Last night the 35th Starz Denver Film Festival launched at Ellie
Caulkins Opera House with a major historic announcement, a spirited
trailer tying into this year's "Vote Film" campaign, one of
the most stilted speeches ever by a festival sponsor (Key Bank), and a
feature film that left very, very little to the imagination. The major
news was tremendous indeed, after 35 years of involvement in starting,
running and most recently handing over the reins of the festival to a
younger generation, festival founder Ron Henderson was beaming
brighter than a projector bulb when he announced that the John and
Anna Sie foundation had donated 2.5 million dollars to the
organization in order to secure the Denver Film Center as the
"permanent" home for the festival. This is big news indeed,
the festival having struggled over the last decade with the need and
desire to shift from the Auroria campus to a location that is crucial
to a singular identity, one that they deserve and can be preserved
because of ownership. It was a great announcement and one that no
doubt Henderson is happy to be around to see make the light of day.
Even though he is officially retired, it's hard for anyone to imagine
the film festival and the center without him, and now he has his own
permanent place to watch movies in for the rest of his days, along
with all of those who appreciate the dedication to film and unique
programming that he has inspired. And by the way, they make the best
gin martini's in "Henderson's Lounge" at the film center, in
glasses that fit perfectly in the cup holders.
While it was a real thrill to hear the announcement, what
followed, Yaron Zilberman's "A Late Quartet," was
less than thrilling, though not exactly a complete loss. The story
revolves around a renowned NYC based string quartet one the verge of
major upheaval due to the oldest members diagnosis of Parkinson's
disease. The group is so tight-knit, having performed for 25 years,
that the news has obvious complications, though one would never
imagine those complications exploding in all the directions that spew
forth in what is largely a paint-by-numbers fashion. There are many
lessons to be learned and much territory quickly covered here, and
obviously it seemed like the perfect film for the festival to select
for opening night, their penchant for predicting oscar winners having
a better than average track record over the years. But putting three
terrific prior oscar winners into one bag (Christopher Walken,
Catherine Keener, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman) along with currently in
demand actors Mark Ivanir (who graciously attended the opening) and
beauty Imogen Poots, does not necessarily equate to a new gold
standard. The actors are great, almost too great in fact as their
characters are thrown into a meat grinder that never really feels as
genuine as it so excruciatingly tries. Certainly it will please and
maybe even move some folks, parts of it should, but if you like your
cinema to be a little more of the challenging variety, there are
fortunately more opportunities awaiting in the coming ten days.
Could this possibly be Phillip Seymour Hoffman's
daughter?
One of those happens to be from Yorgos Lanthimos, one of the new
auters that's reviving the reputation of Greece's film industry in
recent year's. His 2009 film "Dogtooth" garnered high
acclaim including a major award at that year's Cannes Film Festival,
and he also starred in and co-produced "Attenberg," easily
one of the best films from last year's Denver Film Festival. He
returns this year with "Alps," a narrative that's as
strange and seductive as his 2009 breakthrough and one that gives
greater definition to his sensibilities, which are decidedly different
from opener Zilberman's. The title refers to a small group of
associates, the leader of which chooses "Alps" as their
moniker because the European mountains are the greatest in the world
and cannot be surpassed. They behave in the strangest of ways, least
of which is their own interactions with one another, though they seem
loosely to be attuned to relieving the dramatic circumstances of
others. At times it is almost impossible to tell what the actual
"reality" is of their nature or the narrative itself, it's
more of a a puzzle in which all of the pieces have some entirely new
system of fitting together, leading to a conclusion that never
directly sorts itself out. It is very disorienting and consists
largely of stifled emotions and an overall expressionless society that
might have direct allusions to the current Greek state of being.
It is also spiked with abrupt violence and threatening conditions that
also made "Dogtooth" compelling and contradictory. As
confounding as it is, it's visually rich and ripe for the mind, and
the opposite end of the spectrum in almost all ways from something
like "A Late Quartet." And most definitively it is the work
of a compelling artist that should be one to follow for years to
come.
