Love is something everyone wants and dreams of. Sadly, at times, the realities of life and the humanness we all share threaten to destroy our expectation and hope for a happily ever after. We’re invited to believe that love and happiness in their purest forms are more fairy tale and therefore destined to be washed away by the trials and tribulations of our daily lives.
“Sparrows Dance” offers a seemingly short story about simple everyday life laced with something else, something…romantic and charming. I will admit, when the film started those were not the two words I would associate with this film. The story follows a girl so bored, so lost, so drenched in the darkness of her mediocre life that everything is just a painful looping cycle of the mundane.
Things change when her toilet clogs and she meets a plumber and…usually this sounds like the set up for a comedy or perhaps something more risqué, but in reality; it’s the set up to something surprisingly touching and very effective. The film has a dark, simplistic edge to it; it provides a sad presentation of this girl, but it helps work in a very natural approach to the inclusion of possible romance; it especially helps that it comes unexpectedly and from such an unlikely source. Human contact is visibly damaged when it comes to this girls’ journey and I loved the film’s use of both natural silence and sound to emphasize just how humdrum and common this person’s routine is when we examine it from an outside point of view.
So much of this character’s world is shown simply by her actions; the story lets us learn what we can from watching what she does rather than relying on the dialog to tell us everything we need to know. The chemistry and interaction between these two people doesn’t feel like a forced creation of the writer’s desire to see these two in love, it felt real and believable; two words Hollywood has a hard time getting right sometimes. The focus here is on simple, beautiful people. In that vision we learn that reality may be just what we need to get back to true love, a fairy tale like love that does not require the likes of vampires or werewolves.
In the end, it is ok to be human, it is ok to live within reality and it is ok to fall in love. Of course, doesn’t it have to be?
Sparrows Dance, a Tribeca Film, written and directed by Noah Buschel stars Marin Ireland and Paul Sparks and is available now On Demand.
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