What If Judd Apatow Were a Woman?

Courtesy of Everett Collection Humpday celebrates a complex bromance and becomes an early breakout film at Sundance. Plus: You won’t want to miss Stella Schnabel in her first leading role.

At last Thursday’s opening day press conference, Robert Redford responded to the threatened, Prop 8-inspired boycott of the festival by spinning Sundance’s key buzzword into a make-nice platitude: “Diversity is what we do. We've been there giving full freedom of voice to all kinds for years.”

Indeed, diversity has been very much a part of the festival’s brand ever since Redford and his Sundance Institute took over the former Utah/US Film Festival 25 years ago—in theory. Female filmmakers are still a rarity in indie film as a whole, and those who have launched careers at Sundance (Allison Anders, Miranda July, Rose Troche) have hardly become household names. Plus, the stereotypical Sundance Movie of the past decade (think Garden State) has tended to flatten its female lead into the Manic Pixie Dream Girls mold. So many quirky waifs who live to turn a sad-sack young man’s life around with her love, so many troubled beauties desperate for romantic salvation.

“Straight guys are the ones, if you’re going to use a broad stroke, who are most invested in everybody knowing that they’re straight.”

So imagine my delight to see that two of the standout titles of the first weekend of the 2009 festival were not only directed by women, but feature female leads who transcend the usual indie film clichés. One of those films, Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, is as of this writing reportedly the target of a four-way bidding war. The other film, Ry Russo-Young’s much smaller, more experimental You Won’t Miss Me, features Stella Schnabel (daughter of Julian) in a tour de force first leading role.

Humpday follows Andrew (played by Joshua Leonard, who knows from Sundance breakouts—he was one of the three leads in The Blair Witch Project) and Ben (Mark Duplass—ditto, he directed last year’s Sundance horror-comedy Baghead), two college bros who reunite after a decade and, after many drinks, make a pact to star in a homemade porn film. Once sober, sticking to the dare becomes a question of machismo—neither dude is willing to be the first to back out. It looks like they’re going to go through with it—once Ben gets the go-ahead from his baby-hungry wife Anna (Alycia Delmore).

This scenario may sound like prime grist for the Judd Apatow factory, and as far as it’s hilariously raunchy and also sincere and bittersweet, it is. But there are two things that set Humpday apart. Shelton shot the film without a formal script, putting her actors through extensive character work and improvisation, and finding her narrative documentary-style in the editing room. And unlike Knocked Up, which teaches that any dude who doesn’t willingly, totally submit to domestication is both a moron and a cad, Humpday treats adult relationships as the complex beasts that they are, and asks open-ended questions about the extent to which we can and/or should give up all the things we are in order to be with the person we want to be with. Humpday is as much about the realities of maintaining a relationship past the initial romance as it is about the reignited bromance.

At a cocktail party for the film, Shelton acknowledged that having a fully realized female at the tip of this triangle is integral to balancing both relationships. “The scenes with Anna, [like] the ovulation sex scene where she mounts him like a horse—all of those scenes [are] really vital to the way the film works.”