‘Tendaberry’: Sundance Review

Dir/scr: Haley Elizabeth Anderson. US. 2023. 119mins

Shot in various locations across New York as the city recovered from the pandemic, Tendaberry is, like its urban environment, both beguiling and challenging. This story of a 20-something woman attempting to find definition in an ever-shifting landscape is striking in craft, although the meandering narrative makes less of an impact.

 A love letter to a place which has shaped so many young lives, for better or worse

Premiering in Sundance, which hosted debut feature director Hayley Elizabeth Anderson’s  2010 short Pillars, Tendaberry’s loose naturalistic style may draw comparisons with other free-spirited, independent slices of American big city life like Clerks, Kids or Tangerine. Yet is has enough individual style to perhaps tempt further festivals. 

Anderson sets out her stall in dreamlike opening sequences, a tapestry of home video and archive footage of Coney Island — some from 1911, some from 1980s city videographer Nelson Sullivan, whose footage appears throughout — woven together with a poetic voiceover from protagonist Dakota (Kota Johan).

Despite this lyrical opening, 23-year-old Dakota, who moved from The Dominican Republic to upstate New York as a child and now lives in South Brooklyn, is treading a far more mundane and well-worn path. She works a succession of menial jobs — at a convenience store and, later, a strip club — and busks on the subway to fund the meagre life she has carved out for herself. The one bright spot is Ukrainian boyfriend Yuri (Yuri Pleksen), the pair seen sharing intimate moments in their decrepit apartment. When Yuri is forced to return to Kyiv to care for his ailing father, Dakota finds herself adrift; when war breaks out in February 2022 there, she is forced to face an uncertain future alone.

Tendaberry takes its title from the 1969 album ’New York Tendaberry’ by Laura Nyro, and builds a picture of this multi-layered city through plaintive, yearning lyrics. Yet Matthew Ballard’s cinematography never romanticises the place; framing is tight, claustrophobic, on the run-down apartments, dirty streets, threatening dark subway platforms and corner bodegas — that famous gleaming skyline only ever seen through a train window as she sings in a cracked, vulnerable voice for impassive travellers.  

But, as the film cycles through the seasons of a year — it shot in an improvisational style though 2021 and 2022 — there are lighter, sunnier moments which go someway towards explaining why Dakota feels so compelled to stay. That dogged determination also underpins the performance of newcomer Johan, who Anderson met by chance on a train in 2018. Taking a documentary-like approach, the director has coaxed a naturalistic, rawness from Johan.

That’s not quite enough to stop the story from drifting at times, as Dakota lurches from one crisis to the next, and her dreamy voiceover, in which she discusses coyotes in Central Park or the city’s past residents, can be distracting. But as this young woman finally begins to take control of her life, to carve out a sense of place for herself, the breakneck editing slows, the music softens — optimistic flutes joining a melancholy saxophone — and her story begins to take on a definite purpose. Tendaberry may reveal itself to be a coming-of-age narrative of sorts but, more than that, it’s a love letter to a place which has shaped so many young lives.