Sundance Journal 2009 Day 2: Ry Russo-Young’s You Wont Miss Me

Capping off my a full day of movie watching, I attended a late night screening for Ry-Russo Young‘s You Wont Miss Me. The best way to describe Young’s feature length film debut, is as a distant cousin to the mumblecore wave of indie films of the past five years and as the grandchild of American independent cinema’s granddaddy John Cassavetes.

Young (see pic taken from the screening’s Q&A) employs a total of five different filmmaking standards not for the sake of seeing how many formats one can add to a film but rather use the technologies in an effort to avoid going the psycho-babble route in the narrative and favor a naturalism that explores the deep insecurities instead. It’s a stylistic approach and model that I imagine will be verified by more filmmakers (Todd Haynes shaped I’m not There in the same manner).

What I found was that these platforms contributed to a mindfuck of sorts, I have this conditioned understanding of how these formats are usually used and here digital, film and flip phone vids took the cinema verite/docu form into a direction that blurs the lines of reality and fiction – there were a couple of times where I was unsure whether Young’s muse in actress Stella Schnabel (daughter of the painter/filmmaker) was acting or not., made more difficult to decipher when the film hosts a pair of casting sequences with a meta territory likeliness.