Baby, I love you

What do you get when you send Joan of Arcadia to a therapy session with the White Witch? For starters, the first excellent movie I’ve seen at Sundance. Hilary Brougher’s “Stephanie Daley” is a beautifully shot, written, acted, and edited drama about an upstate New York teenager (Amber Tamblyn) who’s accused of killing her newborn baby. Before a trial, the prosecution asks a forensic psychologist (Tilda Swinton) to determine if the girl is sane. The shrink is several months pregnant herself, and her condition starts to bear on her perception of Daley, who claims she didn’t even know she would give birth.

In another decade, this movie would launch into hysterics, but Brougher, in her filmmaking debut, is a skillful and tender director. The scenes set in the local school are some of the most naturalistic, realistic American high-school sequences ever. And by the end of this movie the shrink and her patient have an almost palindromic relationship. Watching it provides me with yet another example of how Lars von Trier might have turned out it with a few more hugs.

The movie is shaping up to be a gender-splitter. Every woman I know who’s seen it finds it powerful. The men who were at my screening spent a lot of time checking their Blackberries – presumably for messages from Mars. The strangest thing about that showing, though, were the crying babies in the theater, something I’ve never experienced before at this festival. Under the circumstances, it would have seemed wrong to shush them.