Sundance 2009: Young Romance

I've joked in the past about teen romances at Sundance. They seem to collapse into a subgenre all their own, each one telling the cute and touching story of a troubled loner (male) who is brought out of his shell by a perky new friend (female). I understand why young, inexperienced (male) filmmakers make these movies; I just don't understand why the Sundance programmers find them so interesting year after year.

But in 2009, I'm glad to say, the filmmakers have been trying to break the mold. Some are finding more success than others, but I appreciate every effort.

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In 500 Days of Summer, one of the most popular comedies at the fest, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (of 3rd Rock from the Sun and the under-appreciated high school neo-noir Brick) plays Tom. The drudgery of his job at the greeting card factory is broken one day by a new employee, Summer (Zooey Deschanel). Between the first glance exchanged by Tom and Summer and their eventual breakup, the clock ticks off 500 days, and the film tells us at the outset that this is not a love story. Then, as if to remind us of that, director Marc Webb shows the 500 days out of sequence, weaving the days of cute flirtation and courtship with the relationship's mopey decline.

The upslope of that hill is far more entertaining than the downslope, which means the film's humorous bits in the low-numbered days frequently hit dead patches when we lurch into the hundreds. When the film is working, the dialogue is sharp and witty, the soundtrack is hip and indie, Gordon-Levitt is effortlessly funny, and wide-eyed Deschanel is a good foil for his quirks. But in this case, the attempt to break the mold works against the film's nature. It is a love story, because almost everything we know about these two revolves around their relationship. Separating them bitterly in the end is a twist of the plot, not of the heart, and the warning label that tell us in the beginning not to get too invested in Summer feels schizophrenic. The film drags in its last half hour, but I think the rousing final minute is what sends people into the lobby with smiles on their faces, reclaiming some of the film's early spunk. Overall, it's a modest success, slickly produced, enjoyable for its light moments but weighed down by the remainder. Fox Searchlight apparently thinks more highly of the film; they're putting 500 Days of Summer into theaters in July.

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Of the romances I saw at this year's festival, the one that hews closest to the irritating subgenre is Adam, a drama about a troubled loner who meets a not-exactly-perky — but perky by contrast — woman, a new tenant in Adam's building. (They're always new, these young women, dropped by the gods into young men's lives.) The troubled loner in this film has full-on Asperger's syndrome, and he just lost his father, so the drama has a far more complicated situation to deal with than just quirkiness. It seems sincerely curious about whether a young neurotypical woman can have an intimate relationship with an "aspie," but it skims the surface of the important issues involved, spending time instead on a subplot involving the woman's indicted father. (Also, while the description in the Sundance program describes her as "brainy," I'm not sure a brilliant person says things like, "He's an electrical engineer, whatever that is.") Except for a little salty language, the film feels like a TV drama, but apparently someone disagrees: Fox Searchlight (Juno, Little Miss Sunshine) snatched this one up, too, so presumably it'll be in theaters soon. Between the two, I'd opt for 500 Days of Summer.

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Unmade Beds is one of the real surprises of the festival, but I realized it only gradually as I was watching. Alexis Dos Santos' second film is a slow but visually colorful story about Axl and Vera, he from Spain and she from France, he with a shock of unruly hair and she with a serene face, the two of them coincidentally sharing a residence in London. And, we assume, eventually ending up as a couple. Or will they? They share this industrial space with an unknown number of other twenty-somethings, a loft-like hive of young people finding themselves and each other, dancing, drinking, and making love, but so disconnected and nomadic that Axl and Vera can pass in a hallway but never really meet.

Axl is in town to find not only himself but the English father who abandoned him when he was three. Vera is in town taking Poloroid shots of beds, first made then unmade, with some all-but-anonymous sex in between. While those melodramatic elements can be found in other festival films, including some that are mentioned on this page, these characters are thoughtful young people, captured beautifully in all their vibrant confusion by a filmmaker who knows when to hold back, wait, and simply observe. Instead of forcing them together, or separating them just as artificially, he lets them drift wherever they will.

I kept asking myself why Vera looks so familiar; it turns out she's Deborah Francois, the young mother in L'Enfant, the Palme D'or winner by the great Dardenne brothers of Belgium. Unmade Beds is a worthy addition to her body of work, and it was only in the film's satisfying and lyrical conclusion that I realized what a remarkable movie it is.

Unmade Beds currently has no U.S. distributor.