One of the most pleasant surprises of this year's Sundance Film Festival, for me, was Gillian Robespierre's warmly authentic debut feature “Obvious Child” — a film that gives former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Jenny Slate her first film lead, and lets her run with it to utterly disarming effect. As a romantic comedy that touches on more complicated human issues than the average example of the genre, it was a perfect acquisition for A24 Films, the young distribution company that is building a neat line in coolly offbeat indies, many of them female-driven.
The first trailer for the film has just landed, and it offers a pretty good taste of the film's scruffy, straight-talking charms, and of Slate's endearing looseness as a performer. Not being a “SNL” viewer, she was more or less a new face to me, but thoroughly won me over: as I wrote in my review, she “has the makings of a rather special movie star: lovably gawky, casually relatable and very, very funny.” I hope the film takes off when it opens on June 6.