Also fitting into the same category are two new films by Austrian
director Ulrich Seidl, someone who has been around the block a bit
more over the last 30 years honing a reputation as a true master of
cinema. Though his most prominent films are still quite rare to even
specialized audiences, "Dog Days" and "Import/Export"
being the more widely known, he is a director with enough support to
continue forging a solid path, one of distinction and singular vision.
In 2012 he releases not one, or two, but three films in his
"Paradise" trilogy, with the festival offering the rarest of
double headers with the first two "Paradise - Love"
and "Paradise - Faith." These are two of the
more rich narratives to be found at the festival, ones that deliver a
non-threatening tension that pulls the audience along, never
bludgeoning the viewer over the head like Zilberman's opener, though
shocks do abound in both. "Paradise - Love"
opens with a profoundly enchanting view of a group of people with
downs-syndrome experiencing the joy of bumper cars at an amusement
park. What this has to do with the trilogy might become more
apparent at the conclusion of the trilogy, but the narrative proper
starts with an obese, and we assume single, Austrian woman leaving her
teenage daughter in order to join a friend on a vacation to Kenya. Why
go to Kenya? Well, the climate is lovely, it's probably fairly
inexpensive, but mostly because the natives are eager and willing to
sexually satisfy the tourists. That's as good a premise as any, and in
Seidl's hands it becomes a compelling, psychologically complex journey
that reveals plenty about life, love and sex. Seidl's approach is
never to over-dramatize, in fact he uses what might be considered a
more documentary approach in his films, never adding unnecessary sound
while amplifying that which exists in the action. His
compositions are stark and very artistically framed, in the more
exquisitely banal sense that is common to a lot of current
contemporary photography. This tends to create a tension between the
purity of his narrative and his obvious intention to pose some sort of
stance about the human condition, not to mention his obsessions with
sex and spirituality.
This is also very much the case in the second "Paradise -
Faith" which has nothing much in common with "love"
except that it follows a single character, one who is supremely
focused in trying to proselytize others with her all-consuming
devotion to Christ. In some cases she is effective, twice we see her
sitting at a dinner table with a large family directing their prayer
to a crucifix or jesus-painting that takes the point of view of the
camera. In others she is not, such as when she encounters a young
Russian woman whose only concern is for alcohol and sex. Certainly she
encounters people who could use a better outlook on life, but her
situation as someone who spends every single moment of spare time
outside of her hospital job in the service of Christ becomes upended
when her husband returns, a paraplegic who we come to understand
happens to have a different set of spiritual beliefs, ones that she
perhaps embraced before his traumatic accident at the sacrifice of her
own. Her encounters and what we learn about her devotion gradually
unravel. Both features leave us feeling that life is full of
illusions, traps, and grand paradoxes. How could it possibly be
otherwise! Seidl is gradually proving himself to be one of the
absolute masters of cinema in the world right now, and his double-dose
at the festival should be applauded as one of this years most vital
efforts. They are also both much more fun than they might sound, at
least in their own strange way that is largely the point of Siedl's
cinema. We are not provoked to laugh in a conventional manner,
yet there is great humor to be found in the folly that is life.
One more film deserving mention, albeit briefly here, is Kevin
Schreck's documentary "Persistence of Vision", which
makes its US debut at the festival this week. The description of the
film from the director's facebook page reads: "Striving to make
the greatest animated film of all time, visionary and acclaimed
animator Richard Williams ("Who Framed Roger Rabbit") toiled
for more than a quarter of a century on his masterpiece -- only to
have it torn from his hands. Filmmaker Kevin Schreck has woven
together mind-blowing animation, rare archival footage, and exclusive
interviews with key animators and artists who worked with Williams on
his ill-fated magnum opus to bring this legendary story to the screen.
A tale of art, obsession, and dreams, PERSISTENCE OF VISION is the
untold story of the greatest animated film never made."
It's hardly necessary to say much more, the title alone has tremendous
meaning, but this is really a very rare gem that speaks heavily
towards a greater understanding of artistic excellence, perseverance
and evolution within a medium that is one of the most common and
embraced in the world today.
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