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Telluride Film Festival 2009

Telluride effectively plays two roles within the film festival economy.

Telluride Film Festival 2009
Photo: First Look Studios

Telluride effectively plays two roles within the film festival economy. For the fortunate few who can afford weekend passes (press nearly always pays their own way), the festival serves both as a curator for recently rediscovered films and as a platform for U.S. premieres of films that have screened at Cannes and other circuits throughout the year. It’s the former role that makes Telluride distinctive. While ubiquitous Telluride board member Werner Herzog showed up with four films (or, more accurately, one film and three videos), including one that may very well be among the best of 2009, the revival screenings were programmed with much more focus, offering a survey of cinema history from the early-to-mid 20th century, beginning with early novelty short films, to opulent silent features by Marcel L’Herbier and Jacques Feyder, and finally to neglected modernist German satires from the ’60s.

Lighting a strip of nitrate film during a rare U.S. performance of his popular show Retour de Flamme, so as to explain the invention of safety film, French film collector and Telluride honoree Serge Bromberg presented a selection of rate silent shorts in a vaudevillian context faithful to their original exhibition. The skeletal-melodrama Pour la Fete de Sa Mere, from 1906, is like a schematic for a century of maudlin tearjerkers: On an early Sunday morning, a young girl picking flowers is accidentally shot by a hunter, but is resuscitated long enough to die in the arms of her deadbeat mother. Within its two-minute running time, the film immediately delivers the hoary catharsis-through-martyrdom conceit that in so many feature films so forcibly demands submission to sentimentality. Pour la Fete is a riot, but one that still has a unique integrity for keeping its story mechanics so apparent.

If only Bromberg’s own film demonstrated a similar economy. A documentary on French director Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unfinished film with Romy Schneider that began shooting in 1961, Inferno too often cuts away from that film’s test footage and outtakes to the talking heads of crewmembers who look like they’ve been locked in an airport hangar designed by Errol Morris. Disappointingly, none of these interviews probe the controversies of a director who had long since fallen out of favor with the French New Wave for being too commercial and, as was rumored, a former Nazi collaborator. An Eyes Wide Shut-like tale of sexual obsession in a French resort town, Clouzot’s failed film was burdened by a luxurious budget, as well as an excessive amount of time for camera tests. Inspired by the op art of the time, the surviving footage is both gorgeous and absolutely ridiculous. For every sensual, gelatinous black-and-white image of Schneider sliding her tongue under a silver waterfall there are several embarrassing takes of the actress lying under neon lights; the biggest howler being one test that shows the actress trying to seductively wobble a Slinky down her belly. To their credit, Bromberg and co-director Roxandra Medrea never claim that Cluzot’s Inferno is a lost masterpiece. Had it been completed, one could see the film having become a kind of late-career cult oddity, ridiculed, much like Otto Preminger’s Skidoo!, for being an instance of an older, classical filmmaker trying to fit in with the rapidly shifting culture of the ’60s.

French silent cinema of the ’20s, however, could be just as excessive as a late-career director’s aborted last film. Adapted from a novel by Emile Zola and of no relation to the Bresson film of the same name, Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Argent is an indictment of capitalist greed that is also a triumph of lavish Art Deco design. The showy high-angle tracking shots are anchored by Pierre Aclover’s sympathetic performance as the scheming businessman, as well as by Metropolis’s Brigitte Helm as his scheming mistress, her puddy-like face frequently shown in close-ups so hazy that it nearly becomes an abstraction. A cynical film in which the Paris Stock exchange becomes grand theater, L’Argent is so free of patriotism and pride that even a record-breaking transatlantic flight isn’t seen as a triumph of human ingenuity but another front to boost stock prices. (A restored print of Jacques Feyder’s 1929 satire on love and political opportunism, Les Nouveaux Messieurs, paired well with L’Herbier’s film.)

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Shown with an English translator summarizing the dialogue, since subtitles were unavailable, Bernhard Wicki’s 1962 film Miracle of Malachias is a rather obvious satire of West Germany’s economic recovery, though, as festival co-director Tom Luddy’s introduction pointed out, the film has become something of an anomaly among German films of the time, mainly because it’s not the completely vacuous cinema that Herzog, Fassbinder, and the New German Cinema rebelled against. When a tacky nightclub is magically transported to a beach on the North Sea, a priest claims it as an act of God, and Germany’s marketing execs quickly exploit the incident. As Malachias ends with what Pauline Kael so memorably described in her review of La Note as a “dress up as the sick soul of Europe party” on the reopened club, the “miracle” becomes a didactic harbinger of the apocalypse.

