Two films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival would be “among the best of any year in which they’re released,” tnyfrontrow writes: Ira Sachs’s “Passages” and Raven Jackson’s “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.”
Though devoted to independent filmmaking, the Sundance Film Festival—which was founded, after all, by Robert Redford—has Hollywood in its DNA. At its best, Sundance draws its strength from both worlds: bold movies made by industry-proximate people who are branching off into new directions, and similarly distinctive ones by relative newcomers or indie veterans. This year’s edition, which ran from January 19th to the 29th, happily offered both.
There’s a sublime pugnacity to Ira Sachs’s film “Passages,” which comes with the turf: the cinema itself. Sachs has been making films independently since 1991 , and his new one is driven by his sharp observations of a life in movies. It starts on the set of a movie called “Passages,” which is being directed by Tomas Freiburg , during a party scene.
The movie’s burning core of desire and pleasure, of Tomas’s ardent adventures and anguished quandaries, extends to the movie’s explicit, intense sex scenes. Most films’ sex scenes are merely illustrative, or even forensic, providing visual evidence of characters consummating their relationship but little insight into character or plot. The ones in “Passages,” however, are finely and strongly dramatic.
Teamwork isn’t destiny, but, along with a script by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, “Passages” features additional dialogue by the screenwriter Arlette Langmann, the longtime collaborator and partner of the great, who died in 2003. The abruptness, the willfulness, the ferocity of “Passages” reflect, more than any other film by an American director that I’ve seen in a while, the influence of Pialat.
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