‘Business as Usual’ Has Lost Its Top Billing

Whatever else people say about the Sundance Film Festival--and they say quite a lot--it’s an event that’s been known for its dependability. Up to now. Be prepared to think of Sundance 2002 as the Sundance of dislocation, displacement and business not as usual.

For starters, this festival, which marks the 20th anniversary of Robert Redford’s sponsoring Sundance Institute, is happening a week earlier than usual so that the host town of Park City, Utah, can be cleared of moviegoers and tidied up in time for the Winter Olympics.

Also a switch for this champion of independent theatrical filmmaking, both the festival’s opening night premiere on Thursday in Salt Lake City (“The Laramie Project,” based on the celebrated play) and its prestigious Centerpiece premiere (Mira Nair’s “Hysterical Blindness”) were made not for theaters but for the increasingly powerful HBO network.

And on the documentary side, five of the 16 films in competition arrive with the imprimatur of the feisty Independent Television Service, which is funded by Congress to present features that “involve creative risks and address the needs of underserved audiences.”

As if the festival did not already have a welter of overlapping sections, they’ve added another, splitting off something called American Showcase from American Spectrum, which was in turn split off from the dramatic competition. Anyone who can convincingly explain why a given film belongs in Showcase rather than Spectrum, Premieres, the competition or any other division is eligible for a free bucket of popcorn at the Holiday Village triplex.

Those trying to collect on that offer, however, are due for yet another shock. The shabby-chic Holiday triplex, one of Sundance’s most venerable venues, will be out of commission, the victim of a renovation that (surprise) didn’t manage to finish on time, leaving the festival to scramble to come up with three new theatrical spaces to take its place.

Also determined to be different is the Park City weather. Though the festival has been relatively precipitation-free for the last few years, news reports say that this winter has seen so much snow that Interstate 80, the road between Salt Lake and Park City, has been the scene of numerous collisions between unwary motorists and very large and hungry moose. A word to the wise.

Just as unsettling are advance reports that the festival, possibly worried about the potential for terrorism, is forbidding anything but messages in the mailboxes of festival participants. No more chocolate cell phones, no more plastic tongue cleaners, no more Armenian pastries, no more condoms in American flag wrappings, no more anything entrepreneurially intended to promote a given film. Art will apparently have to go it alone this year.

Some things about Sundance, however, do not change. The Premieres section is still reserved for anyone with a recognizable name, from veteran director Victor Nunez (“Ulee’s Gold”), here with his new film “Coastlines,” to documentarian-provocateur Nick Broomfield (“Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam”) and his “L.A. Story,” a look at the murderous rivalries of the rap world.

Also in Premieres is Robin Williams in what is said to be a non-Patch Adams role in “One Hour Photo”; “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” a documentary on resilient Hollywood producer Robert Evans; and “The Dancer Upstairs,” a feature directed by John Malkovich and starring Javier Bardem in Nicholas Shakespeare’s adaptation of his own book on revolutionary activity in Latin America.

One of the most outright entertaining of the Premieres is “Birthday Girl,” which stars Ben Chaplin as a timid British bank clerk who procures a Russian mail-order bride and ends up, in Nicole Kidman’s Nadia, with someone who’s so much more than he can handle that saying so doesn’t say the half of it. British director Jez Butterworth, who co-wrote with his brother Tom, has come up with an adventurous film that adroitly remixes genre elements and unexpected performances to pleasing effect.

World Cinema Section Promises Fine Films

If these films have some familiarity to them, the ones in the dramatic competition are, as usual, almost completely unknown quantities and, if anything, tend to sound a bit more on the edge this year. The word from the Sundance brain trust is that these works are “eccentric,” which may or may not be code for “unwatchable.”

Invariably the home of fine films is the World Cinema section. One of the best, Laurent Cantet’s “Time Out,” is from France and, like its predecessor, “Human Resources,” concerns itself with the centrality of work to life. It’s a thoughtful, exceptionally subtle psychological drama about an ordinary man who creates an increasingly elaborate and fantastical imaginary work experience for himself to avoid telling his family he’s been fired. Aurelien Recoing gives a nervy, insinuating performance as an impostor whose deceptions start to take over his life.

Though it perennially has to fight off its stepchild image, American Spectrum invariably has films worth watching. Writer-director Karen Moncrieff’s “Blue Car,” for instance, is notable for young Agnes Bruckner’s heartfelt breakthrough performance as a high school student from a broken home who is encouraged to pursue poetry by a male English teacher

Pound for pound, as the old boxing writers used to say, the most reliable section at Sundance continues to be the documentary competition. Some of this year’s most interesting include:

* “Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony,” which outlines the part song played as both a lifter of spirits and an aid to organizing in the movement against apartheid in South Africa.

* “Close to Home,” a wrenching film, as important as it is difficult to watch, that deals with the devastation of childhood sexual abuse. The documentary consists of interviews with adult survivors of abuse, children who are just now confronting their experience and, most chilling, convicted offenders talking about their strategies in group therapy sessions. As one of them explains, “The predator isn’t the guy in the bushes, picking up kids in the schoolyard. Most child molesters are people in your lives.”

* “The Cockettes” is an engaging tribute to a theatrical troupe that was the sensation of the late 1960s and early 1970s hippie movement in San Francisco. They were, as John Waters describes them, “hippie acid freak drag queens,” and this sympathetic, straight-ahead look at “people who were allowed to live at the end of their imagination” is a charming and nostalgic revisiting of a lost corner of recent cultural history.

* “Derrida” is easily the most intellectually challenging documentary in the competition. This look at the life and thought of the French philosopher and father of deconstruction is also an invigorating and refreshing tonic for tired minds. Made with Jacques Derrida’s cooperation and enhanced by a Ryuichi Sakamoto score, the film is at its best when the man is being interviewed and his powerful, agile intellect takes over. “Everything is fake in cinema verite” is only one of many trenchant comments made about everything from the myth of Echo and Narcissus to the sex lives of philosophers.

* “Sister Helen” provides a glimpse inside a halfway house for recovering addicts in the South Bronx that’s run by a holy terror of a 69-year-old Benedictine nun who is tough, sarcastic and unapologetic in her quest to keep the 21 men in her program substance-free.

Even if there’s nothing else you can count on this year, with Sundance’s documentaries you’re always on solid ground.