Telluride, Colorado
Money can’t buy love, but it can certainly sweeten a love affair. And if your love affair is with cinema, there is nowhere sweeter to indulge it than the Telluride Film Festival, the tiny, prestigious and heartbreakingly expensive movie showcase that wrapped up its 34th year on Monday.
The four-day festival’s domestic and international offerings guarantee a dependable crop of upcoming award-winners (15 Oscar nominations last year alone, including Babel, The Lives of Others, Little Children and The Last King of Scotland), an extraordinary selection of retrospectives, documentaries and overlooked gems past and present, and the chance to rub sunburned shoulders with relaxed celebrities, directors, and well-heeled cinephiles—with nary a BlackBerry to be seen. There are no awards ceremonies, press conferences or frenzied executives texting back to the office for further instruction—just movies, panel discussions and many chances to chat up your favorite director over a chai latte at the central coffee shop.
Furthermore, the town of Telluride, California’s latest acquisition in its conquest of the American West, is as cinematic as anything showing in the theaters, and this year the mountains changed color with the shifting light as dramatically as if they too were fresh off a successful run at Cannes. (In the words of one crasher, happily perched on the free tram as we glided over an appropriately devastating mountain view, “I don’t have a pass, and there are three of us sharing a room for 300 bucks a night, but hey, if I don’t make it into any screenings, at least I’m in Telluride!”)
For those unwilling or unable to mortgage their homes for the price of a ticket (between pass prices, hotels and airfare, you’re unlikely to make it for less than a few thousand dollars), the TFF website offers tips on how to lighten the financial load—but in the meantime, here’s a glimpse of some of the higher-profile films. Keep an eye out, they’ll certainly be coming to a theater near you.
Into The Wild
(U.S., directed by Sean Penn)
Penn’s dramatization of the Jon Krakauer book of the same name succeeds marvelously at capturing the combined cruelty and innocence of American adolescence. Emile Hirsch is Christopher McCandless, the real-life 24-year-old Emory graduate who hiked deep into the Alaskan wilderness and ended up starving to death in an abandoned bus. Hirsch is a winsome performer, and his McCandless is appealing and nearly Christ-like in his ability to heal, soothe and inspire every lost soul he encounters on his vision quest, but Penn never lets us forget that the trip was also an act of violent rebellion against his imperfect but loving parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, both heartbreaking), whom the boy did not once communicate with for more than a year before setting off on his doomed trek. In modern times, we do not need to kill our parents to reach adulthood. Torturing them is usually enough.
I’m Not There
(U.S., directed by Todd Haynes)
A festival favorite, Haynes (Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine) here grapples with the Bob Dylan myth as Dylan might have done it himself. Rather than cast one actor in a Ray- or Walk The Line-style biopic, Haynes instead dramatizes different phases of the legend’s life and career through his own personae. Dylan is portrayed by six different actors, including Richard Gere, Christian Bale and, most successfully, Cate Blanchett.
The movie is ambitious, technically spellbinding and ultimately exhausting. The program notes call it a “Finnegan’s Wake-like meditation” on the ’60s ... and I’m Not There may suffer a Finnegan’s Wake-like fate: Admired from afar but avoided by those of us wishing to avoid the slog.
[Redacted]
(U.S., directed by Brian De Palma)
It took 20 years, but Brian De Palma may have finally made up for his horror-show Vietnam pic-cum-exploitation flick Casualties of War. Once again, the director forces us into the company of soldiers who commit a savage rape, but this time he wisely stays away from lingering shots of the beautiful victim and focuses instead upon the uncomfortably appealing boy-men themselves. Based on real life events in 2006 in Iraq, this movie marks a ferocious return to form from De Palma, who experiments with different media here by combining faux YouTube videos, surveillance footage and soldiers’ home movies to examine both the violence of the war and its layers of untruth. Love it or hate it, it’s an absolute must-see.
The Band’s Visit
(Israel, directed by Eran Kolorin)
An Egyptian policeman’s band, invited to Israel as part of a cultural exchange program, gets lost in a nowhere desert outpost and finds unexpected welcome among the town’s eccentric, Jewish inhabitants. The premise sounds a bit hokey, and it is, right down to an obligatory impromptu sing-along of “Summertime.” But the movie works anyway, in part because of the first-time director’s light touch and brilliant casting. Watch out especially for black-haired Israeli Oscar-winner Ronit Elkabitz, sexy and scene-stealing as a lonely café owner, and Saleh Bakri’s performance—part Benicio del Toro, part young Paul Newman, all insouciant heartthrob—as a Chet Baker-loving Egyptian violinist. Make love not war, indeed.
The Counterfeiters
(Austria, directed by Stefan Rusowitzky)
During the last years of World War II, the Nazis engaged in a furious operation to flood the allied nations with forged currency and drafted a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner to head their operation. Karl Marcovics is Bogart-tough and marvelously inscrutable as Salomon Sorowitsch, the forger in charge of the counterfeiting operation, trying as best he can to sabotage it from within. The film’s ice-cold center, however, belongs to Devid Striesow as SS Officer Herzog, the smooth and winning Nazi who uses gifts and liberal platitudes to control his team of slaves. Herzog is handsome and cultured, the kind of gentleman who would fit in well in rarefied mountain air, and even tries to bond with the prisoner—telling him, “You know, in college, I was a communist!” As one fan of the film told me, after four or five glasses of excellent pinot grigio, “The scary thing about Herzog isn’t that he’s such a monster, but that he’s such a liberal!”