As we all know, this year’s Sundance Film Festival started yesterday.
To me, Sundance has always signified the official start of a new cinematic year. Not only is it the first of the major festivals but it’s also when we first learn about some of the films that we’ll be looking forward to seeing all year. It seems like every year, there’s at least one successful (or nearly successful) Oscar campaign that gets it start at Sundance. For instance, it is probable that Past Lives will receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture on Tuesday and its campaign started with how it was received at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
My plan for this year is to spend the last few days of January looking at some of the films that have won awards or otherwise created a splash at previous Sundance Film Festivals.
Like 1995’s Living in Oblivion for example….
Living in Oblivion centers around the filming of an independent movie called, appropriately enough, Living in Oblivion. The film is being directed by Nick Reve (a youngish and, I’ll just say it, hot Steve Buscemi), a filmmaker whose indie cred does not protect him from the difficulties of shooting a movie with next to no budget. His cinematographer is Wolf (Dermot Mulroney), who is talented but pretentious and who is dating the first assistant director, Wanda (Danielle von Zerneck). The film stars Nicole (Catherine Keener), a struggling actress who is best known for appearing in a shower scene in a Richard Gere movie. Also appearing in the movie is Chad Palomino (James LeGros), an up-and-coming star who is appearing in Nick’s film to build up his critical reputation. (He also assumes that Nick is friends with Quentin Tarantino.)
We don’t really learn much about the plot of the film-within-a-film. It appears that Nicole is playing Ellen, a woman who is trying to come to terms with her abusive childhood and her romantic feelings towards her friend, Damien (played by Chad Polomino). The scenes of the film that we see alternate between being insightful, melodramatic, and pretentious. We see Ellen confronting her mother about her abusive childhood but we also see a dream sequence in which Ellen, who is dressed as a bride, attempts to grab an apple from Tito, a person with dwarfism (played, in his film debut, by Peter Dinklage).
To talk too much about the film’s narrative structure would be to spoil one of Living In Oblivion‘s most clever twists. What I can safely say is that, much as with Truffaut’s Day For Night, Living In Oblivion is more concerned with the production than the film that’s being shot. Nick struggles to keep his cool. Nicole struggles with her fear that she’ll always just be known as the “shower girl” and with the difficulty of keeping her performance fresh through multiple retakes. Wolf makes a point of wearing an eyepatch after claiming Wanda injured his eye and turns sullen when Nick says he doesn’t want to shoot a scene with a hand-held. A smoke machine first produces too little smoke and then too much. When Chad does show up on set, he is passive-aggressively tries to change the blocking of one of the film’s most important scenes. As for the dream sequence, it’s threatened when Tito denounces the scene and his role in it as being an indie film cliche. Throughout, director Tom DiCillo contrasts the studied structure of a finished film with the chaotic reality that goes into shooting.
Living In Oblivion is an affectionate satire, one that pokes fun at the indie film scene while also celebrating all of the hard work and different personalities that are involved in making a movie. Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener give heartfelt performances as two people who understand that every movie could be their last while Dermot Mulroney scores some of the biggest laughs as the self-important Wolf. James LeGros is hilariously shallow and vain as a character who is rumored to be based on one of the biggest movie stars of the past 30 years. (“I want an eyepatch!” Chad declares while looking at Wolf.) Living In Oblivion is a movie that celebrates the beautiful madness of trying to shoot an important film for next to no money in a grubby warehouse. Throughout the film, the film’s crew is forced to compromise but, at the same time, there are also the small and unexpected moments that make it all worth it.
Living In Oblivion‘s witty script deservedly won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. Living in Oblivion is a celebration of both cinema and independence.
Through the Shattered Lens 