The Circuit

Every year Sundance looks back with two retrospective screenings.  With Wendell B. Harris, Jr's bright satire "Chameleon Street" auds get a look at film that didn't benefit from a big sale.  Starring William Douglas Street, Jr. the film is based on the true story of a black con-artist who successfully impersonates a laundry list of professionals in order to live the middle-class dream.


The story of Steven Soderbergh's "sex, lies, and videotape" -- making its return after 20 years -- is mostly known as the story of the fest's explosion as a bi-polar market for indie film, which has wildly swung in every direction since.  Everyone knows its story because everyone has read about it.  Yet Sundance feels it's worth looking back at Soderbergh's first pic not only a watermark in the indie film biz.  As Sundance's John Nein explained it:

It's a film that brings to the surface the dynamics of sexual power and impotence that usually run beneath the surface of human relationships. And in doing, Soderbergh is able to explore this rich, provocative blur of feelings and impulses underlying sexuality, intimacy and fidelity. And he does so from a place of truth, which I think is what makes the movie quite courageous.

For a film that was reportedly written in eight days it's also an incredibly smart screenplay, witty and entertaining at the same time as it finds a way for dialogue to be as sensual as sex. It has an almost literary sense of interior space. All those aspects, along with its deliberate, probing aesthetic combined for a film that feels both deeply personal and profoundly real.