But if you’re author Cormac McCarthy or director John Hillcoat, the end of the world just becomes a well-earned excuse for romanticized father-son bonding. With its muted yellow and gray color palette in the tranquil wilderness, and Viggo Mortensen as the soft-spoken “Man,” life after the apocalypse never looked so cozy as it does in The Road; even Nick Cave’s soundtrack is comforting. The film never challenges Man’s fierce paternalism; every minor lapse in judgment is quickly atoned for, or rectified by his pure, brave son. The only moment of unforced sentiment and genuine terror comes as an afterthought: Mortensen’s wife (Charlize Theron), having decided to commit suicide rather than venture into the wilderness, sees their doting son standing in the doorway and tentatively pats him on the head—the only affection she can manage. Born into a completely different world, bereft of the common conveniences and rituals that defined her and her husband’s life, how could she look at him as anything but an “other”? Unfortunately, the visually and emotionally inert film is neither interested in disturbing any assumptions that the relationship between Mortensen and his son is based on animal instinct—and only the warm, fuzzy ones at that.

Taking place on the weekend before the start of the Toronto Film Festival, Telluride also has the distinction of serving as the gatekeeper to North American premieres of films that have screened at Cannes and other festivals, though this hardly seems to matter more than a week after the festival’s close. Winner of this year’s Camera D’Or for best first feature, Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah, about an Aboriginal couple on the run, is replete with formally elegant long takes and a near dialogue-less soundtrack—just two predictable signposts of “film festival cinema,” which is to say something to be embalmed in museum cinemas and consulate screenings.

By contrast, Andrea Arnold’s second feature, Fish Tank, is incredibly kinetic. The director demonstrates an impressive ability to block and coordinate action on multiple planes of an image, resulting in a sexually charged, hyperreal environment that complements the coming-of-age of 16-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis). For all the talk of Fish Tank being an homage to British realism (in particular, Alan Clarke’s Elephant), the film is fairly romantic, presented in lush, warm colors reminiscent of Nan Goldin’s photography. Ultimately, Arnold’s film is an infinitely more nuanced take on female coming-of-age than An Education. While the triple entente of Carey Mulligan, Rosamund Pike, and Emma Thompson would make any film an enjoyably guilty Friday night diversion on BBC America, Lone Schefrig’s film is dishearteningly conservative. Pulled away from her preparations to get into Oxford by the charming Peter Sarsgaard, Mulligan grows up only to be punished for losing her virginity: Though she gets into her first choice school, she only does so after she reverts back to a state of childish obedience, foregoing sex and boys and listening to her parents to study.

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The history of cinema as presented by Telluride in 2009 featured its fare share of heavyweight auteurs whose careers eventually declined because of excess (Henri-Georges Clouzot, Marcel L’Herbier). It also saw 67-year old auteur and hipster icon Werner Herzog embracing, more successfully than John Hillcoat and Lone Schefrig, the flexibility in form, length, and content needed for a narrative filmmaker to make an impact in the 21st century. A surprise screening at the festival, his bonus feature, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, was produced by David Lynch (“He was just a name,” Herzog was reported to have said at a Q&A) and shot and edited within five weeks. Prolific activity can be suspiciously mistaken for branding, and indeed, the exploitation of his Teutonic deadpan to voice the titular character in Rahmin Bahrani’s eye-rollingly twee Plastic Bag smacks of self-parody. But La Boheme, a rendition of Puccini’s opera shot in crisp video in Ethiopia, shows an artist devoted to both the beautiful and unsettling, as two couples from the Mursi tribe face into the camera and depart separately.

A vulgar valentine from both director and star to themselves, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans finds both Herzog and Nicolas Cage smugly flaunting their disregard for good taste. As all parties have continually reiterated, the film has nothing to do with the Harvey Keitel/Abel Ferrarra original. This one is a nihilistic comedy, one that makes you feel giddy with its sugar-rush of tasteless one-liners, and yet still beguiles with a greater sense of mystery and melancholy. While we certainly are treated to some sun-dappled bayous, what we mostly see are ugly gray buildings and busy highways in front of abandoned rollercoasters, showing New Orleans as just another struggling Southern city. Herzog is too smart to care much about the plot’s police-procedural elements, involving Xzibit as a drug dealer who has slaughtered an entire family. Instead, the film follows Cage’s crack-addled Lieutenant Terrence McDonough as he tries to score crack, coke, and the occasional promotion at work. McDonough is an amoral superman, one whose mercurial choices and beliefs are always validated. After threatening an old woman in a nursing home to obtain information, Cage screams that she’s the reason America is going down the tubes; a few scenes later, it turns out she’s the mother of a Louisiana senator.

With Jennifer Coolidge and Eva Mendes as Cage’s alcoholic stepmother and prostitute girlfriend, respectively, getting into a catfight over a bag of coke, Bad Lieutenant doesn’t lack for fabulousness. Yet the film is also punctuated by scenes of goofy, endearing sweetness. There’s a delirious scene in which Cage leads Mendes through his backyard childhood hideout, looking for a spoon, of all things, that he used to treasure. It’s a charming moment to watch two hard-boiled actors surrender themselves to such whimsy. In the last shot, Cage sits in an aquarium next to a reformed prisoner he saved in the film’s Katrina-set prologue, and asks, “Do fish dream?” Perhaps Cage’s lieutenant longs for redemption after all. Maybe his and Keitel’s lieutenants aren’t so different after all.

The Telluride Film Festival ran from September 4—7.

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Jason Klorfein

Jason Klorfein is an agent at the Gersh Agency. His writing has also appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal.

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