‘Son of Soderbergh’ Fails to Materialize : There was no ‘sex, lies and videotape’ among the films at U. S. Film Festival, but there was much worth seeing

It was a year ago, almost to the hour, that Steven Soderbergh sat nervously through his first public screening of “sex, lies, and videotape” at the United States Film Festival and walked out into almost a parody scene of agents and distributors pressing the flesh--in his case, pressing their business cards into his flesh.

Soderbergh is an internationally acclaimed director now. The Cannes Film Festival, where “sex, lies” won the Gold Palm and its star James Spader was named best actor, fixed that. But for Soderbergh, as for others before him, the yellow brick road began here on the eastern slope of the Utah Rockies where he returned triumphant this year to serve as a juror--a writer-director with a major studio contract taking his jurying duties very seriously.

The image of Soderbergh’s success haunted the place. You could see it in journalists comparing notes, trying to second-guess what the new hit would be and who it would come from. You could see it in the young film makers, hungry to shoulder their “burdens” of celebrity and the choices that success could bring.

But, while no “sex, lies, and videotape” emerged, there certainly were discoveries to be made, if you looked carefully.

It may be presumptuous to “discover” a director who’s won a MacArthur Foundation Grant, the “genius” award, which film maker Charles Burnett has done. But in plain fact, “To Sleep With Anger,” which the gently self-effacing Burnett wrote and directed, may bring an end to his relative anonymity.

A bracingly unexpected story, which never quite goes in a predictable direction, it gives Danny Glover his richest, most multilayered role to date as Harry Mention, a friend from the Old South who comes to visit his great old friends, Gideon and Susie, living comfortably among their children and grandchildren in a big old house in South Central Los Angeles, and very nearly brings the place down around them.

Glover may have been the magnet around which financing and the producers gathered. But he is only the most visible member of a brilliant ensemble, whom Burnett works like a chamber orchestra, letting the cello tones of Paul Butler’s Gideon play against the viola beauty of actress Mary Alice, as Susie. This is the cream of ensemble actors, playing the jealousies and strains, duties and devotions among three generations of a family. It’s not quite black Chekhov, but it’s not unreasonable to think of Chekhov as you watch.

Everett Lewis, whose “Natural History of Parking Lots” became the buzz film among the critical community, will probably never go Soderbergh’s route. With his mesmerizing black-and-white movie about screwed-up advantaged kids in eerily unused Hancock Park mansions, he’s no more mainstream material than Jim Jarmusch, but he is an original. He has workshopped at the hosting Sundance Institute on his next film; this one is already invited to the Berlin Festival. With his generous take on life and youth, his artist’s eye and a deadpan humor, he’s one to watch. In any case, rail thin at more than six feet, with a laugh that once got him thrown off a bus, Lewis is almost impossible not to watch.

Over at the Discovery Program, set up to give people in other branches of the movie industry a chance to direct, were two more finds.

“Private Debts,” which has taken prizes at two festivals before Park City, is haunting. To be discovered here are its first-time director, Nancy Cooperstein, and the extraordinary, luminous performance of its central actress, Sheila Kelley. The story of how the perceived pressures of society force a young woman to sacrifice the thing dearest to her is played out in small-town California. From the film’s assured details, Cooperstein’s strength seems to be in her work with actors; there’s also great swirl and motion to the dance sequences at the heart of the action. It’s the debut of a director with her own style and the humanistic sensibilities of a Martin Ritt.

Jessie Nelson took “To the Moon, Alice” from a story by the fine novelist Lynn Sharon Schwartz. The film follows a young homeless couple who live each night on a deserted TV sitcom set. It’s a great premise and an almost-realized film that gets a little soft at its very close, but as a writer-director, Nelson is a talent to mark.

An appealing maverick quality could be found in any number of festival films and events. This was, after all, the year that Melvin Van Peebles, the mentor of black cinema, was honored with a complete retrospective. Richard Lester, another writer-director whose films were honored with a generous roundup this year, is out of an equally seditious mold.

When brothers Reginald and Warrington Hudlin took two awards--the Film

Maker’s Trophy and the prize for cinematographic excellence--for “House Party,” a hugely engaging rap on black teen-age life, they dedicated the prizes to Van Peebles.

