Winners

Now, a few days later I have to make a list of my Telluride top three films:

Blue is the Warmest Color by Abdellatif Kechiche is very impressing. First of all it’s very long. Too long, especially towards the end. The use of extreme close ups is absolutely great and how it focuses on mouths. Mouths having sex, mouths sleeping, mouths talking, mouths eating.
Adèle’s coming of age is very well made, La Vie d’Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2 is the original title. The sex scenes are very explicit, one has more than that: The one at Adèle’s parents house, ––they are not allowed to make any sound. But my question is: Is this a very very conservative film? About loss and the archaic? There is still an answering machine but no mobile phone. No text messages. And the conversations about art are like from the early 1950s. Schiele or Klimt? Picasso, JP Sartre, and yes, Bob Marley. Adèle compares Sarte to Bob Marley. That’s the freshest name in the film. Marley died in 1980. The paintings the character played by Léa Seydoux produces are absolutely dreadful. It’s harder to show art in films than sex but it hasn’t to be that low. I kept falling in love while watching it, not only in Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos––but there is a pretty obvious rejection of modernism and the contemporary and a desire for the archaic and a Heideggerian Sein:

I saw it on the first day after Palo Alto by Gia Coppola. She is Francis Ford`s granddaughter. It’s a film we all have seen many many times: “A dark drama centered on a group of teens with a penchant for finding trouble.” Sure. Larry Clark, Gus van Sant. The mothers are more fucked up than the teens, teenage angst, teenage ennui. Based on a short story by James Franco. Franco plays a coach for the women’s college soccer team, Val Kilmer a pothead dad. Gia Coppola introduced the film as something universal about teenagers. What? P-a-l-o  A-l-t-o? Palo Alto?

Gia and Frank in Venice.

Lunchbox by Ritesh Batra was the Telluride hit. The director said that he still lived at his parents when writing the film and his mother was concerned that he would never move out. Lunchbox is much more than you expect from a small Indian film. It is so well written, the actors are very good. I love it.

Under the Skin is Jonathan Glazer’s third film after Sexy Beast and Birth. It was not the Telluride hit. People walked out and slammed the door. Scarlett Johansson is an alien/cyborg driving in a big white van through the Scottish highlands luring men into this black liquid. Time? I didn’t read the Michel Faber novel which the film is based on. The men are preserved in the liquid. Johansson can walk on it –– the men drown. The men are naked and follow her (mostly with a hard-on). She is partly naked, later totally naked. Naked she looks thinner than in blue jeans. Did she lose weight for these scenes? She also looks younger in the scenes in the van. Later the cyborg develops feelings and gets hunted herself. I didn’t like the ending. I didn’t like the ending of Sexy Beast and I hated the ending of Birth. But I like Under the Skin. It is quite brave to make a movie like that. It is cold and unrelenting. And it is very beautiful.

There was also  a documentary about Slow Food by Stefano Sardo which will be released in September in Germany. It is funny and nice and has wonderful old footage in it. I didn’t know that the Slow Food movement came out of the left Italian communist movement and a failed radio project by its founder Carlo Petrini. And I didn’t know that the American angle to it and Alice Waters––owner of the Chez Panisse in Berkeley and a former girlfriend of Tom Luddy––was an activist of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Like Tom Luddy. Alice Walters is almost every year in Telluride. Tom Luddy said that being so close to her he gave more interviews about food than about film. I like that. And John Berger would like it.

Best moments? Don DeLillo reading from Underworld while showing an 11minute extended version of the Zapruder film and sitting in the Il Rustico with Vijay Vaidyanathan, Tom Luddy and Colin MacCabe talking about Heiner Müller. (and selling our next three little John Berger/ Tilda Swinton films)