Gravity No film was more befitting of the “XL” label than Alfonso Cuarón’s 3-D outer-space spectacle, Gravity. Sprung from the same survivalist matrix as more than a handful of this year’s headliners, the film stars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as two astronauts—an overly chatty vet and nervous neophyte, respectively—who find themselves reeling weightlessly through the infinite galaxy when they become untethered from their space station. Impressively rendered in CGI, the interstellar landscape is indeed stunning—a boundless void that is as mesmerizing as it is terrifying. But after the opening shot (which comes in at about 13 minutes), the film doesn’t quite have the momentum to sustain itself. Losing sight of Clooney early on, much of the remaining time is spent following Bullock’s arduous, action-packed journey to safety. The experience is more akin to playing a video game than watching a movie as each brief respite is dramatically disrupted by further disaster—a tether snapping, a fire alighting, another tether snapping—and the pattern is tedious and predictable rather than exhilarating.
All is Lost Though the film frequently showcases Bullock’s sculpted body with balletic grace, her performance is decidedly less toned than her rock-hard stems, offering little humanism and a lot of heavy breathing. It’s difficult to avoid comparison here with J.C. Chandor’s Robert Redford one-man show All Is Lost, which has been criticized by some for its extreme minimalism. But with practically zero words spoken during the nearly two-hour struggle to keep his punctured sailboat afloat, Redford manages to convey much more in silence than Gravity does in all of its contrived monologues put together. Loosely based on Michael Farber’s novel of the same name, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin brings outer space down to earth—Scotland, to be specific. His first feature since 2004’s Birth, Under the Skin is a sci-fi thriller that frequently dips into formal abstraction. Donning a short black wig, her famous pout tinted deep red, Scarlett Johansson stars as a predatory extraterrestrial that uses her sexual prowess to lure a series of bumbling Scotsman back to her lair. All helpless in front of her milky white hourglass figure, none of them can strip fast enough, believing it to be their lucky day until they’re sucked into a primordial ooze that flushes away their innards and preserves their skin.
Under the Skin Aside from these ultra-stylized seduction scenes, Under the Skin was shot primarily using hidden cameras that imbue the visuals with the strange eeriness of a surveillance video. While not particularly pleasing to the eye, Glazer’s bold filming technique allies the viewer with the alien’s perspective, supplanting the narrative necessity to explicate the otherworldliness of its central subject. Though she touches many men, the alienne doesn’t make first contact until she finds herself empathizing with one of her victims—a grossly disfigured man whose marginal existence has relegated him to a creature of the night. It’s when she begins to explore what it means to be human—to taste food, to inhabit a body, to interact with others—that the film fully achieves its oddly detached poignancy. Johansson delivers what is perhaps her best performance since Lost in Translation; not only does Glazer make use of her ability to fill out the pair of apple-bottom jeans she pilfers from a deceased doppelgänger but he is acutely attuned to the actress’ capacity to subtly convey great depths while appearing to be no more than a blank surface.
Ida Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida similarly centers on a somewhat unearthly young woman with striking features. The director’s first film in his native Polish, Ida tells the story of a nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) who finds out that she’s Jewish just before taking her final vows. It’s Wanda (Agata Kulesza), Ida’s uninhibited aunt, who bluntly delivers the news when the wide-eyed novice interrupts Wanda’s midday rendezvous with a gentleman caller. The two women initially clash over their worldviews, but they begin to bond as they set out to find Wanda’s former neighbor who murdered their family. Despite its heavy historical themes, Ida is more a character study than an ideological statement. Both the women are strongly written, and undergo arcs that are layered rather than engulfed by their political backstories. And the script, though sparse, is as comic as it is naturalistic. “Do you have carnal thoughts?” Wanda asks Ida. “You should try, otherwise what sort of sacrifice are these vows for you?” Ida’s only response is a half-amused, half-embarrassed smirk, but the seemingly ridiculous conceit that a soon-to-be nun should indulge her sexuality becomes a temptation within arms reach when Ida meets a handsome jazz musician on the road. The director discovered Trzebuchowska completely by chance, with her nose buried in a book at a small café in Poland. Her immaculate cheekbones, sternly dimpled chin, and expressive brown doe eyes make her a striking screen presence, and the first-time actress brings a genuine aura of innocence to the ingénue she plays. Shooting in austere black and white, first-time DP Lukasz Zal opted for an overall aesthetic of carefully framed stillness that does justice to the script’s impressive range, from its most endearing highlights to its darkest shadows.
