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End of the Festival:
Telluride, Day 4
by
Ian Waldron-Mantgani, September 2, 2002
One bad movie and two good ones were in store
for me on the final day of this year's Telluride Film Festival. That brings
my total amount of pictures seen to nine -- not great for four days, but
not too bad either considering the two presentations, one street party, one
picnic and multitude of adventures in which I managed to find
myself.
Besides, this international film fest scene is
new to me. Hopefully next time my skills will be sharper, and levels of
adventurousness and energy greater. Last night I fell asleep at the keyboard
in the middle of writing an article. Tonight I was so bushed that I came
back from town just after 8pm.
Pity about that. Real pity. Embarrassingly, I
have never seen "Lawrence of Arabia"; that and "Singin' in the Rain" were
the two most unbelievable omissions in my film viewing up until this weekend.
I saw "Singin'" yesterday, found out that the festival organisers had a print
of "Lawrence" in town, and convinced them to run it tonight, seeing as Peter
O'Toole is here an' all. I have been saving myself for an opportunity to
see "Lawrence" on celluloid for years; a few hours ago I had that chance,
but there was no way I had the necessary stamina. For the time being, then,
embarrassment shall have to live on. At least I'm not one of those folks
who have yet to see "The Godfather".
This morning festival attendees got a look at
"Rabbit-Proof Fence", which has been playing in Australia since February
to much acclaim and will be going on international release over the course
of the next three months. It's a stunningly powerful drama from former action
director Philip Noyce, dealing with the Australian government policy of detaining
mixed-race children that started in the 1930s and remained legal until as
late as 1970. The story, a true one, follows three young sisters who walk
across country in evasion of law enforcement after escaping from a children's
internment camp. The fence of the title marks the girls' path.
As I suggested to Noyce himself after it had finished,
the film is not subtle. Kenneth Branagh plays its main villain -- a sinisterly
clinical bureaucrat named Neville and nicknamed 'Devil', in a performance
much like his SS General in the TV movie "Conspiracy" -- and most of this
character's shots are photographed from beneath in shadowy lighting, in a
special effort to make him look looming and sinister. There are also several
sequences created to inspire absolutely primal reactions, as when we first
see the girls being pulled from their homes, screaming and protesting as
they struggle to break free in every which way.
I have read that Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury
and Laura Monaghan, who play the sisters, are traditional Aboriginal children
who had never even been to a cinema before this project came along. They
give performances of unforced strength and conviction, creating a grounded
human core for the story. Not that the stylistic indulgences surrounding
the central performances hurt: "Rabbit-Proof Fence" plays like two fingers
straight up at this shameful period in Antipodean history, the people involved
and the way it has been forgotten, while doing respectful justice to the
victims and their descendants.
"Lost in La Mancha", which played this afternoon,
was a reasonably absorbing documentary about Terry Gilliam's attempt to film
"Don Quixote". The production was plagued by upsets, including the leading
man getting a prostate infection that left him unable to ride a horse and
extras in fight scenes not being trained because of scheduling goofs. Keith
Fulton and Louis Pepe's film is original in that the set disasters it depicts
do not lead up to a triumphant climax in which genius prevails: instead,
the production folds, and Gilliam's dream project as yet remains
unmade.
Perhaps the film would have been more interesting
had I caught it on television and been unaware of the subject matter. As
it was, I found it hard to understand the hype. The way conversations are
edited together is rhythmless, the film is a depressingly inevitable march
to something we know must happen, and judging by the rushes we see, the absence
of Gilliam's "Quixote" is probably a blessing for moviegoers all over the
world -- it looks murky and tacky, rather than some kind of jinxed potential
masterpiece.
"Lost in La Mancha" is nonetheless worth seeing.
Film sets in fully passionate swing are rarely boring places, and when are
things likely to be more heated on them than when they are going wrong? Watching
some of this stuff fall to bits before our eyes is breathtaking; we laugh
that we do not cry in the most extreme situations, as when the crew covers
up its external equipment to protect against lightning, but then rain creates
a mudslide that whisks the entire set away.
Today's awful movie was "Russian Ark", which embodies
everything that cinematic laymen claim is wrong with arthouse cinema. It
is ostentatiously European, filled with empty cultural references, completely
random in its dialogue and story and impenetrable in its aura. The concept
is interesting: it's a 96-minute subjective camera piece, filmed in one unbroken
take using a high-definition 24-frames-per-second digital video camera. Two
thousand performers fill the screen as the camera makes swift movements through
hallways, staircases, exteriors and more than thirty rooms in and around
St. Petersburg's Hermitage.
The hordes of actors seem to make their cues okay,
whether walking, wandering, marching or dancing; "Russian Ark" is an impressive
feat of choreography. But to what end? The film is told from the point of
view of some guy who asks every twenty minutes whether or not he's having
a dream, and the film is so clumsily put together that we're never sure at
which points he is speaking and at which we're hearing his thoughts. Dancing
around in front of the camera for most of the running time is a former French
aristocrat -- at least, he thinks that's who he is, but he doesn't know what
time he's from and is surprised to find that fluent Russian comes out of
his mouth involuntarily. There is a kid who stands around to get shouted
at by this guy, a woman who makes bird sounds to paintings so she can, um,
express herself, and everyone's talking over each other at varying volumes
and levels of echo, while folks from various diverse times and cultures swan
in and out at random.
I don't ask that movies make logical sense, but
they can't just piss around this much and expect to be praised as dreamlike.
"Russian Ark" has no interesting feel or dream logic; it's alienating, affectedly
artsy, insufferably boring, and all the worse in the heat and crowding of
the tiny Sheridan Opera House. At least half the audience walked out of this
evening's show, and more power to 'em. I stuck around so as not to abandon
my festival buddy Brigitta, and it's a good job I did, because I think the
heat was messing with her brain. I say this because it turns out she admired
the picture. These kids today… I dunno.
And that's it, folks, the end of the fest, which
shall now only exist in the memory and in these past four and a half articles.
It's been good stuff, although I wish it had ended with something more
definitive, instead of me wandering around the main street wondering whether
to brave "Lawrence", before wandering to the cable car station and getting
back to the hotel room feeling unresolved and somewhat down.
Will I be back next year? Hell yeah, funds permitting.
This little town is a gem of a place, with a good deal of passion and community
spirit to be found in the air if you're willing to seek it out. Whether those
pesky funds will permit is at present a question without answer. Prognosis
negative.
If there's one unexpected achievement from Telluride
that may stay with me forever, it's conquering my fear of cable cars. Going
to and from town in them every day -- in pitch black at any time after 9pm,
with lightning around me on Thursday night and a mid-air stoppage on Friday
-- I've kinda gotten used to the things. Now if there's a festival that can
help me get over fears of bees, fireworks and clowns, we may be onto
something.
COPYRIGHT© 2002 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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