Sundance 2007 - day two

Ben Walters with the latest from the Sundance Film Festival

Jan 26 2007

While the makers of ‘Hounddog’ – the slice of Southern Gothic currently clocking up column inches worldwide on account of a rape scene involving moppet du jour Dakota Fanning – are evidently none too chuffed at being labelled child pornographers, they can at least be grateful for the amount of coverage being granted to a film which, quite frankly, barely deserves mention. Set in the South of the ’50s, the film centres on Fanning’s Lou Ellen, on the brink of adolescence, in awe of Elvis and in the dubious care of unreliable dad David Morse and overbearing granma Piper Laurie (rehashing her Bible-bashing fruit-loop turn from ‘Carrie’ but with even worse hair). Robin Wright Penn is also in the picture. Given the amount of time Fanning spends on screen, she does well enough, though there’s something queasily controlled about her performance that I found hard to engage with.

The biggest problem, though, is with debut writer-director Deborah Kempmeier's stinker of a script, in which deep-fried Southern clichés bash up against laughably portentous symbolism (enough with the snakes!), flimsy characterisation and woeful dialogue. The shoddiness of the writing did make the film’s flirtation with pre-teen sexuality somewhat uncomfortable, but there isn’t the slightest reason to suspect any questionability beyond the aesthetic. ‘Hounddog’ may be many things – pretentious, mawkish, exploitative, inept – but kiddie porn it ain’t.

A less glossy but substantially more interesting treatment of teenage sexuality amid lush vegetation can be found in ‘Tuli’, Philipino director Aureus Solito’s follow-up to ‘The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros’, which played in last year’s London Film Festival. That was very much a city film, but this is unmistakably rural, set in thin-walled little houses and concerning adolescents dealing with village mentality. Both films, however, offer stimulating takes on machismo and alternative sexualities as well as intriguing windows onto a culture little seen in Western cinemas.

Opening with the circumcision of four young boys by the local baker, assisted by his daughter Daisy, the film skips forward a decade to find Daisy unimpressed by her local prospects. Meanwhile, another lad, whose grandmother is the local shaman, has his own difficulties fitting in. The story, though perhaps somewhat unwieldy, heads in unexpected directions and touches on themes as varied as domestic violence and alcoholism, conformism and the integration of Catholicism with indigenous practices, but retains a light touch throughout. The film, whose title means ‘circumcision’ or ‘circumcised’ was rated X in the Philippines but showed here in its complete form, earning it the nicely paradoxical nickname ‘Tuli Uncut’.

It came as no surprise to see the Sundance Institute logo pop up at the end of first-time writer-director Taika Waititi’s ‘Eagle vs Shark’, playing in the world cinema dramatic competition: despite its Kiwi provenance, this romcom-cum-family ensemble piece has the quirky yet life-affirming sensibility synonymous with the festival stamped through it like a stick of rock. Still, it has a definite local flavour about it, with New Zealand’s characteristic good-natured doziness ably represented by Lily (Loren Horsley), a fast food worker with a crush on Jarrod (Jemaine Clement), the narcissistic alpha geek at the nearby electronics store. Jarrod’s animal-themed costume party – at which Lily wows him with her video game prowess – provides the spark for an oddball romance that eventually sees her embroiled in a petty vendetta that takes them back to Jarrod’s childhood home. The family dynamic had a hint of ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ about it, and ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ came to mind more than once, both for the characters’ deadpan propensity for lame arts and crafts and the suspicion that the movie is gently mocking them. The plaintive guitar-rock soundtrack, though good, is also exactly what you’d expect. Even so, winning performances, a witty script and some adorable stop-motion inserts make it an undeniably likeable affair. Nice WTC candle, too.

Altogether less impressive was ‘Dark Matter’, playing the off-beat Spectrum selection. Ostensibly based on a true story, it follows the progress of brilliant young Chinese cosmology post-grad Liu Xing who finds that coming to the US to work with his academic idol ain’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. The performances are pretty good, with an engaging lead turn from Liu Ye and Meryl Streep on typically assured form as the university patron who takes a shine to him, but debut director Chen Shi-Zheng is less adept, wheeling out gimmicky effects in an attempt to get inside Liu’s head. Billy Shebar’s script also fails to offer more than a cursory attempt to get to grips with the academic subject matter supposedly at the heart of the story, and veers suddenly and unconvincingly into last-minute histrionics. That said, the film’s subtext – about whether and how the cultural and intellectual resources of China and the US can be constructively integrated – is certainly timely, and its presentation of its Chinese characters on their own terms rather than as the exotic other is very welcome.

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