Sundance 2013: Sex with James Franco, Sultry Scarlett Johansson and Daniel Radcliffe's Jew-Fro

Finally there was Coco Before Chanel director Anne Fontaine's Two Mothers, an English-language French-Australian co-production set along the idyllic coastline of Seal Rocks, New South Wales -- a town so small that there is, evidently, nothing better for two handsome teenage surfers (played by Animal Kingdomdiscovery James Frecheville and Twilight's Xavier Samuel) than to sit around playing cards, getting drunk and eventually climbing into the sack with each other's middle-aged mom. Naomi Watts and Robin Wright are the two sun-kissed MILFs of the title, and they play the parts with such conviction -- as do their young co-stars -- that, at the late hour it screened, there was something guiltily pleasurable about Two Mothers and its high-toned Skinemax vibe. Fontaine is too straight-arrow a director to push the material fully over the absurd precipice -- the way that, say, Paul Verhoeven readily would have -- but that didn't stop the Eccles audience from erupting in waves of laughter during some of the more risible sections. When asked, during the post-screening Q&A, what surprised her most about the audience's response, a befuddled Fontaine answered in broken English, "Ze laughing. I'm not sure what that means." If a ballsy distributor picks this up and markets it as a full-on camp melodrama-- Mommies Dearest -- they might just have a hit on their hands.

And Sundance 2013 is just be heating up. Still in the wings: James Franco and co-director Travis Mathews' Interior. Leather Bar., which purports to "reimagine" the 40 minutes of hardcore S&M material rumored to have been excised from William Friedkin's 1980 gay serial-killer drama, Cruising. Park City locals, lock up your children.

Follow Scott Foundas on Twitter at @FoundasOnFilm and read more of his stories here: Foundas on Film.