The true discovery of this year’s Sundance so far for this viewer has been Sierra Falconer’s lovely and delicate “Sunfish (and Other Stories on Green Lake),” a series of connected vignettes around a Western Michigan body of water that gives it a title. Knowing almost nothing about movies in Park City other than title, location, and time because we cover almost everything can be a gift in that I had no idea that Falconer’s film would speak to me so directly, a man who grew up not far from Green Lake and spent summers on one nearly identical to it. It is one of the most Michigan films I’ve ever seen, capturing the beauty, humor, and resilience of a gorgeous part of the country that everyone should endeavor to see. It’s a character-driven, nuanced drama that’s mostly about people working unexpressed emotion into their lives, whether it’s the girl who can’t confront her distant mother, the boy who struggles to be perfect, the man seeking one last thing to define him, or the sister who doesn’t want to say goodbye.
Produced by the great Joanna Hogg (“The Souvenir”), “Sunfish” is broken up into four vignettes, opening with the one that gives it its first title, introducing us to Lu (the excellent Maren Heary), a 14-year-old who is dropped off by her mother at her grandparents because mom just got married and needs a honeymoon. Lu rolls her eyes at mom’s flighty nature, noting that the carrot cake that Lu’s new stepdad feeds her post-elopement happens to be her least favorite desert. Stuck at her grandparents on the lake, she spies on neighbor girls having fun, but really throws herself into grandpa’s sunfish, learning how to tie knots, and navigate the tricky waters of teen life. She calls mom at night but only gets voicemail. The vignette culminates in a truly wonderful beat in which Lu yells at a loon because her “loonlet” got too far away. Of course, it’s what Lu can’t say to her own mother, but Falconer films it from a few hundred feet away, avoiding melodrama and almost giving us the POV of someone overhearing a private moment that a young girl could never share with the world at large.
I adored “Sunfish” so much that the rest of the film would have had to truly collapse for me to not at least recommend it. The good news is that it doesn’t. Subsequent chapters include a child prodigy at the prestigious Interlochen, a bartender who gets attached to a man convinced there’s a fish the size of a whale in Green Lake, and two sisters at an AirBnB who are cooking for out-of-town guests while they prepare for the departure to Chicago of one of the girls.
It’s tempting to connect the four vignettes of “Sunfish” thematically, but the connection is really just empathy for normal human beings. It’s a film that works because of how much Falconer loves both Green Lake and the people she’s placed around it. There’s true compassion and care for nearly everyone in this movie, even minor characters who feel like they wandered in from the actual region and might not even know they’re in a movie. It’s hard to overstate how much a filmmaker’s love for the people she’s profiling can translate to the viewer. She cares about these people, and she finds a way to make sure we do too. And the fact that there’s not a single false performance (and a few I truly love) only speaks further to her talent as a filmmaker. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
I have a similar desire to see what Carmen Emmi makes next because his impassioned “Plainclothes” struggles under the weight of being a first-time filmmaker who tries to do too much with one project, burying some of what he’s clearly good at in formal choices that consistently pushed me out of his movie. Emmi is undeniably already a good director of performance because Tom Blyth is stellar in his film, but so much of what I loved about Blyth’s nuanced work gets buried in hyperactive editing, aspect ratio fluctuations, and even different film styles, including some that look like old CCTV or VHS footage. The nearly non-stop intensity of the filmmaking in “Plainclothes” is obviously designed to recreate the anxiety of being closeted, but Emmi makes so many choices that call attention to themselves, burying what works by everything that’s placed on top.
Blyth plays Lucas, a Syracuse cop in the ‘90s who has a truly horrible assignment: seducing men in a local mall that’s known as a homosexual pick-up spot to the point that they expose themselves in the bathroom and are subsequently arrested. Of course, Lucas is gay himself, a truth he’s only recently been able to express to an ex-girlfriend but could never speak to his mother, obnoxious uncle, or recently deceased father. “Plainclothes” unfolds in two timelines with different aspect ratios: flashbacks in full frame and widescreen for a few months later when Lucas is at a holiday family gathering where things will obviously go off the rails.
In the flashbacks, we see why Lucas is so emotionally fragile: He fell in love with one of the marks, developing a passionate affair with a man played by Russell Tovey (always good), who he not only let get away but then met up with later in a desperate effort to turn sex into love. The sensual sex scenes in “Plainclothes” are frenetically cut with widescreen shots of Lucas in full family panic when he worries that his mom and uncle may uncover his secret. Again, I understand that Emmi is seeking to recreate how deeply closeted people like Lucas can’t even experience physical joy without anxiety, but it becomes an exhausting exercise in filmmaking instead of anything that feels rooted in character. It’s filmic statement instead of empathy, something that feels showy instead of true.
Luckily, Emmi has Tom Blyth to keep the emotional center of his film as intact as it remains. Blyth has a wonderfully expressive face, conveying so much of the inner turmoil of Lucas that we don’t really need the external film tricks to feel his pain. It’s all there in his eyes.
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