Sundance films reflect a new affection for romance

PARK CITY, Utah – The Sundance Film Festival has been known for heart-wrenching dramas. Romantic comedies? Not so much.

But this year has brought a slew of romantic comedies and dramatic comedies, offering new takes on the form and giving rise, perhaps, to a new subgenre.

"There's been such innovation in really simple love stories this year," festival director Geoff Gilmore said. "For 20 years, everything stayed the same. And then suddenly we have a half dozen films dealing with different approaches to being in a relationship."

One of those movies -- the Rose Byrne/Hugh Dancy feature "Adam," which centers on a relationship between a young woman and a man who has Asperger syndrome -- found itself center stage when Fox Searchlight, the specialty division of 20th Century Fox, bought the film in the hopes of turning it into the little romance that could.

But there are a host of other pictures in Park City offering fresh takes on twenty- and thirty-something love.

There's Jay DiPietro's "Peter & Vandy," which tells the story of a relationship using a fractured, "Memento"-like structure; "An Education," an offbeat romance involving a young girl and older man in tumultuous 1960s London; "Paper Heart," a quasi-documentary about the search for love by actors Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera; and "Adventureland," Greg Mottola's look at 1980s absurdism and love triangles at a Pittsburgh theme park.

One of the most talked-about movies of the festival is "500 Days of Summer," Marc Webb's meditation on the emotions of a man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who falls in love with, but eventually splits from, an ethereal beauty named Summer (Zooey Deschanel).

These new comedy-dramas -- in some cases focusing as much on the breakup as the coupling -- vary in tone, era and characters. But they share several important traits: They're sometimes funny or melancholy, frequently musical and rarely simple -- much, in fact, like relationships themselves.

The films do still turn some tricks Sundance-style. The darker side of human emotions, for instance, is still explored. But the setting has shifted from broken families or underprivileged environments to the potentially more commercial realm of youthful love.

Most of these films are from a new generation of directors reacting to sugarcoated romances they've been inundated with since they were young.

"What I think we're seeing, and what I was trying to do in '500 Days,' is show the sweet side of relationships but also show how they're really lived," Webb said. "Characters are still hopeful, but they're also realistic. Hollywood hasn't really shown us that, and I don't find a lot of the movies that pretend that everything always works out as you hope to be very interesting, or useful."

It's hard to say whether many more movies in this vein will get made. Much will depend on how the current crop fares at the box office, but for now Sundance is enjoying its fling.