By admin 
In 2021, in response to the covid-19 pandemic, the Sundance Film Festival went entirely online. When the in-person event resumed, in 2023, the online component continued, and it’s still going. However, not everything that’s screened at Sundance is available for home viewing; only the films in competition at the festival are required to be streamable, and only during a short window at the tail end of the festival. That’s how I saw many of the offerings in this year’s festival (which ended on Sunday), and, although I didn’t get to see some films that I’d been impatient for, I did see two that struck me as especially noteworthy—indeed, two of the most aesthetically distinguished Sundance films I’ve seen in recent years.
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A good movie has disparate virtues but a great movie’s merits are comprehensive—a unity of style and drama, tone and theme, images and performances. That’s why a great film can be recognized from its first shot, and that’s how it is with “Filipiñana,” which I knew absolutely nothing about in advance and which grabbed me from the very beginning, announcing itself as a masterwork—which is all the more remarkable given that it’s the first feature by the Filipino director Rafael Manuel. It begins with a long and avid view from behind the front seats of a passenger van that is making its way along a busy, sun-drenched street in Manila. The action, energy, and color of the street life seen through the van’s broad windshield is framed so cannily that it seems choreographed—and nearly conceals the scene’s moment of drama, when a woman in the crowd signals to the driver and the van pulls over to pick her up. She turns out to be a hostess for the van’s passengers, a group of tourists headed to an upscale golf resort—and luxury tourism is the very premise of “Filipiñana.” The film performs a scalpel-sharp dissection of the industry, laying bare a mad microcosm of power relations—political, sexual, economic, familial, cultural, even linguistic—and the aesthetic of dominance that the resort, in Manuel’s discerning view, projects.
The rest of the movie takes place at the country-club complex and is centered on two young women there who never connect, one whose story entails a sharply defined dramatic conflict, the other whose presence is a source of mystery. The first is Clara (Carmen Castellanos), a twentysomething Filipina who lives in New York; she’s staying with her uncle Renato (Carlitos Siguion-Reyna), who owns the resort and is trying to persuade her to stay in Manila and help him run it. The second is Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), who is seventeen years old and a new member of the resort’s crew of “tee girls,” uniformed young women who work at the driving range, placing balls on the golfers’ tees; Isabel becomes increasingly, mysteriously, and ever more openly, obsessed with one particular golfer, Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman), the president of the club.
Manuel’s approach to narrative is as original as his sense of cinematic form, and his gift for documentary-style observation is balanced by a refined sense of style. (He sketched this method and this story in a short film of the same title, which premièred at Sundance in 2020 and involves several of the same characters and actors.) The two women’s stories crystallize only gradually in the course of the feature, through the accretion of tiny details that, like the arrival of the hostess in the first shot, emerge amid a profusion of related distractions. Isabel, for instance, is introduced upside-down, lying on the grass, under the spray of one of the many sprinklers that water the course in a sort of mechanical ballet. (As she lies there, a little girl dashes by—one whose whereabouts will later become a major yet elusive plot point.) Renato is introduced by way of sunlight gleaming off what looks like the blade of a sword but turns out to be the shaft of a golf club. As for the tourists, their van pulls up, far in the background of a long shot that gazes through the grand lobby of the hotel—where, in the foreground, a small folk orchestra of blind musicians, accompanied by a dance troupe’s festive gyrations, provides a showy welcome.
The substance of “Filipiñana” is serious, even harsh, but its tone is wry and bittersweet. In this regard, as in the movie’s intricate tableau-like aesthetic, Manuel’s art is in the tradition of Jacques Tati and Wes Anderson. The many fixed-frame images (realized by the cinematographer Xenia Patricia) aren’t at all exemplars of so-called slow cinema, in which still frames distend action; rather, the effect that Manuel creates is crowded cinema—his compositions abound with activity of which the drama forms only a part. The end credits, teeming with his screen-packing array of golfers, dancers, staff, guests, and passersby, resemble a local phone book. The golf course and the hotel offer Manuel vast spaces to work with, in breadth and depth; the fixed frames lead the eye through those spaces in a way that suggests the interconnectedness of all that takes place within them. He delights in anything synchronized, whether mechanically or bodily, by design or by accident. A scene of workers stacking chairs in a ballroom brings to mind the giddy artistry of Jerry Lewis in “The Bellboy”; Chinese tourists, all clad in white, swing their clubs in synch on the driving range; and, as the tee girls sit in formation washing and restocking golf balls, their boss repeatedly declaims Chinese phrases that the tee girls repeat in unison, in preparation for interacting with the tourists. Manuel also jangles this apparent order with the striking visual trope of disorienting disproportions of scale—figures appearing unexpectedly small or large in the course’s expanses.
Amid these absurdities, Manuel coaxes out the cruelty of the resort’s hierarchies. In a sumptuous dining room, Dr. Palanca’s wife, a former Miss Universe, grouses about how her identity has been absorbed into her husband’s even as he’s carrying on brazenly with one of the course’s caddies. (The caddies, all young women, are often obliged to wade into one of the course’s water hazards and fish out golf balls, some of which are said to be resold for more than a resort worker makes in a day.) Isabel, sitting in a driving-range stall, is nearly hit with a ball when a clumsy golfer clangs it off a metal railing. Such scenes are framed in ways that call attention to the relentless labor that the resort extracts: in the background, trucks bring fresh trees that workers then plant on the course, caddies dash across the grounds as if being chased. When Dr. Palanca does karaoke for a group of guests, the camera pulls back from him to reveal the caddies, in peach-colored uniforms, arrayed behind him on stairs and a balcony to sway and clap along.
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Music and dance are among the most demanding of cinematic subjects; even good choreography can be rendered banal by mediocre direction (see: Fred Astaire). The musical sequences in “Filipiñana”—not staged numbers but integral parts of the action—are filmed with filigreed flair, gathering infinitesimal gestures into choreographies of panoramic grandeur. These rise to sublime heights in a scene of a genteel rally for the reëlection of Dr. Palanca as the golf club’s president, which features a sinuously catchy campaign song, a suavely breathtaking dance, and, punctuating the spectacle, a piercing dramatic moment between the candidate and Isabel. In thinking about “Filipiñana,” I’d gladly just try to describe it in detail for the sheer pleasure of recollection. Its scenes are finely composed and precisely staged yet fluidly energetic. They are exemplary in their sensory beauty, in the delicately understated (and thus all the more powerful emotions) that they embody, in the world that they conjure, in the analytical insight that they unfold. With “Filipiñana,” Manuel opens new vistas in the future of the cinema.
Another of the great first features—alongside which “Filipiñana” now takes its place—is “Columbus,” by Kogonada, which also premièred at Sundance, in 2017. It stars Haley Lu Richardson as a young woman in Columbus, Indiana, who has taught herself about the city’s treasure trove of modernist architecture—which Kogonada films with a visual fervor to match the protagonist’s passion. Since “Columbus,” Kogonada’s work has been on the downswing, with the substantial but hermetic “After Yang” (2021) and last year’s clumsy romantic fantasy “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.” As if radically repudiating the practical demands of those two studio productions, the film he premièred at this year’s Sundance, titled “zi,” was made secretly, rapidly, and spontaneously, in Hong Kong, with a tiny production crew (the cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, the sound recordist Bone Chan, and just a few others) and a core cast of just three actors. The title character, Zi, a Hong Kong-born concert violinist, is played by Michelle Mao; Richardson plays Elle, who has come to Hong Kong looking to change her life, leaving behind a career as a dancer in New York; and Jin Ha plays Min, a medical researcher who was born in Korea and raised in Hong Kong.
The spareness of the production is reflected both in the movie’s aesthetic and in its story: it takes place almost entirely outdoors, and it’s intensely, concentratedly realistic—with a wondrous asterisk. In its contours, “zi” is a gloss on a classic—Agnès Varda’s 1962 drama “Cléo from 5 to 7,” about a singer who wanders through Paris for two hours while awaiting the results of a medical test for cancer. In “zi,” the eponymous protagonist is also awaiting, albeit overnight, the results of a medical test that may reveal a tumor. Her symptoms, however, are unusual: when Zi walks in the city, she intermittently sees herself in the future, a near-future that seems to be receding ever further ahead. Fearful that she’s losing her mind, Zi sits and sobs on a long public staircase and is consoled by a stranger—Elle, whose face she has indeed already seen in her mind’s eye. Elle insists on keeping Zi company and on bringing her to meet her ex-boyfriend, who works at the medical center where Zi was tested. It’s Min, of course, whose presence Zi has likewise foreseen.
Min has an idea of what could be going on: it involves “temporal relativism,” and the conceit is so clever that I dare not spoil it. Suffice to say that Zi’s condition may not be a physical issue or even a mental one but, rather, a metaphysical state. Kogonada’s inspiration is to render this mystery poetic, political, and, above all, incontrovertibly material, in a way as distinctive as the architectural realm of “Columbus.” In that first feature, Kogonada, like the protagonist, raptly contemplated buildings as works of art, public expressions of auteur-like personalities. In “zi,” he films the face of a city no less ardently, but he does so in the way that the characters experience it—not as individual works but as architecture in the aggregate, in its functional context, as part of an urban fabric made up of planned and unplanned elements. The movie’s vision is one of arrangements and connections, stylistic and textural clashes of hulking buildings, stark forms seen in distant vistas, sublime coincidences of collective energy thrumming from generation to generation in the simultaneity of the physical city’s chronological strata.
Kogonada exults in escalators and staircases, alleys and corridors—how they appear to his trio of passersby and how they frame his trio, too. He delights in the show of street life as seen from the windows of buses and streetcars, the walkways of a steep hillside cemetery, the glitter of lights across the sea, the brutalist swoops of a concrete highway ramp and the walkway beneath it—and the personal connections that these spatial jumbles foster. Moreover, he finds a metaphor for his visual world and its temporal essence that stretches his aesthetic into another, surprising dimension. Elle has become a collector of sounds, wandering the city with a pocket recorder in hand, creating what are, in effect, sonic images of instants stretched out into time. The condition afflicting Zi is an essentially urban one, a disruption that comes off as hypersensitivity to a phenomenon—the omnipresence of history—so basic and so prominent that it’s generally overlooked, and which the movie camera, when wielded by a filmmaker as alert to it as Kogonada, is built to capture. ♦
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