The Invisible Woman Adapted by Abi Morgan from Claire Tomalin’s novel, Ralph Fiennes’s second directorial effort, The Invisible Woman, recounts the secret affair between Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and the 18-year-old Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones). At the height of his literary career, the egotistical Dickens thrives on the adoration of his fans and isn’t particularly tactful when it comes to his affections, favoring Nelly over his plump wife (an excellent Joanna Scanlan), who has borne him a veritable army of children over the years. Both complicating and facilitating the illicit liaison is Nelly’s mother (played by the always delightful Kristin Scott Thomas), who recognizes the match as her daughter’s best—and perhaps only—option for a prosperous future (as it turns out, Nelly didn’t inherit the acting talent of her sisters), while simultaneously attempting to preserve her daughter’s dignity in the public sphere. In the typical Victorian fashion, the ever-increasing eroticism between the couple must be sublimated into non-carnal outlets—double entendres, knowing glances, the subtlest touch. While the film’s sense of restraint is for the most part an asset, particularly with regards to Fiennes’s masterfully sober incarnation of Dickens, the overarching stiff upper lip stifles the chemistry between the two leads. The film seamlessly alternates between two time periods, with the Nelly of the present—clad only in black—now married to another man. Eyes baggy as if from crying endless tears, she exudes a broken sense of strength that seems beyond her young years. Likening the unattainable relationship to the original ending Dickens penned for Pip and Estella in Great Expectations, Nelly’s curtailed catharsis amounts to a single tear and a delicately quivering chin. It’s in this moment, as Nelly’s obligatory sense of control cracks to reveal a glimpse of irrepressible emotion that the film is at its best.
title: “Festivals Telluride” ShowToc: true date: “2024-04-14” author: “Judy Atlas”
The Perils of Priscilla screened in a program of nearly lost and now restored short films by Ballard that were a highlight of the 41st Telluride Film Festival. The evening, bookended by speeches from both Ballard (now 76 years old) and Payne, was anchored by Seems Like Only Yesterday, a short 1971 nonfiction essay that preserves the insights of a dozen Los Angeles centenarians. Wary about the future and recalling life in the city before sidewalks and telephones, the aged American’s remarks are paired with aerial shots of urban sprawl, imagery from contemporary TV commercials, and views of city streets packed with billboards and strip malls. Ballard said he sought to capture the dramatic changes experienced during the lifetimes of his elderly subjects. Funded by a grant but never aired because public television executives feared rights issues stemming from Ballard’s use of real TV advertisements, the 45-minute film was shelved and screened just once at the Pacific Film Archive back in 1981 before its single Telluride screening. “To me the meaning of the movie was impossible without [showing] the media,” Ballard explained as he defended his use of the TV clips. “The media was what was driving things in those days.” While Ballard’s forgotten films were showing to a few dozen people on Saturday night, a few blocks away hundreds of Telluride attendees packed the well-appointed Werner Herzog Theater, a temporary venue built on top of an ice skating rink at the center of the large town park. At Telluride, movies start as a whisper, as festival co-director Julie Huntsinger observed on the first day. “They may become a shout elsewhere,” she added, referring to the looming Toronto International Film Festival, where this year organizers took measures to limit the number of high-profile movies that would debut prior to Telluride and Venice. Even so, Telluride audiences got an end-of-summer look at some studio films that will be unveiled in theaters this fall, including Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman and John Stewart’s Rosewater, to Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild and Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game.
Birdman Birdman, a darkly comedic look at the life of an aging actor, led the weekend as the best of the new narrative movies on offer at Telluride. Michael Keaton’s often unhinged performance as a self-centered former action film star trying to stage a Raymond Carver story is matched by Emmanuel Lubezki’s constantly mobile camerawork, which is stitched together to create the illusion that the film is playing out in one continuous take. All weekend, Telluride attendees—a mix of tourists, cinephiles, retirees, Hollywood insiders, and awards-season bloggers—seemed to be buzzing about Birdman. Additional screenings were added to accommodate interest in the movie. “What have you seen?” is the standard greeting among strangers in the small, well-heeled Colorado mountain town. Passholders waiting outside anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes use this pickup line to spark a conversation and get crucial tips. Although such exchanges are common at most festivals, because Telluride’s organizers unveil the lineup on the eve of the event and often announce screening times on the fly, attendees are constantly looking for guidance from each other. Instead of big films getting all of the attention this year, an animated short about a singing volcano and an array of new documentaries were among the other highlights at this idyllic movie marathon. Ethan Hawke’s documentary about a reclusive pianist, Seymour, and Nick Broomfield’s Tales of the Grim Reaper, about serial killings in an underprivileged area of Los Angeles that were ignored for decades, were two Telluride titles that earned well-deserved attention ahead of Toronto, where they will compete for attention with star-driven offerings among the nearly 200 new films screening at that fest. Yet it was Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence that seemed to stoke the most intense discussions in the wake of its screenings in Telluride, just as its predecessor, The Act of Killing, did at the festival two years ago.
