Telluride Ski Resort is planning to reopen on Monday, Jan. 5, after spending more than a week closed with its ski patrol on strike.
The resort announced on social media Saturday that it would run one lift with access to its bunny hill. Representatives were not immediately available to comment on what this means for negotiations with the patrollers’ union, the Telluride Professional Ski Patrol Association. The patrol remains on strike, union president Graham Hoffman said Saturday morning.
Reactions on social media were mixed, with comments ranging from relief and excitement to frustration and disappointment. Many expressed support for the patrol and called on the resort to settle the contract dispute. Meanwhile, the Telluride Professional Ski Patrol Association continued picketing at the gondola station in downtown Telluride on Saturday.
The union and resort have been negotiating a new contract since June, and patrollers walked off the job after rejecting an offer deemed the resort’s “last, best and final” in early December. It’s unclear if bargaining has resumed.
The resort’s closure has the potential to send the local economy, which relies heavily on tourism, into a tailspin. Most New Year’s Eve visitors kept their trips since the closure was announced with short notice, Telluride Town Manager Zoe Dohnal previously told The Denver Post, though that was expected to change as the situation wore on.
A week after the closure was announced, the number of lodging accommodations booked for the rest of the season dropped 54% year-over-year, according to the Telluride Tourism Board. Local officials have been pushing other winter activities, such as snowmobiling, snowshoeing and ice skating; however, “the reality is everyone comes to Telluride to ski,” Mayor Teddy Errico said previously.
“We only have three months left in our season. We know that the impact, if it lands, is people losing their jobs, people boarding up their restaurants,” Errico said. “But we’re doing everything in our power to mitigate those concerns.”
Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong have both experienced a meteoric rise in stardom thanks to their time on two critically acclaimed TV series. But being the star of The Bear or Succession is nothing compared to walking around a film festival with a music icon like Bruce Springsteen.
At the Telluride Film Festival on Saturday, White, who plays Springsteen in the new film Deliver Me From Nowhere, and Strong, who plays Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau, were joined by their real-life counterparts for a sold-out screening of the film. The screams were deafening when Springsteen came to the stage for the post-screening Q&A. Springsteen told the crowd he had finally signed off on a movie about his life because he considers it an “antibiopic” since it focuses closely on just two years of his life. “And I’m old and I don’t give a fuck what I do,” he added to laughs.
Deliver Me From Nowhere, directed by Scott Cooper, centers on the time when Springsteen was making his 1982 album Nebraska, while struggling with depression and challenging memories from his past. Springsteen and Landau worked closely with White and Strong as they prepared to play the characters, and were also present on set.
For White and Strong, recreating the steadfast friendship between these two was easy, but performing these characters in front of their real-life counterparts wasn’t. On the ground at Telluride, they spoke to Vanity Fair about Springsteen’s openness, relating to struggles with fame, and why Strong left Landau a voicemail as Landau.
Vanity Fair: What was it like the first time you met Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau?
Jeremy Allen White: We’d been in touch a little bit through text, and I had been preparing for a couple months before meeting him. But my first time meeting Bruce was at an empty Wembley [Stadium] in London. I went to soundcheck and got to watch him. After soundcheck, he saw me and called me over, and our first 20 minutes of talking were center stage at Wembley.
Were you nervous?
White: I was nervous, but I was with Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson.
Wait, are they friends of yours?
White: No, I had had lunch at Emma’s house with another friend. Because of the generation that Emma and Pierce are from, I saw them react [to Bruce]. They’re such confident and charismatic people, and I saw them kind of get shy in his presence, which gave me, somehow, a little bit more confidence. So yes, I was nervous, but also, when you spend a little bit of time around Bruce, he’s so available and sort of generous and accommodating. It didn’t take long until there was a real ease in the conversation that happened pretty quickly.
Jeremy Strong: I was in Denmark last summer and drove a couple hours to where they were playing a show, and was sort of whisked into the complex of trailers and into a room with Bruce and Jon. And it’s interesting as an actor for me, before you’ve done the work and before you’ve entered into something, you’re totally outside of it. So I remember feeling like, I know somehow between now and X amount of months from now I’m going to be inside of this. But I met them before that was the case, so it was just kind of putting my toes in the water.
But it was a really profound experience. I’d never seen Bruce play before. Watching this ritual that he had with Jon before the show, which I subsequently learned is a ritual they have before every show—hundreds, maybe thousands of shows—where they sort of hold each other by his shoulders, kind of touch heads a bit of a benediction before Bruce goes out and plays the show. It gave me so much emotional information.
How did you come to understand the bond they have?
Helen (Claire Foy) is not the kind of woman to wallow in her emotions. After her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson) passes, she insists she’s not moping (“Dad would hate any kind of moping”); when loved ones ask if she’s okay, she dismisses their concerns and tells them she’s just fine.
