O'Horten film poster

One aspect of Telluride’s 35^th film festival that was immediately apparent this year was the noticeable lack of U.S. entries in comparison to last year’s event which yielded I’m Not There, Into the Wild, Juno, The Savages, Margot at the Wedding, Redacted and Rails and Ties. Instead, filmgoers were treated to a wide range of offerings from around the world that included Norway (O’Horten, by Bent Hamer of Kitchen Stories), Australia (Rolf de Heer’s 12 Canoes), India (Firaaq), Denmark (Flame & Citron), Senegal (the documentary Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love), Ireland (Kisses), South Korea (The Good, the Bad and the Weird), the Czech Republic (Private Century), Kazakhstan (Tulpan), Romania (The Rest is Silence), and several contenders from the U.K. and France. 

The Rest is Silence film poster

No new Japanese films were in evident and the only upcoming American feature films being screened were American Violet (Tim Disney’s true account of racial injustice in Texas in 2000) and the last minute arrival of Flash of Genius, another dramatization of a true story starring Greg Kinnear as college professor/inventor Robert Kearns who takes on the auto industry after they refuse to recognize his creation of the intermittent windshield wiper that he created and they appropriated. Paul Schrader’s Adam Resurrected, however, was technically a Germany-Israeli production even though the cast included Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe. But on the documentary front, the U.S. was well represented with Kimberly Reed’s Prodigal Sons (which became a hot ticket item after an enthusiastic first screening buzz), Nicholas Eliopoulos’ Mary Pickford: The Muse of the Movies, Peggy Stern & John Canemaker’s 25 minute short, Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood and Richard Schickel’s chronicle of Warner Bros. - You Must Remember This, which one student festival attendee described as “really bad. I thought I was going to learn about the history of Warner Bros. studio but instead it was like a promotional film for specific movies they produced.” 

I've Loved You So Long

The clear audience favorites were I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG, based on the novel by French author-turned-filmmaker Philippe Claudel about the reunion of two sisters, one of whom has recently been released from a 15-year jail sentence; Danny Boyle’s SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE in which an impoverished Hindu lad wins a fortune on the Indian TV equivalent of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and is subsequently arrested and harassed by the police who accuse him of cheating; and EVERLASTING MOMENTS, Jan Troell’s period drama which opens in 1907 and charts the trials and tribulations of a Swedish housewife who becomes an accomplished photographer. 

Sally Hawkins (second from left) in Happy-Go-Lucky

Mike Leigh’s new film, HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, set in a London most tourists don’t see, probably generated the most debate among festival-goers who were equally divided between those who loved the film’s relentlessly upbeat heroine Poppy (Sally Hawkins) and those who wanted to conk her over the head. Poppy is one of those people who seem determined to force their cheerful exuberance on everyone they meet, particularly those who seem determined to resist her open manner and randy sense of humor. In real life, she would be insufferable but on the screen Sally Hawkins creates a vulgar but irrepressible lifeforce who is more effective in her quieter moments. The film seems rather shapeless and incomplete compared to most of Leigh’s previous work and comes off as more of an improvisational actors’ exercise. Yet Leigh tries to give the movie dramatic closure with an emotionally overwrought confrontation between Poppy and a misanthropic driving instructor who has been used as a comic straight man to Poppy’s kookiness throughout the film. For a moment, it appears the movie is going to end on a downbeat note of complete contrivance but instead it transitions into a final but apt visual metaphor for Poppy’s behavior - a rowboat going around in circles on a lake.  