The Look of Silence While The Act of Killing revealed the dark hearts of killers, this companion film hones in on a family who are grappling with the murder of a sibling by an oppressive regime in a country that has yet to acknowledge its genocide. Adi Rukun, a soft-spoken optometrist, confronts criminals with a quiet confidence that is disarming due to his measured but assertive manner. Over the weekend, Oppenheimer emphasized that he hopes to foster reconciliation in Indonesia and predicted that his film will have a big impact in the country once it is screened and made available to a local audience. But Rukun and his family are in such danger as a result of participating in the film that they have moved to a different area of the country, far away from those who killed their loved one. “I dream of an Indonesia where we can live without fear,” Rukun said over the weekend in remarks translated by the filmmaker as the two sat on stage next to Werner Herzog, an executive producer on both of Oppenheimer’s films. Rukun seemed ill at ease in front of the adoring Telluride crowd, staring down at his lap as Oppenheimer and Herzog spoke in English. He only raised his head when asked a direct question. “I am happy to have this opportunity to represent survivors in general,” he said, adding that he hopes this film will pressure elected officials in Indonesia and the United States to acknowledge the genocide and facilitate an era of healing and truth about nearly 50-year legacy of pain and murder. Until his country accepts its history, he concluded, “People cannot mourn, and the dead cannot be released.” An unexpected Telluride breakthrough offered a respite from films that took on weighty topics, yet it was no less moving. Lava, a seven-minute musical short from Pixar, won over audiences at multiple weekend screenings. Even after seeing it multiple times, I found its charms impossible to resist. On the final day of the festival it was added to a free outdoor program of films in Elks Park at the center of town.
The origins of the short lie in an impulsive purchase. Director James Ford Murphy, the head of animation at Pixar, bought a ukulele while in Hawaii on his honeymoon two decades ago. Moved by the distinctive local music played on the little wooden instrument there, he sought to create verses he could set to that sound. The endearing story of a lonely, yearning volcano named Uku who sings of his hope to find “someone to lava,” the short’s island landscapes were inspired by the state’s sweeping geographic wonders. During a presentation in Telluride, Murphy shared early sketches and helicopter footage set to the rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” performed by Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. “What if I could write a song that makes me feel the way that song does and feature it in a Pixar film?” James Ford Murphy remembered thinking, as he detailed his own ambitions for the short, which will debut in theaters next summer with a new Pixar feature. When pitching the project at the animation studio a few years ago, Murphy picked up his little ukulele and sang the song for Pixar chief John Lasseter—just as he did on the final night of this year’s Telluride festival, outside on a chilly evening before the final film program of the weekend. His advice to the audience was short and sweet, just like his new film. “You can’t be afraid to make a fool out of yourself,” he said.
title: “Festivals Telluride” ShowToc: true date: “2024-04-26” author: “William Bailey”
No Word of mouth is the most influential force at the festival, and few films were trailed by such uniform enthusiasm as Pablo Larraín’s No. The third installment in the director’s Pinochet-era trilogy after Tony Manero and Post Mortem, No unfolds in the weeks leading up to Chile’s 1988 referendum—the vote that would determine whether or not Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship would maintain its rule for another term. Taking the political advertising campaign as its point of entry into tumultuous historical events, No stars a tactfully reserved Gael Garcia Bernal as Rene, an up-and-coming ad-man who hesitantly agrees to head up the leftist cause. Committing to a 1980s television aesthetic, Larraín makes the bold choice to shoot his story with a low-res look evoking obsolete news video. Other than a few sequences that feature a naturally backlit Bernal slaloming through suburban streets on his skateboard, an era-appropriate rat-tail trailing in his slip stream, the film is a self-declaredly “ugly” piece of cinema. But the choice of format is essential to No’s success; if at times slightly nauseating, the thickly granulated images ensure that the audience is as fully submerged and invested in the historical moment as the characters are. Rene’s ‘No’ campaign neatly packages its democratic plea within the visual rhetoric of Americanized pop culture—namely unusually tall Chilean ‘everymen’ flashing the thumbs up on rollerblades and a catchy jingle that was fervently adopted by late-night hot-tubbers for the remainder of the festival. The dated ads imbue the film with a slightly uneasy humor that entertains as much as it warns against the unholy matrimony between politics and advertising.
