I far prefer the flat, unfinished, cheesy look of Some Body. This digital-video project, directed in the style of a home movie by Henry Barrial, introduces Stephanie Bennett as a Los Angeles elementary school teacher in her late 20s who dumps her too-nice long-term boyfriend and begins sleeping and drinking around, just because. The verite instability of the story is a plus, the lack of lessons learned a weird relief.
The lesson of Chris Smith's short documentary Home Movie, and of Chain Camera, edited by Sick documentarian Kirby Dick, is that there are no subjects more heroic than people in unheroic circumstances, treated with respect. I thought Smith crossed the line in American Movie, but the five proud owners of wildly unusual residences in Home Movie retain their dignity, while the 16 high school students who turn videocameras on themselves in Chain Camera bubble with more honesty and integrity than Hollywood teen-movie manufacturers would know what to do with.
O Sundance, I drowse through your sentimental tearduct teasers like Green Dragon, Timothy Linh Bui's drama about life among Vietnamese refugees in Fort Pendleton in 1975, your thumpingly lifeless premieres like Enigma, a sodden, heavily acted drama about British code breakers during World War II. But I come alive for Waking Life, Richard Linklater's beautiful, talky, innovative animated headtrip in which a guy glides through dreamstate encounters with folks who have a lot to say about the cosmos. Fluid, mind-expanding, and witty, this, along with The Believer, is the kind of work that lets Sundance endure.
In comparison with which, the vulgar T-shirt scene is easy enough to forget.
OWEN GLEIBERMAN
The dank camcorder images loom up before you like something out of a hardcore-porn nightmare. Raw Deal: A Question of Consent was hardly the most artful movie to play at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, but it may prove the most revolutionary. It's the taboo-smashing culmination of a new, voyeur-happy film/video culture in which we peep, therefore we are. On Feb. 26, 1999, Lisa Gier King, an exotic dancer (and former prostitute) in Gainesville, Fla., was hired to perform at a Delta Chi fraternity party that devolved, over the course of many hours, into a leering and squalid bacchanal. Running into the morning dusk, she accused one of the frat members of rape (he claimed that their sex was consensual), and two days later, King herself was arrested for filing a false police report. At issue was the ultimate hot-button evidence: Most of the evening had been videotaped by the frat-house members, and Raw Deal is built around extended, sexually graphic excerpts from that tape.
Directed by Billy Corben, the movie, to its deep discredit, appropriates the overheated, mood-music-drenched, j'accuse! style of tabloid television. What the audience witnesses is a (literally) naked power duel between King and a skinheaded creep named Michael Yahraus that turns into an S&M role-playing game of rape and then...rape itself? Yahraus was never formally charged, and the false-police-report charge against King was later dropped. Raw Deal's (dubious) strategy is to let you decide. It's the ultra-explicit reality show you'll never see on TV--a shockumentary that forever shatters the boundaries of what a theatrical feature can, should, and will depict.