Tyrone Power (left) in Nightmare Alley

In terms of revivals and repertory screenings, the 35^th TFF had much more to offer than any past festival I can recall – three of which were selected by this year’s guest director Slavoy Zizek, a Marxist philosopher and prolific author. They included Nicholas Ray’s ON DANGEROUS GROUND (1952) with Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino, the 1947 film version of William Lindsay Gresham’s NIGHTMARE ALLEY starring Tyrone Power as the ambitious mentalist reduced to a carnival geek – the Hollywood ending was a travesty imposed on director Edmund Goulding by the Hayes Code, and John Frankenheimer’s contemporary “horror” film SECONDS (1966), which was a commercial failure upon release but remains a haunting, original work and features Rock Hudson in one of his finest dramatic roles. Also on the schedule was the David Fincher director’s cut of ZODIAC (probably the most overlooked major release of 2007), Terence Fisher and Antony Darnborough’s SO LONG AT THE FAIR (1950), an entertaining “gone missing” thriller set at the 1896 Paris Exhibition with Jean Simmons searching frantically for her vanished brother and being assisted by Dirk Bogarde, Richard Brooks’ ELMER GANTRY (1960), Jan Troell’s two-part epic THE EMMIGRANTS (1971) and THE NEW LAND (1972) in which Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullman play Swedish peasants who attempt to make a new life for themselves in rural Minnesota – a visually stunning but emotionally exhausting experience, Dusan Makavejev’s rarely seen INNOCENCE UNPROTECTED (1968) from Yugoslavia, Rene Clair’s THE ITALIAN STRAW HAT (1928) with live musical accompaniment by Maud Nelissen, “Laughing ‘Til It Hurts” – a program of silent comedy shorts including Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Buster Keaton in The Cook (1918), Max Ophul’s gloriously restored and most complete version of LOLA MONTES (1955) featuring Martine Carol in the title role, the lush 1944 color melodrama THE GREAT SACRIFICE by German director Veit Harlan, famous for his Nazi propaganda films for Hitler, and the 1949 Soviet Union epic, THE FALL OF BERLIN from director Mikhail Chiaureli.

Among my favorite viewing experiences at the 35^th TFF were:

Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command

1) THE LAST COMMAND (1928) – One of the great silent films directed by Josef von Sternberg, this handsomely designed melodrama reflects a fascinating period in early Hollywood when European immigrants were arriving in Los Angeles and entering the film industry after fleeing political unrest and tyranny in their home lands. The beginning of the film which features an insider look at the mechanics of studio system moviemaking is actually a framing device that bookends the real story, one in which a high ranked general of the Czar loses everything in the Russian Revolution and is reduced to playing himself as a Hollywood extra in a movie version of the actual events. As the shell-shocked general, Emil Jennings proves why he is often considered one of the great silent film actors and in a smaller but pivotal role is William Powell playing a former Bolshevik turned Hollywood director. Adding immeasurably to the film’s effectiveness was a new music score performed live by the much loved Alloy Orchestra, a regular fixture at Telluride.  

film still from Gomorrah

Pirosmani

3) PIROSMANI - This retrospective screening of Giorgi Shengelaya’s 1969 biopic about the Georgian folk painter Nico Pirosmanichvili was introduced by festival co-director Tom Luddy. His account of how the festival managed to receive a beautiful archival print of the film from the Georgian Film Archives was as fascinating as the actual movie. Originally a rather battered 35mm print of PIROSMANI was slated to play as a backup in the event that the Georgian Film Archives couldn’t deliver their vaulted copy. Then when Russia invaded Georgia just prior to the festival and all communication with the archives staff was cut off, Luddy assumed the inferior U.S. print of PIROSMANI was the only option and played its appearance down in the program schedule. In a strange twist of fate, the Georgian Film Archive print of PIROSMANI turned up at the festival office after the program had gone to press - apparently, it was on the last flight out of the airport in Georgia before the Russians bombed the facility. So, along with a fortunate few (possibly 20 viewers in all), I was able to revisit Shengelaya’s hypnotic and melancholy portrait of the once neglected Soviet artist (I had previously seen it when I was a film programmer at Films Inc. and we carried the Audio Brandon library; the movie is now distributed in the U.S. by Kino International).  Unlike most film biographies of artists, Shengelaya’s approach to his subject is poetic rather than informative, depicting scenes of Pirosmani’s nomadic existence in a pictorial style that often imitates the style of his somewhat surrealistic paintings of farm animals, peasants and exotic singers. The painter’s alcoholism, his inability to hold a steady job, forge close relationships with anyone or place any value on his work is never explained but the evidence is there for us to contemplate. At times, the movie exudes a raw, primitive power that is closer in style to an ethnographic documentary from another time period and images from this film are guaranteed to resonate in your memory for years to come.  

