Sundance 2010 Preview: BLUE VALENTINE

Independent films about two people falling in love starring incredibly gifted actors.   What more do you want at Sundance?   BLUE VALENTINE, with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams leading the charge, is definitely one of those films.   You can just feel the power seeping off of this movie.   With an award-winning screenplay (it won the 2006 Chrysler Film Project, which resulted in $1 million in funding) in tow, BLUE VALENTINE looks to be a very powerful film worth checking out.

Official Synopsis:

Blue Valentine is an intimate, shattering portrait of a disintegrating marriage.

On the far side of a once-passionate romance, Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) are married with a young daughter. Hoping to save their marriage, they steal away to a theme hotel. We then encounter them years earlier, when they met and fell in love—full of life and hope.

Moving fluidly between these two time periods, Blue Valentine unfolds like a cinematic duet whose refrain asks, where did their love go? Framing the film as a mystery whose answer lies scattered in time (and in character), filmmaker Derek Cianfrance constructs an elegant set of dualities: past and present, youth and adulthood, vitality and entropy. The rigor of his process is visible throughout the film. Eliminating artificial devices, he has only the truth of the characters to work with. Because Gosling and Williams bring amazing intensity and emotional honesty to their roles, the experience of connecting to these two souls becomes truly moving.

BLUE VALENTINE plays at the following times:

3:15 PM Sun, Jan 24 Eccles Theatre
8:30 AM Mon, Jan 25 Racquet Club
9:30 PM Tue, Jan 26 Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in Salt Lake City
8:00 PM Thu, Jan 28 Racquet Club
2:15 PM Fri, Jan 29 Racquet Club

Stills: