Fall begins for me a few weeks ahead of schedule when I make the trek to Telluride for its annual film festival, a four-day reprieve from three-digit temps and the daily humdrum of home in Denver. Once I stand in line to wait for screenings, feeling the crispness of the impending season already upon me, I remember how movies in the mountains herald more than changing weather.
This year’s fest, the 50th of its kind, both special and familiar, offered its signature glimpse into the state of art and culture and ideas at a particular moment, this time the pandemic having slid past our rearview and something less known but inescapable waiting ahead.
While festival director Julie Huntsinger curates a program based on her own tastes and vision, each of us who makes the trip also crafts our version from the timetable of offerings and activities on hand. For me this year: sixteen films, all 2023 releases, that starred big names who were primarily absent from the birthday celebration (solidarity forever…).
If last year’s selections represented various directors’ personal journeys into and out of the pandemic, often coming to terms with decades of unprocessed loss and change, this year also ended up a directors’ year but for very different reasons. And with so many diverse offerings again, I relished the challenge, as always, to find my thread, a commonality, that strings together what I watched and what I witnessed into a larger texture of how artists are viewing their world right now.
In this year’s celebration of film in the San Juans, every creative wanted to show off how the form is highlighted by the form itself. I walked out of each screening with the sense, only in film can that happen, only in film.
Thanks to #TFF49, I got to see a few of Georges Melies’ restored movies projected in stereoscopic 3D. Since then, I have wondered periodically what he might say about the form today. He would be surprised but mostly delighted in the eventuality of what he and others spawned over a century ago. Musician, and star of documentary AMERICAN SYMPHONY, Jon Batiste explained about music what I would bet Melies might say about today’s films: “We don’t love music because it feels good. We love music because it feels inevitable.” In one moment of the film, we watch Batiste dig into his heart and create an original song that inexplicably, yet inevitably, sounds like something we’ve heard before. Great movies can do the same for us.
Melies might have been confused by the giant parrot with its deep baritone, but twenty minutes into the film (TUESDAY), he would have said, “Of course. How else do you talk about loss?”. He may never have seen the motorcycles of the late 60s (THE BIKERIDERS) or visited the barren savagery of the Outback (THE ROYAL HOTEL), nor might he be prepared for the violence–really, the brutality–of those two films, but he would have recognized how movement of humans and landscape can communicate something.
Several of this year’s selections tapped into the zeitgeist of parent-child relationships, mostly on the screen but also behind the camera. Guest director Ethan Hawke traveled to Telluride with Maya Hawke, his daughter and star of the film WILDCAT, a biopic that weaves the fictional stories of Flannery O’Connor with the realities of her writing life. Proud papa Hawke gushed over Maya (and Laura Linney who plays O’Connor’s mother and a few of her stories’ characters) in the film introduction, and exposed how an artist’s work will blur the line between their lives and their art. Watching these actors change from real-life character to fictionalized one cemented how film may be the only form capable of showing that connection.
Two films relied heavily on surprise endings, ALL OF US STRANGERS and SALTBURN, but it was the former directed by Andrew Haigh that parlayed its final shock into a clever but affecting exploration of parental loss, especially when one’s parents never get the chance to see who their child has become. As you would expect, Paul Mescal turned in an exceptional performance, but it was Andrew Scott as Adam and Claire Foy as Adam’s mum who made the film my favorite of the festival this year.
I saw several others that did not disappoint, some even rekindled my love for what cinema can do that no other medium seems to: RUSTIN, the true story of almost-unknown organizer of the March on Washington Bayard Rustin who finally receives his due recognition after being sidelined for decades as a gay man who believed civil rights meant all civil rights; DADDIO, a two-hour conversation between a NYC cab driver (Sean Penn) and a young woman returning home from Oklahoma (Dakota Johnson) as they navigate traffic on the streets and in their complicated lives; Silver Medallion recipient Wim Wenders debuted two films, including PERFECT DAYS about the mundanity and the beauty of a Japanese toilet cleaner (only Wenders, a quintessential German filmmaker, could pull off such a lovely tribute to the culture and people of Japan and it’s obvious why Koji Yakusho won Best Actor at Cannes); THE HOLDOVERS bringing director Alexander Payne and actor Paul Giamatti together again for a sweet and funny take on the classic student-(Dominic Sessa)-becomes-the-teacher and teacher-learns-from-the-student riff; the anxiety-inducing THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE left me wondering whether I might start having beginning-of-the-school-year nightmares again after watching a fresh-faced, well-meaning teacher make every mistake in the book; and, the sumptuous, eye candy of Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Mark Ruffalo in POOR THINGS from Yorgos Lanthimos who somehow reimagines Frankenstein as a prurient satire about women’s roles in a society hellbent on making them proper.
In every one of those movies, I can still see long-held close-up shots of actors who made the audience stop and pay attention to everything we should not see but somehow can.
And there was one film, more than any other, that epitomized why seeing movies in Telluride can be different than in any other setting. I woke up early to get in line for Jonathan Glazer’s THE ZONE OF INTEREST, but I was lucky to have time to stay for his Q&A afterwards. Glazer set out to make a film about the Holocaust that no one had ever seen before. Based on the novel of the same title by Martin Amis, Glazer turns his camera to a home on the perimeter of Auschwitz where Commandant Rudolf Hoss and his wife Hedwig raised their family while smoke from the crematoria lofted in the air and dogs barked and guns blasted in the distance. Glazer’s explanation of using cameras with remote crew to create an authorless story and making sound the counterpoint of the images of typical family life to avoid fetishizing the horrors we’ve all seen at Auschwitz proved how revolutionary it was to focus “on making a film you couldn’t see.” Instead, we heard it and we wondered about it. Only in a film where the atrocities are left off-screen could a filmmaker show us how more connected we are to the perpetrators of the crimes than their victims.
Every time I sat down in a theater and wondered if I could sit through another two hours, the lights would dim, the sound would roll, and I would forget how tired I was. There’s something about the full-bodied experience of watching movies, even at 9000 feet, that keeps me thinking and wondering and connecting. These films did not offer an escape from life but a deepening of it. I can’t wait to go back next year.
My Telluride
- SALTBURN-3 stars
- PERFECT DAYS-4 stars
- AMERICAN SYMPHONY-4 stars
- TUESDAY-4 stars
- THE ROYAL HOTEL-3 stars
- THE ZONE OF INTEREST-5 stars
- THE HOLDOVERS-4 stars
- WILDCAT-4 stars
- THE BIKERIDERS-2.5 stars
- DADDIO-4 stars
- RUSTIN-3.5 stars
- JANET PLANET-2 stars
- ALL OF US STRANGERS-5 stars
- POOR THINGS-4.5 stars
- BALTIMORE-3 stars
- THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE-4 stars