On Attending The Telluride Film Festival, part 2

5 months ago

On Attending The Telluride Film Festival, part 2

by Edward Montgomery

There is a strange form of community in Telluride that forms around the festival. Telluride’s population is often split between thrill-seeking tourists, Hollywood titans on reclusive vacations, and simple townies that have come as part of a mid-life crisis or as an enviable denial of the need for a career. Aging hippies and long-time bartenders eye the crowd of filmgoers with a mixture of curiosity and disdain—half of the choice to move to Telluride, I believe, comes from the desire to move away from the world. Ironically, a different world forms when the festival crowd arrives in Telluride—texts are shot to phone numbers we haven’t used all year, old names quickly asking, “when do you get in town?” and soon you are surrounded by an odd, film-loving family that just happens to meet once a year. For the townies, we are a reminder that the world still exists, something that sounds dramatic until one feels quiet of the town immediately after the festival’s end and knows that it is time to leave.

Among the festival public the atmosphere is one of unabashed interest in others’ perspectives. Friends, remarking on experiencing the festival for the first time, said, “I was surprised at the friendliness, the thoughtfulness, of conversation and discussion with others in line.” Your icebreaker for any stranger met is prepackaged: “So what movies have you seen?” Another compared it to musical festivals they had frequented, contrasting an audiences’ love of partying with a musical background to audiences who love the music itself—“Telluride is about people who love film, simultaneously battling between being hyper-critical about them and being receptive to an alternative point of view.” In Telluride, opinions are surprisingly malleable.

We all walk away with something new to think about, whether presented by those we join in the audience or the films themselves. One of the perspectives that challenged me the most was the one presented in Lynne Ramsey’s stunning new feature We Need to Talk About Kevin, starring Tilda Swinton. Swinton’s character, Eva, is a mother who, from the first moments of her pregnancy, feels alienated and distant from her child. The slow, and yet ever intense build of fear that comes over the two hours, waiting for the film to reveal its secrets, has surged back from memory repeatedly since its viewing. Filled with bleeding red imagery amidst suburban aesthesia, Kevin exists in the counter-punctual world of pop soundtracks for Shakespearean tragedy. From one body comes two; from Eva’s childless freedom comes the chain of living always for someone else. She is a slave to her son’s whims, yet a jilted lover, seeing him fully for the person that he has become and being powerless to change it.

Kevin is about the life Eva must live after her child destroys every moment that has led to his existence. I am not a parent, so I cannot express how hard this film must have been for one—the knowledge that we ultimately have little control over the people our children will grow up to be is not new, but this film pushes all of us a bit closer to understanding this truth. With a perhaps predictable, yet most damning of conclusions, the audience is given an unobstructed view of the awful choice that love and family can press upon us.

If Kevin is concerned with the shouldering of familial role as obligation, then Shame, Steve McQueen’s new film, discusses that role as both unwelcome salvation and bitter curse. Shame twists from family, turns away and back towards itself—a helix of suffering with our assigned others in life. The film follows Brandon (Michael Fassbender) and his tenuously controlled life: a revolving cycle of listless moments at work, uncontrollable lust after, and the anguish in-between. This soap-bubble existence breaks with the sudden arrival of his more publicly wayward sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), and with it, a possible explanation for Brandon’s traumatic beginnings as an addict.

McQueen as a director was more visually interested in the story than its narrative, and it shows with its long tracking shots throughout New York (one of my friends described the film as an “erotic love-letter to New York”) and allowed Fassbender almost total control of his character. Brandon emanates a certain numbness: white noise in the acceptance of chaos, noise that spread through the audience and I felt hum near the back of my neck—how far have we gone down this acceptance of moral relativism that moments of an addiction feel sane? How much further do we have to go before there’s no shudder at all? That noise that came to a sudden roar with the closing sequence, the ghost of Travis Bickle whispering about washing the streets clean even as Brandon is compelled to visit their every corner and add to the filth. I left wondering how much of our movements are already decided for us, how many self-destructive choices are we forced to make? Shame’s end is its beginning, the hollow existence of an addict forever present no matter what words have been said, no matter what blood has been spilt.

From the absence of maternal love to the tear-stained and conflicted nuclear love between a brother and a sister, came young love and Bonsái, a grateful respite from the darkest sides of humanity. The second film from Cristián Jiménez, Bonsái is a sometimes light-hearted, sometimes sorrowful film that looks at the awkward college love of Julio (Diego Noguera) and Emilia (Nathalia Galgani), and the struggling novelist Julio becomes eight years later. The love between Julio and Emilia begins with Julio’s faking of having read Proust to impress her, and the lie follows the two the rest of their time together.

Eight years later, Julio constructs an elaborate ruse to fool his neighbor from realizing he is writing his own story, and the film becomes a box in a box of stories. Many authors I have read say their characters are merely extensions of their own personalities and that their books are the amalgam of all the choices they never made, they couldn’t make. The first book, however, seems to always be a revealing process, the study of how one idea can open your own life up for examination. It’s the metallic peel of a lid being opened. Julio writes to try and understand what went wrong between him and Emilia, always asking the question, never finding an answer.

The greater question that exists in the film is how much of our own past is built upon the lies we spoke trying to be a perfect other for our lover? The false weight of snow on bonsai trees, the false memory and understanding of Proust—it all bends us regardless—even imagined memories carry their own weight. Bonsái tells its story easily, though honestly, and a finds a melancholy, South American conclusion that Gabriel Garcia Marquez would be proud of.

To approach all of their reviews together, in a single essay, is cheating a bit. And, looking back, I realize I’ve left out Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (too funny to allow the sorrow to settle, but let’s mob George Clooney for a picture anyway) and Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (the rift between Jung and Freud, co-starring Kiera Knightly and her Russian accent—one of the best psychoanalytical comedies of the year), as well as a slew of shorts, silents, and rare foreign films. I’m even leaving out the Argentinean ballet-film about a cock-fighter and his rooster.

There’s always too much in Telluride. Too many stories of friends to catch up on, too many days stolen from the townies, too many days standing before us before the next festival as the final films close. The negative space of the canyon yawns down upon the crowds as we try to fill ourselves with all the films and ideas and friendships possible. It’s an impossible task, but one we’ll gamely keep on trying, year after year, until the world outside Telluride calls us back, and the locals breathe a sigh of relief.