Sundance 2022 Review: ‘Fire of Love’ • Salt Lake Magazine

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While researching the Icelandic landscape for her film The Seer and the Unseen (2019), director Sara Dosa and her team came across spectacular footage from volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, which led to Dara digging further into their work, lives and deaths, and Fire of Love.

Deep in the Krafft rabbit hole, Dosa learned a profound lesson from the couple that she shared with the Sundance audience:

“They taught me that loving the earth also helps us to love each other.”

Fire of Love builds up to the couple’s death, doing what they love, but that is just a small part of the narrative, which instead focuses primarily on their lives and relationship.

The film tells their story through their own photos and video footage from around the world. The majestic, and often frightening, footage is expertly paired with music, animation and narration from indie film star Miranda July, who sounds more low-key and honest than your typical nature-doc “voice of God.”

We learn the several ways the couple may have met, how they first became fascinated by volcanoes (Etna and Stromboli early on) and witness the subtle differences in the ways they approach their work. While Katia prefers taking still photos, focusing on the small details of their science, and writing the books; Maurice shoots video so no aspect is lost, focuses on the grandiose and does most of the public speaking. Maurice also comes off bolder in his research methods, even paddling with a fellow scientist onto an acid lake at one point.

We learn that one won’t work without the other.

Viewers also witness a change in their approach overall, as they turn their attention from the less-dangerous “red” volcanoes to the highly dangerous “grey” volcanoes (think St. Helen’s and Unzen), with a goal of sharing their findings to help save those in the path of destruction.

Add this to your list. With 200-ish hours of footage edited down to about an hour and a half, we can only imagine the sights left on the cutting room floor.

Fire of Love will show again Jan. 21 at 8 a.m. at Sundance online.

For more reviews from the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, check out the Art and Entertainment section of Salt Lake magazine.

Sundance 2022 Review: ‘The Princess’ • Salt Lake Magazine

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Perhaps you’ve heard this story. How, once upon a time, a beautiful, young woman—a nanny of all things!—met and married a prince in an incredibly lavish ceremony observed by the whole world. And wasn’t it amazing, dreamy, romantic? The spectacle, the procession, the dress, that girl! Just like a fairy tale, they said. We said. And then the not-so-happily-ever-after followed, and we continued to watch, at least sometimes, wondering, maybe, what’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with her?

But oh, there’s a son! And here’s another one! Splendid. And then things got even worse, and then they were splitting up, sort of, separating, not divorcing, because for some reason his family couldn’t allow that, and, really, it was for the boys, and were we still paying attention? Because there’s another woman and another man in the story now—but which came first, and that’s not how these things go, right? I mean, maybe in our lives, people’s lives, but not in this story, not for them (or forget him, he’s always been sort of odd and definitely not charming), not for her. That’s not how we wanted it to be. Or, actually, all this business about affairs and her feeling trapped sort of maybe makes her more interesting, doesn’t it? Which has always been the case, yes, that she, the seeming outsider, was the most approachable of all of them, that ancient, cold, symbolic family she married into. She’s the most compelling, the one we really loved because those eyes, that voice, that style—and also she had problems we could identify with and she cared a lot and she could express that.

And then they were divorced and she was free of him and his controlling family—great!—and then she was dead, killed in a car crash we never saw, while she and some guy were being chased by a buzzing swarm of paparazzi, trying, as they always had, to catch the latest, most intimate glimpse of her face, her most private expression that would tell us everything we wanted to know, about—

What did we still want to know? What was it we’d wanted from her? What did she mean, after all?

Maybe you lived through this saga, getting up before dawn to watch the coverage of its beginning and its end. Or maybe you only know part of it. Or you’ve immersed yourself in all the pages and hours of analysis, the told-to biographies and secret histories, as well as the searching, speculating dramatizations of The Queen, The Crown and Spencer. So why, at this point, would you bother to sit down and watch one more documentary about her—unless you’re just a glutton?

Director Ed Perkins is well aware of your saturation and skepticism, but he doesn’t accept the possibility of your total exhaustion. Or rather, he knows you haven’t yet considered the implications of your own interest. The Princess is what he calls an archive film, constructed in the editing room from thousands of hours of video and audio documenting and analyzing the marriage of Charles and Diana, the most basic materials of their narrative. His choices purposefully avoid the mostly familiar, entangling and enhancing the known with video outtakes and the often passionate and sometimes cruel assessments of royal observers, talk show hosts and ordinary citizens from around the world. There are very few moments of surprise in The Princess (Princess Anne’s stunningly bitchy response to a question about her sister-in-law’s new baby is one), but that’s not really the point. The film’s drama lies, rather, in Perkins’s deft aggregation of the frequently absurd, sometimes pathos-laden, but always authentic images and sounds of people watching and caring—the expressions of affirmation in the street celebrations during the wedding; the constructed melancholy in the coverage of Diana contemplating the Taj Mahal solo; the inevitable phalanxes of slavering photographers and videographers; Diana’s increasingly intentional and savvy manipulation of the media through more and less subtle glances, refusals and riddle-like statements; and, finally, the tearful, even rageful crowds slowly converging on Buckingham Palace, seemingly to mourn some greater coming apart.

