Telluride, Colorado — Here at the Telluride Film Festival, showcasing screenings at venues including two school auditoriums, a hockey rink, an old opera house, and a classic single-screen cinema, “The Ringmaster” is pure love of cinema. I like to evoke Cinema as the sole organizational principle. The hype of this annual Labor Day weekend event lures thousands of travelers to the Rocky Mountains to sit in darkened rooms amid spectacular views, and the hype that fuels other major festivals. It means that it is beyond the hustle and bustle.
It’s a bit of a myth. In fact, there is nothing pure about cinema (a hybrid art form that has been stamped with the stamp of commerce since its birth) or cinephilia, which combines lofty aesthetics with more visceral and less admirable forms of pleasure. With a slew of future Best Picture winners in recent years (including “Argo,” “Moonlight,” and “The Shape of Water,” Telluride isn’t aiming too high or too low. At its best, it shows how vast and diverse mainstream filmmaking is, and how open to individual vision and artistic risk.
Often the best Telluride movies are just as good as the movies. That’s how I felt in 2016 when “Moonlight” was screened for the first time at a film festival. The silence that blanketed the room after the glorious final shot is unlike anything I’ve experienced in watching movies in my lifetime. It looked like
I felt something similar at the end of “Woman Talking,” Sarah Polley’s warm and austere adaptation of the 2018 novel by Canadian author Miriam Towes. I don’t want to overdo the comparison. These are very different movies. But what “Women Talking” shares with “Moonlight”, despite its absolute focus on story and setting details, illuminates vast, unexplored realms of modern life. The reality that was always there will be seen for the first time.
In “Women Talking” the reality is sexual violence against women. The film takes place in a Mennonite colony where a series of horrific rapes have come to light and several men from the community are assaulted in their own beds after being drugged with cow tranquilizers by dozens. women and girls.. A group of women meet to decide how to respond. A women-only referendum across the colony has already ruled out doing nothing, so the options are to stay and fight or pack up and leave.
The premise is simple and suspenseful, but as the women discuss their options, the complexity of their predicament becomes apparent. We also know that it concerns everyone we know and love. their communities; their husbands, brothers and sons.
“Women Talking is a special kind of political thriller. It is about the basic needs for justice, security, and voice that underlie democratic politics and how radical ideas about freedom and power arise from assertions of those needs. The thrill comes from seeing an assertion take shape and understanding its cost.
You could say that the feminism of “Women Talking” sets the festival’s theme apart, but I tend to think of feminism as integral to Telluride’s identity. A fine morning, Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, Todd Field’s Tar It’s a woman’s struggle to find freedom, joy, and control in what appears to be a situation.and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, a lively and intelligent adaptation of the Rolle de Clermont Tonnerre The once infamous DH Lawrence novel.
De Clermont-Tonnell downplays Lawrence’s sexual mysticism, but despite Emma Corrin and Jack O’Connell bravely playing major roles, there’s still plenty of sex, It highlights his still timely thoughts on class, family, and the power of destructive desire. And the same goes for the film festival itself. Films directed by women regularly make up a significant portion of the roster, which is still rare in Venice or Cannes.
It’s not that male filmmakers aren’t going anywhere. What I mean is that they, not all of them, of course, end up in their own pasts, and in some cases their navels. James Gray’s Armageddon Time is a poignantly sad autobiographical tale set in early 1980s Queens. His sixth-grader Paul (played by Banks Repeta), a Jew, befriends a black classmate named Johnny (Jaelyn Webb) and is taught a tough lesson about the cruelty of the world and his own role in it. Learn
The film, which also stars Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway, and Jeremy Strong, is open to criticism for sentimentality and wishful thinking, but it wears its vulnerability on its sleeves, rather than defending its noble intentions. It seems to be aware of its limitations. It’s not about liberal guilt. It’s about moral regret.
Regret is one of the themes of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Bardo, False Chronicles of a Handful of Truths” about death, fame, family, and the endlessly troubled relationship between Mexico and its tumultuous northern neighbor. But the mood is rebellious. , rowdy and pretentious.
Many critics were scornful at last week’s Venice International Film Festival. Such bombastic and self-exaggerating statements are easy targets. The line between personal quest and solipsistic complacency is a fine one, and here, like “Birdman,” it’s a line Iñárritu definitely crosses. But the scale of his ego, the humility of confusing the histories of two nations and the fluctuations of his own consciousness, are in tune with the strangeness and dynamism of his images.
‘Baldo’ is his ‘8½’, with the wonderful hangdog Daniel Giménez Cacho doing the duties of Marcello Mastroianni as director’s alter-ego, journalist-turned-documentary filmmaker, and filmmaker between Mexico City and Los Angeles. separates life and work. Unlike Mastroianni’s character, who is caught up in a characteristic Fellini-esque whirlwind of artistic ambition and libido, Jiménez Cacho’s Silverio is immersed in his fatherly demands, the complexity of his national identity, and the presence of a drifting death. is plagued by He is an intellectual, not a sensualist.
There is a lot to unpack here. The film is a steamer trunk full of big ideas, vague grudges, intimate memories, and inside jokes. I understand that some of my colleagues are impatient, but I want to defend “Bardo” and Iñárritu from their reflexive ridicule. We need more large-scale, messy, idiosyncratic films like this, as large-scale filmmaking is increasingly used for the soulless corporate mandate of franchise building and fan service.
We also need more movies like ‘Tar’, but I don’t know if you’ve seen a movie like ‘Tar’. Its first scene is about highbrow culture in the 21st century, as Lydia Tarr, the world-famous conductor played by Cate Blanchett, is interviewed by real-life author Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker Festival. And while the aura of philanthropic extravagance and flamboyantly understated flair never quite goes away, if anything it’s intensified once the action settles in Berlin, and hands down. An irrepressible and complex artistic passion comes to the surface.
That passion is Field’s subject and his motivation. Lydia’s favorite music (especially her obsession with Mahler) conveys overwhelming, sometimes violent emotions with a frenzied discipline. Field, returning to directing after a long hiatus, balances Apollonian restraint with Dionysus frenzy. “Tar,” like Lydia herself, is meticulously controlled and terrifyingly wild. It’s partly a #MeToo fable about personal and professional boundaries where a prominent cultural figure was accused of looting. Field finds new ways to raise long-standing questions about separating artists from art. The question he proposes can only be answered by another question: Are you crazy?
Lydia’s surname is an anagram of art and, as the disgruntled acolyte points out, of a rat. The pursuit of beauty is dangerous. Our highest aspirations are mingled with our lowest impulses. That’s something all movie lovers know, but it’s always good to be reminded.