Sundance’s Last Stand in Park City Delivers Sex, Surprises, and a Farewell to Redford

Buh-bye, Park City: this week, after five seminal decades, the Sundance Film Festival is hosting its last edition in Utah’s storied ski resort. Next year, and for the foreseeable future, Robert Redford’s indie-film idyll will have brand-new metropolitan digs in Boulder, Colorado. Its founder will never see the seismic move, of course, since the 89-year-old actor/director/producer died last September in what feels like bittersweet end-of-an-era serendipity.

Those sharing their tributes to the Sundance Kid over the festival’s opening weekend were outré auteur Gregg Araki, who introduced his hot-and-heavy satire I Want Your Sex with an outpouring of gratitude. “How the hell did he come up with this concept? I honestly don’t know,” said the self-professed punk-rock queer Asian, an 11-time Sundance vet who first came here with The Living End in 1992 and credits the festival for giving him his career. “Thank you so much to Robert Redford,” he added. “You are a god to me, and you are immortal.”

I Want Your Sex, an instant hit with its tittering, titillated audience, is a proudly kinky comedy of manners between an acclaimed, domineering multi-media artist (Olivia Wilde) and her torrid relationship with an open-faced assistant 14 years her junior (Cooper Hoffman) — equally skewering sexual harassment in the workplace, Gen-Z frigidity, and art-world bloviation.

The gleefully explicit romp revels in its graphic, latex-laden displays of ass paddling, BDSM whipping, strap-on pegging, and threesomes. It proudly name-checks Harold Robbins’ steamy romances and Helmut Newton’s boundary-pushing images, while its characters use pink dildos and pink pig masks, handcuffs and pirate eye patches. Hoffman says “I’m your boy-whore for the evening,” while Wilde reassures him with zingers like “I’m using a ton of lube.” It’s exactly the type of film that strait-laced uber-WASP Redford would never have starred in or made himself, but would still have championed with full-throated approval.

Wilde also delivered another of the festival’s strongest selections: The Invite, a remake of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish hit The People Upstairs. The actress not only stars in but directs this four-hander about a bickering married couple who invite hyper-sexual new neighbors over to their apartment. Wilde plays the uptight, Xanax-popping wife; Seth Rogen is her depressed husband with chronic back pain and simmering resentment over his life choices; their seemingly perfect guests are former firefighter Edward Norton and his steamy therapist girlfriend Penelope Cruz.

Over the course of a very deftly written, brutally honest and hilariously candid two hours, the film offers up a vivid x-ray of the four characters’ interpersonal dynamics, effortlessly switching tones from comedy to drama to slapstick to romance as each person digs deep into each other’s lives. The Invite is that rare treat, a potentially small movie — set entirely in one location, and confining itself to a quartet of actors — that magnifies human relationships into a vitally cinematic experience.

“A wise man said you’re never more vulnerable than when you’re laughing,” said a visibly elated Wilde after The Invite earned a standing ovation at its premiere in the 1200-seat Eccles theater. She explained that she had the luxury of making the film chronologically, which helped build its emotional intensity organically. “There were days that were so excruciating,” confessed Rogen. “In the best way!”

Rogen also shared that he and Edward Norton were cast before Wilde committed to her role, since the director wasn’t originally planning to act in the film. But they both eagerly convinced her to do it, since the group’s chemistry was clearly working so well. “It was just like making a movie with your best friends,” said Rogen. “As if I was friends with Penelope Cruz,” he added self-deprecatingly. “Which I’m not.”

Sex sells at Sundance, but one of the more delightfully odd riffs on this truism was Wicker, Alex Huston Fisher and Eleanor Wilson’s shrewd and charming adaptation of Ursula Wills-Jones’ fairy-tale-tinged short story “The Wicker Husband.” Olivia Coleman plays a spinster fisherwoman in an Elizabethan-era village that sees a woman’s value mainly as a wife. As a cheeky rebuke to all the patriarchal conventions, Coleman pays basket-weaver Peter Dinklage to make her a husband. A month later, a woven wooden man (Alexander Skarsgård) suddenly appears — and becomes the all-loving, all-abiding, handy, helpful, devoted, and sexually satisfying spouse that every woman in town secretly craves. Which, naturally, plunges the community into chaos.

During his introduction, Fisher praised the breathtaking practical effects (all done by the Kiwi geniuses at Peter Jackson’s WETA Workshop) that transformed Skarsgård into an elaborately threaded work of art — although some finer details had to be tweaked. “Wicker nipples or no wicker nipples?” Fisher asked rhetorically before answering, “rest assured, we have wicker nipples.”

After the film’s warm reception, Skarsgård explained his trepidation about taking a part that was so different from the slimy villains, aloof jerks and duplicitous rogues that have so far defined his career. “To play this good-hearted character was… scary to me,” he deadpanned. “It was a stretch, as an actor.”