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Many of the selections, as holds true this year, come from the previous spring’s Cannes Film Festival and then head to the Toronto and New York film festivals, which take place after the traditional Labor Day weekend screenings at Telluride, Colo.
Upper Valley audiences, then, are in the rare position of being able to see some of the year’s most anticipated movies before they open in commercial runs. The slate of movies typically combines works that are sure to be box-office and critical favorites with more daring efforts that might come and go relatively unnoticed in movie theaters.
“I’m willing to try things at Telluride at Dartmouth that I’m not going to see at the theater,” said Sydney Stowe, director of Hopkins Center Film.
This year’s Telluride at Dartmouth marks a first, Stowe said in a phone interview this week. The festival is departing from its usual six-film showcase by adding a seventh film to the roster.
Why the change?
Because the seventh film, the documentary Free Solo, which follows the American mountain climber Alex Honnold on his quest to be the first person to scale El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without safety gear, is so thrilling and extraordinary they couldn’t not show it.
“The way they film, is unlike most other films. You’re right there with them,” Stowe said.
Free Solo closes out the festival on Thursday, Sept. 20 with screenings at 4 and 7 p.m. All Telluride at Dartmouth screenings are held at 4 and 7 p.m. in Spaulding Auditorium at the Hopkins Center.
Honnold climbed El Capitan in the spring of 2017. If you want to know the outcome read the papers.
Still, you may have to take a Valium (or quaff a stiff Scotch and soda) before watching it, because film makers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi got as close as they could to Honnold as he worked his way up the 3,000-plus feet of El Capitan’s implacable face, right down to focusing on his fingernails as they seek purchase on what appears to be an impossibly smooth surface. I watched the trailer online and gasped at both Honnold’s fearlessness, and the audacity of the filmmakers.
From a sublime to an interior landscape, Telluride at Dartmouth opens on Friday, Sept. 14, with Can You Forgive Me?, which features a somewhat unusual turn from Melissa McCarthy as a writer living in New York who turns to forgery. Some of you may know McCarthy from her over-the-top, inspired comic performances in such films as Bridesmaids and The Heat, or just as likely from her killing impersonation on Saturday Night Live of former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.
Here she plays the writer Lee Israel, living on New York’s Upper West Side, who once had fairly steady literary success but has fallen into living-on-the-knife-edge obscurity.
She needs to pay her rent, so she concocts a scheme to forge the correspondence of famous writers, embellishing them with her own literary flourishes as she goes. (The title itself is a clever nod to the conventions of 19th-century English literature). She’s aided and abetted by a con man she meets in a bar, played by the superb English character actor Richard Grant.
McCarthy reins in her natural exuberance to find the poignance, the wit and the resilience in Lee Israel. Directed by American Marielle Heller, whose film The Diary of a Teenage Girl won prizes at Sundance in 2015.
Next up, on Saturday, Sept. 15, is a film tailor-made for our cynical political age.
In the vein of the classic 1970s film The Candidate, which starred Robert Redford, The Front Runner, directed by Jason Reitman, follows then-U.S. Sen. Gary Hart, D- Colo., in his 1988 run for the presidency. Those old enough to recall Hart may remember that the press began sniffing around rumors of an affair between Hart and a younger campaign worker named Donna Rice.
Hart, then considered the leading contender for the Democratic nomination, had a reputation as a cerebral, innovative policy thinker. As the race intensified, however, he broke new ground, but not in a way anyone would envy.
The press, from the tabloids to The New York Times, dug deep into his personal life, uncovering evidence of extramarital affairs that would eventually scuttle Hart’s nomination. His record as a public servant was far eclipsed by scandal, and what appeared to be his recklessness in inviting the scrutiny. Prior to Hart, the press had exercised discretion, rightly or wrongly, when dealing with politicians’ personal peccadilloes.
After Hart, that disappeared. Now we’re at the other end of a long tunnel in which two presidents have been elected despite rumors, and evidence, of decades of sexual misconduct. Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air and Thank You For Smoking) is a canny observer of American politics’ bent toward self-destruction.
“(Hart’s) loss unleashed a chain of events we’re still feeling,” Stowe said.
Since his film Dogtooth won Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2009, some of the world’s finest actors have lobbied to appear in such black comedies as The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
With The Favourite, Lanthimos brings three superb actors to the screen: Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman, both of whom appeared in The Lobster, and Emma Stone, making her first appearance in a Lanthimos film. The Favourite screens on Sunday, Sept. 16.
The movie, which premiered this week at the Venice Film Festival, is set in the court of Queen Anne in 18th century England. Weisz and Stone play aristocratic rivals for the attention of the rather loopy Anne. Who doesn’t want to watch Weisz and Stone on screen?
But the real reason to see The Favourite may be the presence of Olivia Colman, who stands out in everything she does. If you’ve watched her in The Lobster, the British TV series Broadchurch and the adaptation of the John Le Carre novel The Night Manager, she is funny, imperious, poignant and always real, no matter the part.
Border is surely the most unusual entry in Telluride at Dartmouth, screening on Monday, Sept. 17. A film by Swedish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi, Border examines what it means to be an outsider in a relatively homogeneous society. But it does this in a way that defies conventions of that genre.
Swedish actor Eva Melander plays Tina, a customs agent at the airport who happens to bear an unmistakable resemblance to a troll. She also has an animal’s acute sense of smell, which is why she’s so good at her job, sniffing out fear, guilt and depravity. When Tina meets a fellow troll, Vore, and they fall for each other, the story becomes a meditation on the nature of beauty and appearance, and how we judge others.
It was part of this year’s Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard and has just been named Sweden’s entry for next year’s Best Foreign Film at the Oscars.
One of the most highly praised films at Cannes this year was the Belgian film Girl, which screens on Tuesday, Sept. 18. It earned its director Lukas Dhont the Camera D’Or for Best First Feature at Cannes.
The film looks at the world of ballet, and sacrifices, through the eyes of a transgender teenager Lara, played by Victor Polster. Lara is coping not only with the physical and emotional travails of becoming female, but also with the extraordinarily rigorous demands of becoming a ballerina, which is the essence of a certain kind of feminine ideal.
Through the film, Lara jousts with and confides in her father, who must come to terms with her decision to become female. Polster, who was 15 at the time of filming and is not transgender, won the Best Actor award in the Un Certain Regard program.
Finally, Italian director Matteo Garrone, who made his mark in 2008 with the crime drama Gomorrah, is back with Dogman, which screens on Wednesday, Sept. 19. Gomorra was a tough, unsentimental look at the Camorra, the ruthless Neapolitan crime syndicate. Garrone takes on violence again with a tale of dog groomer (and sometime drug dealer) Marcello, whose life is relatively placid until he has the misfortune to run up against a brutish customer who strong-arms him into coming along on a robbery.
What happens when Marcello must deal with the consequences of his misguided decision? Only the dogs know, and they’re not talking.
Tickets for Telluride at Dartmouth go on sale on Wednesday, Sept. 5 to Hopkins Center members; and on Thursday, Sept. 6 for non-members. A Telluride pass is $75. Single tickets are $15. Tickets are available online at hop.dartmouth.edu/online/film or through the box office at 603-646-422.
Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.