Ginger and Rosa Also firmly rooted in a bygone but still resonant era is Sally Potter’s Ginger & Rosa. An elegant reverie of limp-haired, long-limbed female adolescence set in the atomically threatened 1960s London, the film’s main attraction is a truly astounding performance from fourteen-year-old Elle Fanning as the red-headed waif-like Ginger. A budding poetess who divides her time between “roving about” with her sexually precocious friend, Rosa (Alice Englert), and attending pacifist rallies, Ginger’s world is irreversibly fractured when her self-righteous leftist father, Roland (Alessandro Nivola), moves out of the house and gives in to his inner Humbert Humbert. Nearly every frame in this film is worth hanging above the mantelpiece and an entourage of immaculately styled supporting vets (Timothy Spall, Oliver Platt, and a characteristically confrontational Annette Bening) provide an added delight. Most importantly, though, Potter captures the ephemeral tone of girlhood with great depth and precision, never trivializing the emotional impact of young female friendships that can blend steadfast love, confused eroticism, and immense cruelty.
Frances Ha Flaunting its freedom from romanticism, Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha also features female friendship at its center. The film stars Greta Gerwig as Frances, a 27-year-old woman struggling to find both an existential and economic foothold as her slightly ill-paced trajectory toward adulthood veers off course from that of her sexless life partner, Sophie (Mickey Sumner). The black-and-white Nouvelle Vague aesthetic is well suited to the film’s constant undercutting of would-be cinematic vignettes. Whether dancing street side with limbs akimbo, urinating off a subway platform, or sleeping through the duration of her spontaneous 48-hour Parisian sojourn, Gerwig’s performance as the fetching oddity with a furrowed brow allows a post-ironic poignancy to permeate the film’s web of caustically comic one-liners.
At Any Price Another heavyweight contender at the festival was Ramin Bahrani’s At Any Price. A contemporary mid-western take on Death of a Salesman, the film stars Dennis Quaid—all dimples and cheesy smiles—as Henry Whipple, an Iowan farmer who maintains his forcibly gregarious mannerisms in the face of fiscal and familial discord. In comparison with Bahrani’s earlier work (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop), At Any Price takes a decidedly mainstream turn into the realm of high-speed car races, Zac Efron’s feathery lashes, and Heather Graham’s cleavage. Efron delivers a staid and surprisingly dark performance as Dean, the prodigal son who abandons his NASCAR dream to take over the family farm, but there are a few too many narrative threads that either feel loose, superfluous, or overtly commercially driven. The unsung hero is relative newcomer Maika Monroe, who plays Dean’s devoted but defiant long-locked girlfriend, Cadence, to great avail. Though it is certainly entertaining and has a refreshingly murky sense of morality, Bahrani’s latest suffers from the same fatal flaw as its protagonist— namely, taking the business mantra “expand or die” a little too deeply to heart. By far the most unsettling film at the festival was Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary, The Act of Killing. Seven years in the making, Oppenheimer gets up close and personal with a group of retired Indonesian gangsters responsible for the mass purging of communists in Indonesia in the late 1960s. Though all of his interview subjects are former members of the country’s vigilante military Pancasila Youth Party, Oppenheimer’s camera sticks particularly close to Anwar Congo, the silk suited boss who is more than willing to describe—and even re-enact—his monstrous past. Directing a small, sadistic coterie of party alumni, Congo proudly stages his memories in the vein of a Hollywood gangster film with seemingly no remorse—in one scene he appropriately sports a shirt that reads “APATHETIC” in big, white capital letters. The elaborate re-enactments are so profoundly viscerally and ethically disturbing that they make the snuff scene from Benny’s Video seem like good wholesome family fun. The glimmer of repressed guilt glimpsed at the film’s end hardly assuages the moral nausea that lingers long past the closing credits—but this may be a good thing.