Though there are a few moments (as in a hunting sequence) where the editing of the film indulges its own myth-reinforcing metaphors and resonances, The Princess mostly avoids pushing its own commentary on its subjects, letting the footage it frames—its assumptions and claims—raise critical questions. And the film draws no grand conclusions about our persistent, reciprocal participation in an intoxicating and frequently destructive celebrity culture. Instead it presents abundant and provocative evidence supporting a single and singular case. Whether or not we have been caught up in the story (as millions of others here testify that they were), the attention The Princess asks us to bring to its montage of images and dialogue and to the personal act of meaning-making we perform on these make it a worthy and uniquely reflective addition to the vast commentary on Diana’s life and death.

Follow Salt Lake’s coverage of Sundance all festival long.

Sundance Film Festival 2022: 20 buzzy movies and documentaries premiering during the festival

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Wyatt Garfield/Courtesy of Sundance Institute Rebecca Hall appears in “Resurrection” by Andrew Semans. 20 buzzy films premiering at Sundance 2022

Wyatt Garfield/Courtesy of Sundance Institute Rebecca Hall appears in “Resurrection” by Andrew Semans.

The Sundance Film Festival has kicked off in an online-only format due to Covid-19 concerns after initially being scheduled as a hybrid of both virtual and in-person screening events in Park City, Utah. Here are some of the feature films and documentaries premiering at Sundance this year.

Sundance 2022: ‘Emergency’ laces its bawdy comedy with sharp social commentary

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Sundance 2022: ‘When You Finish Saving the World’ Movie Review

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Knowledge and the pursuit of it is one of the few ways we all relate as human beings. The part that separates us is the retention of said knowledge. Jesse Eisenberg has established a reputable name through notable works such as The Social Network, Now You See Me, and Zombieland. It’s not atypical for actors who pursue film direction to lapse in the necessary knowledge to create a great picture. However, Eisenberg’s retained knowledge from his experiences has greatly translated to a respectable directorial debut. The irony in this, is that When You Finish Saving the World is about individuals who aren’t knowledgeable nor fain enough curiosity to pursue it.

Similar to one of Eisenberg’s early works – The Squid and the Whale – When You Finish Saving the World is about a familial relationship that is in shambles. Ziggy Katz (Finn Wolfhard) is a streaming musician with a respectable international following. Evelyn Katz (Julianne Moore) runs a shelter for survivors of domestic abuse. Ziggy is looking to search for himself through a romantic outlet. Evelyn is looking to fulfill her maternal instincts. However, both of them have zero humility and act as if the world was made around them. Creating a mismatch amongst Ziggy, Evelyn, and the rest of the sane world.

A feat that this movie achieves is its ability to show the contrary motions between Ziggy and Evelyn while also showing a sense of parallelism. Ziggy is pursuing knowledge without the curiosity to achieve it. Evelyn is using her curiosity to provide knowledge while not being knowledgeable. Somehow, these two different avenues produce the same end result. Most movies would stumble in its effort to achieve this level of complexity. However, Jesse Eisenberg’s smart direction sticks the landing.

When You Finish Saving the World is successful at creating emotional highs and lows. The employment of dramatic irony builds well deserved tension. As the tension boils over, Eisenberg is able to create bombastic scenes. In turn, extracting some of Finn Wolfhard’s and Julianne Moore’s best performances. Even when you reach the end of the movie, there was natural resolution to the tensions brought on throughout the film between Ziggy and Evelyn. Respectably, not taking the cliched-easy way out in lieu of something more cathartic.

The only major drawback of this movie is its use of societal and political issues. Primarily driving out of Ziggy’s storyline, all the political discussion serves no higher purpose than to be topical to Ziggy’s generation. Which wouldn’t be an issue – if it weren’t for the fact that it doesn’t seek to examine these further than what’s on the surface. Although it isn’t necessarily the focal point of the movie, it adds nothing more than noise to the already short 88 minute runtime.

Despite this drawback, Eisenberg creates a debut that rejects the idea that movies from actors turned directors are bad. I fear this may fade into obscurity once it’s officially released, but there’s something sincere about this movie. When You Finish Saving The World is a complicated, yet small bite into Eisenberg’s capabilities as a director. Hopefully whatever Eisenberg makes next is as smart and well made as this. – Jacob Mauceri

Rating: 7/10

‘When You Finish Saving The World’ is pending wide release date. For more Sundance 2022 coverage, keep an eye on our Twitter page and this site!