consciously crafted doc about the real-life bestiality case that made headlines around the world two years ago – is the ticket to get and, having missed the press screening, I take my place in the returns queue. In front of me are two female senior citizens who, it turns out, are here for the skiing and have no idea of the film's content but were attracted by the hubbub. 'We just heard it was very popular and was something to do with animals,' one of them says. Once appraised of the full story, they still prove game, if giggly…

The film turns out to be an intriguing but not wholly satisfying affair. Based largely on audio interviews with 'zoophiles' from the same small group to which the deceased man belonged, it functions as something of a case for the defence, offering an essentially sympathetic and holistic approach to a complex case that could easily have leant itself to superior, sensationalist sniggering. (In this respect it reminded me of the recent British doc 'Deep Water'.) It touches on issues of cultural and emotional engagement and alienation and allows those involved to emerge as apparently decent men with a profound admiration for the natural world, however questionable its expression.

Structured around reconstructions, the film's somewhat heightened aesthetic – dreamlike photography, woozy score, the occasional jarringly banal detail – is quite effective on its own terms but 'Zoo' ultimately feels a little coy about the nub of the issue, offering an intriguing context for the taboo sex acts at its core but shying away from the queasy, invasive questions they will provoke in anyone's mind. I wonder what the senior ladies made of it.

The big winner of the day, however, was 'Son of Rambow', Hammer & Tongs' '80s-set follow-up to 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. That film had visual imagination to burn but wasn't always so strong on plot and character; this one is an absolute treat, a schoolboy yarn with a bracing emotional honesty that packs a real kick. Will (Bill Milner) is the sheltered son of a strict religious family; Lee (Will Poulter) is the tougher wide-boy who bullies then befriends him as they embark on a homemade VHS opus after seeing a pirate copy of 'First Blood'. French exchange students, gorgeous sketchbook-style animations and a flying dog are also involved. It's an exceptionally fine piece, with a lot of terrific verbal and physical humour, substantial emotional clout that never leans on sentimentality and an unobtrusively sophisticated take on peer pressure and group dynamics across school, family and larger society.

Yesterday's other film was 'Low and Behold', a shoestring effort about a young man who joins his boorish uncle in post-Katrina New Orleans to work as an insurance claims adjuster. He also strikes up an uneasy rapport with a local man looking for his dog. The location photography and documentary-style interviews with claimants are as eye-boggling and sobering as you'd imagine but the fictional framework struggles to do justice to the enormity of the situation. Probably best stick with Spike Lee's 'When the Levees Broke'.

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