For my final dispatch of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, I’m covering three films that I watched virtually. Ironically, these films, while not all specifically tailoring their plots to location, firmly plant the roots of their filmmaking in the use of spaces for means of investigating ebbs and flows in ambition: “Bunnylovr,” “Love, Brooklyn,” and “Atropia.”
From the screen-lit corner of her bedroom to the general air with which she moves through the world, “Bunnylovr”’s Rebecca (Katarina Zhu) is markedly stagnant and aimless. She’s lonely despite a supportive best friend (Rachel Sennott) and markedly complex relationships with her father and ex. Most of the time she finds nuggets of dopamine in the validation she receives from her cam girl job, notably one client who always pays for a private though never shows his face. When he gifts her a pet bunny, Rebecca — through the care of this animal — starts to unpack the ways she might start to care for herself.
“Bunnylovr” is muted and cool in tone despite moments that step away from the screen and into sunny New York. Her white sheets, beige walls, and blue-lit habitat contrast the brightness and bustle of New York, but in Rebecca’s presence, it all feels the same — to her and to us. These locations are sites of longing, and Zhu’s direction locks us into her lead performance, creating a symbiosis that nags poignantly at the center of your chest. Rebecca feels flimsy but not helpless, and painfully, but also lovingly, familiar. She’s easy to root for because the prognosis of her dilemmas feel simple: the answer to her woes is right there, but we know the difficulty it can take for one to identify them. And even more so than Zhu’s ability to paint diverse landscapes with these similar, touching feelings, the contrast she crafts in the film’s relationships are even more of a stand out.
Rebecca cannot be told anything. Her yearning and lack of self worth prevent her from absorbing any care or candor, nor truly being able to give it. She has a hunger that she’s tapping into in the wrong spaces, like her ex-boyfriend’s bed or her attachment to her troublesome client. She’s half-in the relationships that ground her. Struggling to show up for her best friend and warily dipping her toes back into a relationship with her ailing father, Zhu portrays the fight to get a grip with tender meditation. Until Rebecca is able to reconnect with her autonomy in the world, she’s a bit like a leaf in the wind. But “Bunnylovr” makes clear that her aimlessness is not a symptom of being broken, but stuck; and therefore, hope is not lost.
Rachael Holder’s “Love, Brooklyn” is exactly what its title denotes: at once an ode to the famous borough, while also in many ways a love story from it. Roger (André Holland) is a struggling writer, and lover. Caught in the midst of a love triangle with his ex, gallery owner Casey (Nicole Beharie), and new flame, widow and mother Nicole (DeWanda Wise), whilst being on a deadline he won’t look in the eyes, Roger billows in the wind of half-commitment.
Set against the tree-lined streets of Brooklyn and the everchanging landscape of businesses that butt heads against legacy and gentrification, the city itself feels just as in limbo as Holder’s protagonist. Her character-writing positions the main trio, as well as Roger’s best friend Alan (Roy Wood Jr.), on the same playing field, though the characters don’t really notice. Each of them in their own ways are plagued by their unwillingness or inability to stand ten toes down: Roger wants his cake and to eat it, too, with the women in his life; Casey can’t decide between romance and platonic friendship with Roger; Nicole battles her desire to be close to Roger with own grief; and Alan constantly fantasizes about having an affair.
As the cast faces their own crossroads, Brooklyn does as well, and “Love, Brooklyn” becomes a portrait of fluctuation. Though Holder maintains the city as its own character, she does so peripherally, allowing the actors to shine whilst demanding the landscape within which they exist not be forgotten.
Hailey Gates’ “Atropia” is unlike most films I’ve seen: boldly metafictional in order to investigate our relationship with politics and place. The film is a satirical war-comedy, in which Fayruz (Alia Shawkat), is an Iraqi-American actress working at Atropia, a post 9/11 West-Worldesque desert site used to simulate the American War in the Middle East.
Used as a locale to train soldiers before deployment, the staffed actors portray a variety of roles to make the experience as immersive as possible. For Fayruz, she wants to finally be discovered, playing her role to her defined perfection. When soldier Abu Dice (Callum Turner) arrives in Atropia, a lusty affair begins to dominate their days, and the line between real life and fiction begins to blur beyond recognition.
“Atropia” uses the format of a comedy of errors to explore the American relationship with the propagandized image of the Middle East. This transforms the film into a reckoning, even with laughs abound. Fayruz and her fellow performers adopt stereotypical narratives within their world, and barter roles with DVDs and cigarettes as if it’s all a game. There’s a psychic distance from the real-world implications of their representations, and as one man poignantly says, they’re teaching them to “invade us in a gentler way.”
Gates’ ability to juggle tone with cannonball confrontations of ethnocentrism and political rhetoric is noteworthy. Shawkat’s high-octane, slightly neurotic performance is familiar to her other roles, but balances well with Turner’s rigidity and seduction. “Atropia” commits to a lot of tones, but the strength of its central theme grounds it home.
