Telluride 2006, Day 3 (2006-09-03)
Yesterday, I wrote a bit about Telluride frustrations. At the risk of seeming negative about a place and an event I love, I'll begin today by talking about another Telluride peeve: the almost complete lack of genre films. On one hand, this could simply be considering the audience: the movies most of the festival attendees (who trend older and affluent) embrace tend not to contain, for example, rivers of fake blood. On the other, for a festival that purports to challenge filmgoers, this isn't a terribly admirable approach.
In any event, it so happens that the 2006 slate does include a horror film: Christopher Smith's wonderfully clever Severance (B+), which is to Scream what Scream was to slasher flicks of the past. Instead of commenting on and lampooning horror film conventions, it subverts them outright, with characters putting bullets through the heads of subdued villains before exclaiming, "I don't want to be accused of not killing him when I had the chance."
That's an obvious dig at a horror cliche, but there are many subtler ones; I don't want to ruin the film, but I have to mention the scene where the villain follows the lead of the heroes in falling through a troublesome floor plank. The film is closest in tone to something like the Canadian parody Invasion! (a.k.a. Top of the Food Chain), mixing fairly broad gags with humor so subtle it's easy to miss. And, not content with being merely wryly amusing, Severance is at points a gutbuster; late in the film, a scene involving a rocket launcher made me absolutely lose it.
Remarkably, Smith retains the horror and suspense in the midst of all the subversion, and the story even turns out to have a moderately intriguing hook. My surprise at seeing a horror film in the Telluride line-up soon wore off: Severance is good, genuinely good, the work of someone who wasn't interested in making a one-off B-movie on the cheap, but instead wanted to do something interesting with the genre.
I admit I am hard up for a segue from Severance to Mira Nair's The Namesake (B+), so let's pretend that I had a good one and move on. Early word had this pegged as yet another story of cultural-assimilation-as-rebellion-from-traditionalist-parents, but the film underplays this angle in favor of a more general, surprisingly affecting twenty-something coming-of-age plot. The focus remains on the protagonist's coming to terms with his cultural identity, but the way he finally does it may stun you with its subtlety and insight.
The film is most notable, however, for the performance of Kal Penn, who fulfills the obvious promise he showed in his comedic turn as Kumar in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Nair puts his character through the emotional wringer, and Penn effortlessly pulls of the tricky role -- he is as convincing when he is lightheartedly charming as he is when brooding or angry. His Nikhul is effectively the entire movie, and I credit him for its success every bit as much as the screenplay or Nair's direction. Watch for him.
Telluride local Laura Linney showed up to introduce Ray Lawrence's ambitious Jindabyne (B), mentioning that it features her third cinematic troubled marriage to Gabriel Byrne. As always, Linney is a case study in her craft, every motion and gesture calibrated -- but not calculated -- for naturalistic perfection. Needless to say, the movie is at its best when she's on screen, but she's not its only asset: Lawrence has also come up with a killer dramatic concept. Stewart and Claire are a pair of expats living in the small Australian town of Jindabyne. When Stewart and his buddies discover the body of a dead aborigine woman on a fishing trip and decide to finish their trip instead of leaving to report the find, an uproar ensues -- and Claire is forced to confront the things that have been haunting her marriage since the birth of their son.
The film sometimes seems too esoteric -- the occasional appearances of the Killer, vaguely reminiscent of the psycho in Wolf Creek, don't lead very far -- but when Lawrence ditches sociological observation and focuses in on Stewart and Claire, and specifically the latter's crisis of conscience, Jindabyne is almost as riveting as Lawrence's acclaimed debut, Lantana. Slow-moving, portentious, and filmed using only natural light, it sometimes exudes an offputting indier-than-thou vibe, but its characters are accessible through their sheer humanity.
Speaking of accessibility, we need to talk about something, and that something is the "great" Pedro Almodovar -- specifically the fact that though I try and try, I still don't get it. To my mind, he weaves convoluted melodramas without much appeal or relevance, and Volver (C+) (pronounced "volv-air") is no exception. Maybe more comic than his last few outings, this family soap opera has some amusing moments and a surprisingly adept performance by Penelope Cruz (who was tributed at the festival), and it manages to smoothly juggle several simultaneous plotlines, but I didn't think the movie ever connected, or even made an effort to do so. The twists and turns have a slightly self-conscious feel, as if Almodovar wasn't sure whether to take this material seriously and filmed everything with a barely perceptible wry smirk to deflect criticism. He is clearly trying to transcend the "soap opera" label in a number of ways, but I thought he failed to do so entirely.
I'm adding more qualifiers to my evaluation of Volver than I ordinarily would because I have, over the years, come to accept that there is simply some connection I'm not making with respect to Almodovar. Once more people see Volver, I'd like to talk about it. It's been getting glowing remarks elsewhere, as have virtually all of Almodovar's films. He recently had an entire retrospective in New York City devoted to him. Alright. If y'all say so, I'll take your word for it.
--Eugene Novikov