A Languorous, 87-Minute Movie Worth Watching

No matter how accomplished, anthology movies can often be exhausting to watch. For those brief hours in its presence, a film demands total immersion, and switching from one story to another can start to feel like taking a long trip that requires hopping between cars and trains and boats and planes. By the end, all you want is for the ordeal to be over. So, what a wonder it is to discover Sierra Falconer’s Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), a Sundance premiere presenting us with four delicate tales that together constitute a quietly moving daydream. Steeped in the pleasantly lazy atmosphere of the title setting, the film is languorous, but not long. And you might find yourself thinking about it for days.

In the first episode, “Sunfish,” Lu (Maren Heary), a 14-year-old who’s been left to stay with her grandparents by her just-eloped mom, discovers the joys of navigating the nearby waters with a small sailboat. After finding a lost loonlet, Lu and her birdwatching grandparents nurse the baby bird back to health. At nights Lu calls her mom, always getting her voicemail. When she finds the mother loon and berates the older bird for abandoning its baby, Falconer keeps her camera distant, with the dialogue almost inaudible. Knowing that we understand the symbolism of the moment, she lets it pass gently, and her soft touch underlines both the sadness and predictability of Lu’s response. Other young filmmakers take note: This is called directing.

All the stories in Green Lake function in similarly glancing fashion. In “Summer Camp,” Jun (Jim Kaplan), a shy teenage violin prodigy, gets dropped off by his demanding mom at Interlochen Center for the Arts, where he practices until he bleeds; a promising attempt at friendship with some fellow students gets complicated by the fact that they’re all trying out for the same spots in the camp orchestra. In “Two Hearted,” a frustrated single mom and waitress (Karsen Liotta) offers to drive a big-talking, terminally ill local man (Dominic Bogart) to try and snare a monster catfish that he’s convinced lives in the waters of Green Lake. In “Resident Bird,” two sisters who help their father operate a homey boarding house prepare for the arrival of a Hollywood screenwriter and his family. The older girl, Robin (Emily Hall), is about to leave for culinary school; the younger, Blue Jay (Tenley Kellogg), doesn’t quite know how she’ll manage without her older sibling.

And that’s pretty much it! In some ways, these stories feel more like memories, the film’s interruptions lending everything a half-remembered quality. Save for the slight, tall-tale sensationalism of “Two Hearted,” none of these episodes offers a truly big, revelatory moment — but they do feel like glimpses of something these people will remember later in life. The true revelation lies in the whole, in the gathering sense that life is full of change and that nothing ever really resolves itself. That might also be why this particular anthology works so well, and also why it lingers afterwards. These incomplete individual stories all dance on the edge of transformation, even though we can’t quite tell what comes next for these people. And yet, over these quick, memorable 87 minutes, we come to know and love them, and hope they’ll turn out okay.