SUNDANCE: Film offers something to ‘Barl!’ about
The Sundance Film Festival is about fresh, honest, vivid, realistic approaches to movies, and as you might assume, the festival is usually brimming with avant-garde cinema, far more risky than the average run-of-the-mill Tinsletown blockbusters and bombs.
Amongst Sundance participants, there is no overwhelming desire to produce a cash cow; rather the endeavor is focused almost solely on the art of storytelling and authentic performance.
Such is the case with Kasia Adamik’s black comedy/drama, Bark!. It opens with Lucy (Heather Morgan) angering her apartment neighbors by barking up a storm in the middle of the night. Yes, barking. And yes, like a dog. This tendency for Lucy to act, or at least communicate, like a canine, is troubling to her husband, Peter (Lee Tergesen), who cannot decide if she is gone fully cuckoo, or if she is trying to nab a few laughs. Also, like most men, he wonders what he may have done to trigger Lucy’s abnormal behavior.
Besides her barking, Lucy is fairly normal. Her routine hasn’t changed. She showers, eats and changes her clothes, but it’s that prickly little issue of speaking English that worries Peter. He tries yelling and pleading with Lucy, but she is unresponsive. Little by little, he begins to question his sanity and begins to pursue help from family and friends, hoping to cure Lucy of her malady.
Peter’s boyhood friend, Sam (Hank Azaria), who tends to cycle through minimum wage jobs every six weeks, tries to assist Peter in finding help for Lucy, encouraging him to seek psychiatric care for his barking wife. More than slightly hesitant about checking his wife into the sanitarium, Peter first approaches a local veterinarian, Darla (Lisa Kudrow). She thinks he is nuts, but cute, and before enlisting her trust, she drills him with pepper spray.
Fed up with the impolite receptionist at the mental hospital, Peter befriends Malcolm (Vincent D’Onofrio) a resident psychiatrist who would rather play the harp than save distressed souls. Their broom closet session leads to a bleak but truthful assessment of Lucy’s plight and future. Although Peter has gained a strange, disheveled new friend, he despairs and finds solace in the bed of the veterinarian, Darla.
All in all, the film echoes Franz Kafka’s book Metamorphosis, except what seems like tragedy might actually be happiness. When Lucy is sedated from her mishmash of anti-psychotic drugs, her eyes are glazed, there are no smiles and Lucy has no soul. In the finale, after a visit from Lucy’s equally crazy family, Peter decides she is better off happy and barking, than sedated and quiet.
Heather Morgan, the actress who portrays Lucy, also penned the screenplay. Of her writing, Morgan said, “This is a story about unconditional love. All the people in the story get to find themselves because of what Peter and Lucy go through. Fears, self-doubt and inhibitions all get healed.”
First-time director Adamik picked the right cast for Morgan’s dualistic tale of love and suffering. Tergesen, who has a role on HBO’s series Oz, is gruff, yet sensitive, and has nothing but a glimmering future in film. D’Onofrio (The Cell) is tremendous, and nails his character’s believability with facial twitches and perfect delivery of dialogue. Kudrow is quirky, yet light-years away from her Friends character, Phoebe. And Azaria (Mystery, Alaska) adds the everyman charm that would befit a person who has a propensity for losing jobs.
While you won’t see the flick pasted across billboards or discussed on Entertainment Tonight, Bark! is one of the best of Sundance 2002.