An Indie Go Girl

Ski parka-clad studio execs queuing up to get into a movie theater. Novice directors being slavishly courted by slick Hollywood agents. Must be time for the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, Robert Redford's annual conclave--and open market--of independent cinema. Aside from the high-priced bidding wars over low-budget movies, a favorite festival ritual is the emergence of a relatively unknown actress as a genuine starlet, complete with fawning fans, attitude-heavy handlers and enough buzz to short-circuit her StarTAC.

The Sundance "It Girl" phenomenon started back in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape's Andie MacDowell, a model whose only previous major role had been as Jane in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan. Feisty Parker Posey had been banging around no-budget films for years until the 1997 festival hits Party Girl and The House of Yes gave her enough cachet to play Tom Hanks' girlfriend in You've Got Mail. And Christina Ricci, a former child actress best known as the Addams Family's creepy daughter Wednesday, broke into the big time last year with tarty, career-shaking turns in Buffalo '66 and The Opposite of Sex.

The 10-day festival officially began last Thursday, but it isn't too late to handicap this year's potential contenders for Indie Goddess. You can probably cross porn star Annabel Chong off the list, even though a documentary about her, um, orgiastic talents sold out faster than almost every other Sundance screening. Former brat packer Ally Sheedy, who resurfaced after a decade of TV movies with her acclaimed performance in last year's High Art, has a chance with two new films, the dysfunctional-family weepie The Autumn Heart and the music-industry romp Sugar Town. But your best bet might be Sarah Polley, a 20-year-old Canadian actress who stars in the way-cool teen comedy noir Go and in Guinevere, a serious coming-of-age story about a May-September romance.

Actresses with a wide range like Polley's thrive at Sundance because many movies there take risks with compelling, quirky characters. Where Hollywood favors vapid females whose greatest apotheosis is a kiss, indies prefer complex women who can also kick butt. "Independent films almost have a province when it comes to portraying strong women," says festival programming chief Geoffrey Gilmore. "They're not just the archetypal roles of the girlfriend, the wife or even the women who get together to cry. Actresses get to play the kind of fully fleshed-out characters who just aren't in most studio scripts."

Polley first attracted attention back in 1996 for her performance as the crippled but precociously wise survivor of a school-bus crash in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter. Her current roles couldn't be more different. In Guinevere she must hold her own as a love interest opposite the formidable Irish actor Stephen Rea. In Go she is a young supermarket cashier who gets caught up in a drug deal gone awry. The part called for a sweet but tough chick who could take her lumps. Director Doug Liman (Swingers) had originally courted Ricci, but scheduling conflicts arose. Polley, who possesses the look and spark of a younger Uma Thurman, has a surprising wild streak that belies her fresh-scrubbed beauty. "She's young, but she's led an incredibly full life," says Liman. "She's been involved in a lot of political protests in Canada--had her teeth kicked in by a cop--and she knows something about the streets. Besides all that, she's an amazing actress."

A performer from the age of four, Polley doesn't take her job lightly. "Acting can be a really shallow thing to do with your life," she says. "You have to choose things that actually have something to say." Should she emerge from the festival as this year's phenom, Polley may prove a reluctant superstar. "I don't want my life to change too much, so maybe I'm going in the wrong direction," she says, laughing. "I never want my privacy or personal life compromised by what I do, so I guess I'm not interested in getting a higher profile." According to those who know her well, she'd rather be organizing nonunion crews on a movie set than blowing air kisses at a splashy premiere. She refuses to move from Toronto to Los Angeles, passes on overtly commercial scripts and nixes interview requests from celebrity-oriented magazines. Well, O.K., she did appear as one of Vanity Fair's upcoming hot Hollywood cover girls--but hey, she refused to wear makeup for the photo shoot. Now that's truly independent.