A Love Song First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

A Love Song served as essentially the opening night film, or at least the representative on Sundance 2021’s first day, for the NEXT film section, introduced in 2010 and designed as a showcase for more purportedly innovative or formally daring work amid the tacit mainstreamification of the festival, and especially the U.S. feature competitions, as a whole. On one level, it’s not hard to see what might be appealing about this film, directed by Max Walker-Silverman in his directorial debut, as a first pick: it is forthrightly rustic, set and shot in rural Colorado; it has two recognizable actors in the form of Dale Dickey and Wes Studi, something very much lacking elsewhere in the section unless one counts Something in the Dirt actors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead; and it tells a pleasingly coherent and emotional story without too much signposting. But therein lies the question: how little must a film go outside the norm of the independent landscape to qualify as worthy of inclusion in a section like NEXT? It is both a positive and a negative that to say that, in an even somewhat more robust independent scene like the one in 1992, whose 20th anniversary this year has been feted by the Criterion Channel, a film like this would be seen as the absolute norm, a solid and quiet work whose rhythms are built from little moments and the logical pairing of landscapes and weathered faces with 16mm. The plot, such as it is, ostensibly revolves around the reunion of Faye (Dickey) and Lito (Studi), two widowers who were childhood friends but haven’t seen each other in decades. Faye has been waiting at a campsite in a national park near where they grew up for an indeterminate amount of time, and spends her days eating small lobsters fished with a miniature pot, reading and utilizing Audubon guides to identify birds and constellations, and interacting with some of the fellow campsite denizens, including the mailman, a lesbian couple on the cusp of proposing, and a too cute cowboy-hat-wearing crew of four brothers and one young sister seeking to disinter their dead father buried somewhere around Faye’s trailer. Ostensibly is an apropos word, because while much of the true, if somewhat muted charge of A Love Song comes from Faye and Lito’s two days, one night meeting — which begins with charming awkwardness and proceeds, like much of the film, in brief little moments, with the highlight being a guitar and vocal duet — this truly is Faye’s film, as much because she is the center of the film for the fifty-some minutes surrounding the encounter as it is because of what soon becomes an emotionally legible arc. Learning to let go of grief is certainly no novel storyline, and it’s to the film’s credit that it doesn’t fully spell it out, but after Lito departs, the emotional signposts on Faye’s literal journey up Mount Elbert only become more obvious. None of this is to say that A Love Song is a bad film; while the rhythms can feel trite at a certain point, unwilling to sit with the quietude for too long, there is an unadorned quality to appreciate. But the question remains: should such a film should be considered as truly innovative, or simply its own kind of retrenchment or throwback?