Courtesy of Cinetic Media and Fusion Entertainment

My first trip to Sundance itself, after two successive failed attempts, was marked by even more improvisation and recalibration of expectations than I had anticipated. Through a combination of competing obligations and severely limited time in Park City itself, I only saw three films at the festival, but the surrounding experience was enough to get a lay of the land. There are many things that, even if one actively reads Sundance dispatches every year, might not be immediately apparent: the shuttles necessary to navigate the hilly, slushy streets are really just city buses, sometimes packed with skiers jostling for position; the press and industry screenings during the festival all take place north of/down the hill from the far more picturesque and bustling Main Street in a requisitioned multiplex; and the shifting tides, both in terms of “internal”—the occasion of new festival director Eugene Hernandez’s first slate—and external politics—the continued partnership with a pro-Israeli organization during the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the passage during the festival of statewide anti-trans bathroom bills—can go largely unnoticed. This last point is by no means exclusive to Sundance, especially in these times of struggle and compromise (which I freely acknowledge I contribute to in my own minuscule way), but the specific concatenation of dire issues made for an especially strange experience amid the beautiful surroundings.

Such a conflicted perspective was on display in the first film I watched: Sujo, the third film from the Mexican directorial team of Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez. I didn’t see their previous, well-received effort—2020’s Identifying Features, credited to Valadez alone—but this film seems to represent a simultaneous contraction and expansion of scope from its predecessor’s twinned tales of disappearances along the Mexico-U.S. border. Running half an hour longer at 125 minutes, Sujo nevertheless confines its focus to its eponymous subject, following him from childhood to young adulthood over the course of four parts. After the death of his father, a cartel gunman with the nom de guerre “El Ocho,” Sujo—whose unusual name is frequently remarked upon—goes to live with his aunt. For his safety, he is forced to stay at her home in the remote countryside outside the city, with only visits from a family friend and her two young sons for company. As the film unfolds, he joins the cartel himself and is eventually exiled to Mexico City, where he acts upon a long dormant interest in education.

Sujo often threatens to become a rote depiction of cyclical masculine structures—unfortunately underscored by an abrupt shift in attitude and behavior between the two actors playing Sujo as a boy in the former two parts and a teenager in the latter, offering little character-based justification for his sudden desire to join the cartel—ameliorated in part by some reasonably impressive dream sequences, which heighten the mildly ethereal tone already established in the quasi-rural setting. Given this, it might be somewhat odd to single out the last part, which takes place entirely in Mexico City, and yet it is where the interest in its character’s experience becomes most prominent, almost acting as its own, more successful film in miniature; seeing him on his own, as opposed to constantly in the company of his family or friends, goes some length in concentrating what can sometimes feel like a loose, surface examination of what it means to grow up in isolation.

A much more successful example of finding new material within familiar forms could be seen in Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples, by far the best world premiere I saw at Sundance. I’ve seen two of the prolific New York filmmaker’s works before—Thirst Street and The Great Pretender, both of which I enjoyed—but was still taken aback by the tone this immediately establishes, launching immediately into an initially contextless discussion between Ben (Jason Schwartzman in one of his best performances), a Jewish cantor still recovering from the death of his novelist wife, and his two mothers (Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon). This is only the first of many destabilizing encounters, which grow in hilarity and unpredictability, a tendency which helps greatly to color in the (relatively) standard central premise: over the course of the film, Ben literally finds his voice again with the companionship of Carla (Carol Kane), his childhood music teacher who, after reconnecting with him by chance, impulsively decides she wants to get a bat mitzvah.

Silver’s collaborators, once more, involve multiple luminaries of the New York independent film scene: he co-wrote with C. Mason Wells, while Sean Price Williams shot the film as usual on 16mm and John Magary edited with welcome freneticism. But there’s a strange alchemy at play in Between the Temples, which balances its pleasantly jaundiced take on the people in Ben’s life—especially those involved in his synagogue, including Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel)—with genuine, tentative chemistry between Schwartzman and Kane. This is above all a warm film, given jagged edges by the gambits that Silver orchestrates according to the demands of a particular scene: a recurring sound gag caused by Ben’s bedroom door, a cemetery tryst with Rabbi Bruce’s daughter Gabby (Madeline Weinstein) that improbably evokes both Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, an actually well-done hallucination sequence with shades of the more fanciful parts of La chimera. This all culminates in an exquisitely chaotic dinner party sequence where everything is laid bare, and the tenderness of what follows does not resolve things so much as find a place of great rapprochement.

But the best film I saw in Sundance’s selection was the last film I saw in person: Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, which premiered at Venice last year but hadn’t yet shown on the West Coast. I’ve admittedly been lax on staying current with Linklater despite my general appreciation for him, but the combination of exceptionally warm reception and widespread bemoaning of a likely cursory theatrical run courtesy of Netflix pushed me to prioritize this. Of course, Linklater himself has had a long history with Sundance stretching all the way back to Slacker—he also had an episode of the documentary miniseries God Save Texas at this year’s festival—that only sweetened the urge to see it with an audience. Co-written by and starring Glen Powell, the film follows the moderately fictionalized story of Gary Johnson, a New Orleans philosophy professor who takes up side work with the police department, eventually finding his role as an undercover cop posing as a hitman to entrap would-be clients. Eventually, he becomes entangled with Maddy (Adria Arjona), a woman seeking to kill her abusive husband, and the fallout that ensues takes all manner of truly delightful twists and turns.

Hit Man is definitely a very slick and crowd-pleasing affair, but in its own way it almost reads like Linklater’s idiosyncratic, breezy take on Vertigo wherein Scottie and Madeleine are embodied within the same person, a conscious molding of one’s persona to fit the situation. Each of Gary’s disguises are specifically tailored to what he thinks his target desires (deploying an array of ridiculous disguises and accents reminiscent of “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”), and thus each transaction is premised on some manner of seduction. That impulse, of course, is taken to its absolute limit when Maddy enters the picture, and the inherent joy involved in watching Powell and Arjona eventually playacting their roles of cool professional and defiant possible criminal is inextricable from their red-hot magnetism. The final note, both perverse and good-natured, typifies the brilliant high-wire act that this film walks, and provided a great conclusion to this phase of my Sundance 2023 experience.