By John Anderson

January 22, 2004

Park City, Utah

There haven't been many years when the Sundance Film Festival crowd could gloat about the weather, but it's been a lot warmer here than it's been in New York. And then there's Winnipeg.

"The fact is, we were shooting most days in temperatures that were below minus 40 degrees," said Guy Maddin, the mad genius Canadian whose home province of Manitoba was the setting for "The Saddest Music in the World." Starring Isabella Rossellini and former "Kid in the Hall" Mark McKinney, it's a characteristically absurd Maddin-esque story about a search for, yes, the saddest music in the world ("sobbing Mexican mariachis, dour Scottish bagpipers, woeful West Indian drummers, and numerous other grief-stricken ensembles ..."). Oddly enough, it was adapted from a novel and screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro ("The Remains of the Day"), but back- dated to the Depression - a better setting for Maddin to concoct another of his sepia- toned dream states.

"Minus 45 was the coldest day," the director said, sort of laughing. "We shot this orphanage scene, all these little children half freezing to death. Then I cut them out of the movie."

"It was so cold it was funny," McKinney said. "Isabella said she was fascinated, because when the weather gets that cold in Winnipeg, the radio station reports how many minutes you can stay outside before your face falls off.

"We rented flamethrowers that blasted fire like the back end of the Batmobile," Maddin added. "You could actually put your face right into the flames, because they were going straight up into the rafters, where there was this ecosystem of cockatoos and parrots fluttering around."

Uh huh. Anyway, "Saddest Music" is one of the more delightful films populating a festival with many highs and lows that have nothing to do with weather. The celebrated Sundance "buzz" - the mysterious quantity that foretells great success for certain films, except when it's wrong - hasn't been very loud at all. "Garden State" - "the kind of quirky romantic comedy that used to be a staple of Hollywood," as the catalog tells us - stars Natalie Portman and Peter Sarsgaard and was getting the kind of mixed-to-tepid word of mouth that made its mutual purchase by Miramax and Fox Searchlight (a novel and unholy alliance) no surprise whatsoever.

It will be curious, come Saturday night and the Sundance Awards ceremony, what kind of film is recognized by the festival itself. Juries are notoriously unpredictable, but if one had to pick a competition feature on the basis of positive word of mouth, it would be "Napoleon Dynamite," Jared Hess' offbeat comedy about an über-nerd from Idaho. And that's about it.

They'll have to pick something, but some of the more talked about films aren't eligible for prizes. One is "Motorcycle Diaries," a film by Walter Salles ("Central Station") taken from the travel diaries of Ché Guevara and his traveling companion, Dr. Alberto Granado. And Angela Robinson's "D.E.B.S." was getting major laughs.

Among documentaries, the attention has been split between the international docs and the competition from the United States - "Born Into Brothels" (about children of prostitutes in Calcutta, India, learning photography); "Heir to an Execution," about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, their children and grandchildren; "Farmingville," about migrant-labor issues on Long Island; and "In the Realms of the Unreal," about the strange and reclusive Henry Darger and the art he left behind.

"Persons of Interest," a deliberately formalist film about immigrant people and their often horrible experiences under Attorney General John Ashcroft's post 9/11 policies, was getting raves, which may or may not be surprising: The film, directed by Alison Maclean ("Jesus' Son") and Tobias Perse, is demanding, consisting simply of victims telling their stories in a stark white room. On the other hand, the political temperature at Sundance has been high: When programmer Caroline Libresco, introducing "Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed" (on Martin Luther King Jr. Day), said something about "reclaiming our democracy," the audience burst into applause. So a film like Shola Lynch's Shirley Chisholm film, or "Persons of Interest," a film guaranteed to raise the righteous indignation of anyone with a favorable opinion of liberty, freedom or the Constitution, could very well bury the Big Mac films - ones that audiences rush to consume, but don't feel so good about afterward.