Waltz With Bashir

4) WALTZ WITH BASHIR - Another Cannes Festival winner from this year, Ari Folman’s animated account of the 1984 invasion of Lebanon by Israeli forces bent on raiding Palestinian refugee camps is a highly original and harrowing work of art. A first person witness to the atrocities committed in 1984, Folman turns his own investigative reporting techniques on himself and former comrades-in-arms to remember what he has blacked out of his own memory from the sheer horror of it. The fact that the movie unfolds in the visual style of an animated graphic novel doesn’t soften the nightmarish tone or the dehumanizing acts of violence on display. It’s probably no accident that WALTZ WITH BASHIR at times resembles a gamer’s most violent X-box fantasy except that these events really happened….and in the movie’s final moments we see actual newsreel footage of the massacred bodies of defenseless Palestinian women, children and men. A shameful moment in Israel’s history comparable to the U.S. military involvement in the My Lai Massacre in Viet Nam. 

Jan Troell's Here's Your Life

5) HERE’S YOUR LIFE - Jan Troell’s 1966 directorial feature debut - he previously directed a segment of the 1965 film 4 X 4 - is an intensely lyrical coming of age story unlike any I’ve ever seen before. Based on the popular Swedish novel “Romanen om Olof” by Eyvind Johnson, the film charts the picaresque adventures of Olef, a young man coming to terms with the harsh realities of provincial life in Sweden in the 19^th century. I’ll be writing a more detailed analysis of the film at the end of the month in our Movie Morlocks blog-a-thon on “Our Favorite Recent Movie Discovery” so check back on Saturday, September 27^th for an in-depth look at HERE’S YOUR LIFE (aka Har har du ditt liv).  

Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire

As for those previously mentioned crowd pleasers, I didn’t see Jan Troell’s EVERLASTING MEMORIES so I can’t comment on that but the other two favorites - I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE - were, in my humble minority opinion, overhyped and unsatisfying on numerous levels. Despite fine performances by Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein as estranged sisters, I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG is undone by a risible final act revelation about Thomas’s crime - the murder of her young son - that undermines the great empathy director Philippe Claudel has build up for Thomas, transforming her into a first class masochist or worse, a self-deluded martyr with a Joan of Arc complex. While it might look and feel like an elegant and subtly nuanced French art film on the surface, don’t be fooled. I’VE LOVED YOU FOR SO LONG turns out to be a tearjerker for women in the classic Hollywood tradition of Magnificent Obsession or Now, Voyager. SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, on the other hand, is a loud, flashy and synthetic feel-good tribute to the underdog - in this case, a trio of street orphans in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) who are perpetually beaten, chased and harassed by sadistic criminals, rival religious clans and the cops in the course of their passage into adulthood. Despite a colorful visual palette and an attractive, energetic cast of unknown Indian actors, the film sacrifices character development for breathlessly paced action/chase sequences, often crosscutting between past and present events in an annoying MTV editing style. For a film which purports to address the problem of street kids struggling for survival in the slums of Mumbai, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE eventually goes off the rails, morphing into a clichéd love story between two star-crossed lovers who are fated to be together. The audience clearly loved every minute of it though, breaking into applause over the ending credits as the young cast members move in unison to the sounds of M.I.A. in a Michael Jackson-like “Thriller” production number. I even heard murmurs of “Danny Boyle is gonna win an Oscar for this.” Maybe so but it seems like Boyle is more interested in turning out slick commercial films these days and is no longer in touch with that inventive director who once made quirky and original films like Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.