The 52nd Telluride Film Festival closed on Monday evening. Many filmmakers and film goers consider this four-day event over Labor Day weekend to be the best film festival in the world, for its dramatic mountain setting, its careful choice of films, its blend of old and new movies, and its daring in-person appearances.
Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia is the kind of movie that leaves you full, and convinced that movies can really matter.
The picture centers on a president of Italy whose term ends in six months. He’s been a good president, a notable judge before that, but all he wants now is to go home. For his first evening back, he says he’ll order a pizza. But three moral dilemmas confront him before he gets that pizza – a bill to make assisted suicide legal, and two morally and legally complicated applications for pardons for people convicted of killing their spouses.
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So, unlike many recent films, La Grazia is about serious questions of life and death, justice, morality and decency. And more astonishing, the picture gets to those questions without chaotic flashing lights or a camera and cutting that jump around incoherently, jolting the senses but leaving the mind and the emotions pointlessly jangled.
Sorrentino holds images on screen to give time to take them in – the claustrophobic offices opposed to the open elegant spaces of the presidential palace. The film concentrates on faces while characters talk and struggle. As the president, actor Toni Servillo – a regular in Sorrentino’s films – is a marvel of humanity, humor and genuine purpose. La Grazia is also sometimes funny, always humane, and it’s an elegant film that respects both its characters and its audience.
On December 28, 1895, two brothers – Louis and Auguste Lumière – showed some 50- second films in the basement of a Paris café. This was the first time films were shown on a screen to an audience.
The brothers eventually made hundreds of films and sent crews to film all over the world. Some of these films of daily life have become famous – Workers Leaving a Factory, The Arrival of a Train at a Station – but now a presentation called Lumière, le Cinema by Thierry Frémaux, the head of the Cannes Film Festival, arranges 114 of the 50-second Lumière films into a radiant look at the world in the late 1890s.
But for me, the miracle of this year’s Telluride Film Festival was the tribute to Jafar Panahi, the brilliant Iranian filmmaker who’s been imprisoned twice and banned from filmmaking for 20 years, although he’s been able to make small films which he’s shipped by internet to the major film festivals in the world. His new film, It Was Not Just an Accident, won the top prize at the Cannes festival in May.
Panahi’s films have always challenged the tyranny of Iran’s government. This one is blunt. After a minor car accident, the repairman’s brother believes that the driver is the government interrogator who tortured him. The story widens to include other people who were tortured in Iranian prisons. But can they be sure this is the man known as Peg Leg – this guy has an artificial leg, but how to be sure?
It Was Not Just an Accident careens through situations. Sometimes they’re funny – a bride at a photo shoot gets into a ruckus, two security guards take a bribe by credit card – but the questions here involve torture and tyranny, and the movie is not a comedy. It’s stunning filmmaking, and brave, and it shows that vengeance is useless, which the entire world should notice. Panahi actually got a visa to come from France. To shake his hand in person, was a thrill.