There may be a little of Van Peebles’ spunk kick-starting “House Party,” but really, it’s amazingly conservative considering that the Hudlins are still shy of 35. Their greatly talented cast of kids do the right thing, morally, all the time without an adult around, a quirk that will probably give the film’s distributors, New Line Cinema, a truly “mixed” audience: teen-agers and parents.

Early word of mouth created the hope that Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan” would walk off with the roses, but it’s decorously listless. “Metropolitan” hovers over a nightly gathering of New York debs and their escorts during the Christmas holidays like a solicitous waiter. For sheer jaw-dropping obtuseness, this group could probably out-point Dan Quayle, but it hardly seems reason enough to dedicate an evening to their company.

Also too far on the proper side is “Longtime Companion,” directed by Norman Rene, which traces the path of AIDS through a group of New Yorkers from 1981 to the present. Its touching performances, particularly by Bruce Davison, Mark Lamos and Mary-Louise Parker, won it the Audience Award for drama, but one could wish that in a first feature film on the subject, it felt and looked less like a TV drama.

The AFI-produced “Hollywood Mavericks” is an paean to sedition, a smartly edited, well-thought-out series of conversations with some of the screen’s better rebels: Martin Scorsese (the fan), Peter Bogdanovich (the historian), John Cassavetes (the purist), Alan Rudolph (the poet) and a dozen more, not one of them uninteresting for a single frame.

As an unplanned companion piece to “Mavericks” was “Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer,” the worldly, debilitating history of a talent who seemingly couldn’t wait to ruin everything he’d gained, including his pioneering status as a sound-era writer- director .

Like Sturges’ films, which seem to dance before your eyes, “Dancing for Mr. B.” does that literally. As six of his great ballerinas, one of whom--Maria Tallchief--was also his wife, contribute a mosaic of details about working with George Balanchine, lavishly illustrated by clips of the ballets, it doesn’t matter that he becomes more, not less mysterious. That was Mr. B., and film maker Anne Belle, clearly at home in this world, knows it better than most.

Equally lively was “Berkeley in the Sixties,” a rigorously bright study of that churning period of American political action. To the credit of Mark Kitchell and company, the film’s intellect is matched by a vivid sense of history; this really is the ‘60s again. It won the Audience Award in the documentary vein, as well it might.

If it seems as though the documentaries had run away with the festival, quite so. Does it say something about our pull toward “real” life? I doubt it; it may just mean that documentarians are becoming poets rather than pedants.

As an example, “James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket” was one of the festival’s great emotional jolts; a portrait of the man whose books, in the 1950s, were primers of political and personal understanding. Those who may never have read him will meet an eloquent, resounding and infinitely humane spirit. “You were black, impoverished, homosexual,” one questioner ventures. “Weren’t those three strikes against you?” “I thought I’d hit the jackpot,” Baldwin smiles.

Film makers Karen Thorson and Douglas Dempsey turned to Maya Angelou; Amiri Baraka; William Styron; Baldwin’s marvelous brother and lifelong companion, David, and more, to build their picture of the man who left self-imposed exile to come home for the civil rights movement, to “preach the gospel of freedom.” Asked near the end of his life whether he considered himself bitter, Baldwin says with remarkable forbearance that he’d heard about progress for blacks since he was in grade school; now, at 62, he was still hearing about it: “How much time do you want for your progress?”

Festival judging is sometimes unfathomable. Perhaps the biggest stir at the awards ceremony came when “Chameleon Street,” Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s uneven, ambitious first feature, won the Grand Jury Prize in the dramatic category, while Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger” received the Special Award of the jury. Reportedly, the judges considered “Chameleon Street’s” style more adventurous, which is a little like choosing a big zirconian over a small, perfect diamond. No matter: as surely as audiences have a taste for subtlety over glitz, Burnett’s drama will have its day.

For Los Angeles audiences who might like to make up their own minds on these films, the AFIfest in April will include among its other Sundance choices the documentaries “Berkeley in the Sixties,” “Dancing for Mr. B” and “Preston Sturges,” along with the two grand-prize winners, “H-2 Worker” and “Water and Power.” Dramatic films will include “Chameleon Street,” “Metropolitan” and “The Natural History of Parking Lots.” Plenty of room for discussion here.