SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

Christoffer Boe’s Offscreen

Turning Upside Down and Inside Out
By Claiborne Smith

For JJ Lask’s sake, let’s pretend, just for a moment, that we actually live in a world where talk show hosts wear plaid smoking jackets on the air. The director of On the Road with Judas, Lask’s official bio states that he “grew up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side with dead dogs in the playground and roaches in the toaster,” but in his movie, he plays Rubin Parker, Jr., a suave talk show host. In 2002, Lask published a novel called On the Road with Judas; this year, he has a movie of the same name and in it, Lask, as Rubin Parker, Jr., interviews actors–who play the “real” characters from his book – about their characters’ actions and motivations. There is another set of actors who then depict the actions that the “real” characters describe.

Confused? Try this: Lask (the director) asked his actors to first read the book On the Road with Judas; in the span of eight days, he shot footage, on a set designed to look like a talk show, of himself as Rubin Parker, Jr. asking his actors questions about their characters, questions they respond to improvisationally. He edited that footage, and six months later, reassembled his cast and crew, with additional actors, so they could act the scenes they had created via improv on the talk show set. On the Road with Judas, the movie, began with no script.

Garth Jenning’s Son of Rambow.

“...as audiences become smarter and become more aware of what cinema is – and that is definitely happening – you have the potential for more non-traditional forms to catch on.”

— Festival Programmer John Nein

And the resulting construction, which is in the Festival’s Independent Feature Film Competition: Dramatic, is a dizzying, rebellious, and occasionally moving question mark about how stories are made. Like other restless filmmakers at the Festival who are not content with fashioning conventional narratives, Lask is asking his audience to think – about the ways in which stories are told, and about film as a medium. “A lot of cinema is about erasing the signs of watching a film, so in a way they’re asking people to care about something they’ve been taught not to care about. But I like the idea that these filmmakers are toying around with what they’re doing rather than settling with it,” John Nein, a programmer at the Festival, pointed out.

Lask is defying recent trends in independent filmmaking: “I was getting sick of ‘independent’ films,” he said. “Movies like Little Miss Sunshine, these are small studio films.” He wanted to redefine the rules of independent filmmaking: “Let’s try and not make a script, let’s shoot it in two phases, let’s think in opposites,” he explained. Screenwriter John August has a history of writing big Hollywood films (Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) but because, as he put it, “the experience of life is often a lot more tangled and less straightforward” than a big studio film depicts it, August is using The Nines, which is premiering at the Festival, to explore “other possibilities.” The Nines is full of possibilities, in fact: Ryan Reynolds plays a dim-witted, tough-boy actor in the first section of the film; a gay sitcom writer in the second section; and a sought-after video game designer in the final section. By scripting the first section as a traditional comedy, August lulls the audience into thinking that The Nines is a conventional little movie. “I wanted to leave the audience questioning some of their expectations about what is really real and blur the boundaries between what is inside the world of a movie and what is outside the world of a movie,” he said.

Chinese novelist Xiaolu Gho’s contemplative, genre-defying film How Is Your Fish Today? has an irreverent disrespect for the boundaries between documentary and fiction. The filmmaker received funding from the British Documentary Fund, but her movie is screening in the Festival’s World Cinema Competition: Dramatic because, although it has documentary footage throughout the film, it is anchored by a fictional story. Xiaolu calls the movie a “film novel”: Rao Hui is a real-life screenwriter in Beijing who writes a screenplay about a man who flees southern China after killing his lover. The man tries to reach Mohe, a tiny village on China’s northern border with Russia that is famously difficult to reach. But interspersed with that story is documentary footage about Rao Hui and also about life in the stark and remote Mohe. “For me there is no difference between fiction and documentary,” Xiaolu said. “It matters for the producer and the funders.” “How often do we hear screenwriters say, ‘You have to listen to your character’?” John Nein asked. “This movie plays with that, that here’s somebody who is wrestling with their own creation.”

Many of the filmmakers wrestling with cinema’s conventions are asking themselves (and their audiences) what it means to live in a culture that is increasingly enthralled by the spectacle of celebrity, but no movie at the Festival this year investigates that dark tunnel more trenchantly than Danish filmmaker Christoffer Boe’s Offscreen. Nicholas Bro plays an actor who asks Boe for advice about his steadily evaporating relationship with his girlfriend Lene, so Boe gives Bro a video camera and tells him, almost as an afterthought, to film everything he can. And Bro’s life falls apart. As he becomes creepily unable to put the video camera down, his girlfriend and friends become disgusted with him. It is a grim, fascinating thing to watch a person become undone by their own self.

The camera does not always have to be such a dictatorial master. Garth Jenning’s buoyant and charming Son of Rambow follows a group of British schoolkids in the 1980’s as they adapt the new technology of VHS and user-friendly video cameras to craft their own daffy but moving homage to Rambo. Jennings, who got his hands on a video camera as a boy, uses moviemaking as a way of talking about the struggles of growing up, however innocent they may be. “They become extremely ambitious,” Jennings pointed out, “but their main lesson is that they learn to keep it simple.” Movies about the making of movies are popular at the Festival this year: Nejib Belkadhi’s VHS-Kaloucha follows the frenetic filmmaking obsessions of a Tunisian house painter named Moncef Kaloucha, who involves various friends and acquaintances in his amateur movies, which are then passed from house to house. Kaloucha is an unrepentant auteur, insistent that it is his vision, and no one else’s, that ends up on the screen. “VHS-Kaloucha is about the sort of power that cinema offers in terms of telling stories,” Nein said. “It’s almost a narcotic power.”

Does the appeal of Charlie Kaufman’s work, and the wide distribution of a movie like Stranger than Fiction, indicate that demanding filmmaking is gaining popularity? Not necessarily so: as The Nines director John August pointed out, conventional narratives are still the bulk of the movies released each year, but the growth of independent film, and the emerging growth of new ways to watch film, make it easier for audiences receptive to demanding narratives “to get access to movies they couldn’t before. I love to see a movie in a dark theater, but I’m anticipating that most of the people who see [The Nines] will see it on DVD.” Self-reflexive cinema is nothing new, Nein said, “but as audiences become smarter and become more aware of what cinema is – and that is definitely happening – you have the potential for more non-traditional forms to catch on.”