This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Sundance Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.
The Sundance NEXT program is unpredictable, containing some of the best and worst the festival has to offer, featuring a variety of different genres and styles. The standout in this year’s program was a micro-budget romance called A Love Song. The directorial debut of Max Walker Silverman, the film stars Dale Dickey and Wes Studi as two childhood friends who reconnect and share a night by the lake in the mountains.
A Love Song is a compassionate and reflective exploration of love, loss and longing for romantic connection in the American West, through the eyes of an older woman named Faye (Dickey). The film nails how one’s perception and desire for romantic connection shifts as they get older, but never disappears. Walker-Silverman is a filmmaker with a lot of depth who truly understands the importance of human connection, but also the complexities that come along with it. The film may be extremely simple on the outside but it has a fair amount bubbling beneath the surface, though the dialogue is not quite as poetic or emotionally impactful as it’s trying to be.
One can tell right away that Walker-Silverman is a massive fan of Chloe Zhao. He wears this influence on his sleeve, perhaps to a fault. Based on its themes and visual style, it’s very difficult to not compare this film to Nomadland. The major difference between that film and this one is that the protagonist here longs for another romantic connection and wants to move on with her life, even though her heart still lies with her deceased husband. Dickey gives the kind of lived-in performance that only happens once in a blue moon. She is remarkable in this role and is easily the most mesmerizing aspect of the film.
Meanwhile, the cinematography is also gorgeous, boasting many crisp landscape shots of the American midwest. Outside of riding the coattails of Nomadland way too closely, what keeps A Love Song from being a great film is its lack of content. This feels like it was intended to be a short film that ended up being stretched out into a feature length film. Many sequences are drawn out and it fails to maintain a steady rhythm.
In the end, A Love Song is one of the most polished and promising films to premiere in the NEXT selection in years. While it is derivative and meandering, Walker-Silverman absolutely has a bright future ahead of him.
still courtesy of Sundance
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