But a grief as large as Helen’s does not simply disappear because it’s denied language or tears. It simply finds other methods of expression. A few months after her dad’s death, Helen adopts a goshawk, one of the birds of prey she and he so used to love spotting on their bird watching expeditions, and immediately makes it her whole world.
H Is for Hawk
The Bottom Line
A sensitive but slow portrayal of grief.
Venue: Telluride Film Festival Cast: Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, Denise Gough, Sam Spruell, Emma Cunniffe, Josh Dylan, Arty Froushan, Lindsay Duncan Director: Philippa Lowthorpe Screenwriters: Emma Donoghue and Philippa Lowthorpe, based on the book by Helen Macdonald
2 hours 8 minutes
H Is for Hawk, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and co-written by Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue based on Helen Macdonald’s memoir of the same title, is the tale of that rather unusual coping mechanism. As an appreciation of birds and our connection to them, it’s engrossing and endearing — a fresher take, certainly, than yet another weepie about dog or cat owners. But as an exploration of grief, it’s hindered by a 128-minute run time that spreads its emotional potency too thin.
Initially, Helen seems to be handling the death of her father, the photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, as well as might reasonably be expected of anyone who’s just lost what she calls “the only person in the world who truly understood me.” She carries on with her teaching fellowship at Cambridge University, and makes plans to apply for a prestigious new job. She hangs out with her best friend, Christina (Denise Gough, here as likable as her Andor character is despicable). She even starts dating a handsome art dealer, Amar (Arty Froushan), whom she’s met on Twitter. (H Is for Hawk takes place in 2007, making them very early adopters.)
But once Amar leaves, she falls apart, though the breakup seems less the cause of her breakdown than the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s at this point that she decides to buy Mabel, the goshawk, and falls head over heels in love at first sight. To Helen, Mabel is no mere distraction, nor a pet, nor a hobby — Mabel is her hunting partner, as she’ll snap to anyone who dares invoke any of those other words.
Especially at first, H Is for Hawk might seem a strong argument for taking up falconry. Mabel, or rather the trained bird actors who play her, is a delightfully magnetic presence on camera, with her wide alert eyes, her handsome feathers and her fascinatingly inhuman movements. DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen captures both Mabel herself and the gorgeousness of the forests and fields that she takes as her hunting grounds with a real sense of reverence. If anything, it’s harder to understand why others — like Stu (Sam Spruell), a friend and fellow falconer — had warned Helen against getting a goshawk in the first place, given that Mabel seems generally well-behaved for a wild predator.
But the grief seeps through. The script, by Lowthorpe and Donoghue, is particularly well-observed when it comes to the almost comical oddness of mourning. In one scene, Helen tells a restaurant server her father has just died, and he returns with a plate piled high with desserts as if unsure what else to do. In another, Helen and her brother, James (Josh Dylan), choke back giggles over the funeral director’s somber question of whether they might want a “themed” coffin decorated in ridiculously tacky nature designs.
Foy, who previously worked with Lowthorpe on Netflix’s The Crown, does an excellent job of capturing Helen’s stiff-upper-lip repression, with gestures as small as the way she brushes away the tears that occasionally leak through — as if they’re mere physical annoyances rather than reflections of inner turmoil.
The more Helen becomes fixated on Mabel, the more she seems to dim in every other aspect of her life. She flakes on her job, ignores questions about her future, distances herself from her friends and family. On rare occasions when she’s forced to leave the house for non-Mabel reasons, she might bring Mabel with her — leading to the funny-sad sight of partygoers giving this woman with a bird a very wide berth — or else grit her teeth through an unbearable cacophony of mindless chatter and grating music.
It’s a sensitive portrayal of a person’s slide into depression. The issue is that H Is for Hawk mistakes “gradual” for “slow.” The film feels baggy with a few too many repetitions of scenes or ideas we’ve seen already, making it hard for the film’s emotions to pick up the momentum they need; a tighter edit might have distilled those feelings down to a more powerful form.
But then, the patience required is in keeping with Helen and her father’s favorite hobby. “Watch carefully so you remember what you’ve seen,” he tells her as they search the skies with their binoculars for interesting birds. Flashbacks to their happier days are interspersed throughout the film, triggered by details as small as the scrape on his arm that never had time to heal, or the seating arrangement in a car she’s inherited from him. Helen’s adoration for her dad casts him in a nearly angelic glow, frequently backlit by a bright white sun that might be beaming from the gates of Heaven themselves. But Gleeson’s relaxed performance nevertheless ensures he feels like a human being, rather than some sentimental symbol of parental perfection.
The symbolism, instead, is left up to the bird. Mabel might be Helen’s dad, or Helen’s grief, or Helen herself; she’s a reminder that death comes for us all, or that nature is full of beautiful and awe-inspiring things. I found myself wondering what Mabel herself would make of all this messy human emotion. Then I caught myself, realizing I too was probably projecting too much of myself onto a bird who never asked to be here.
I love when a project has a title that seems just a little off but offers a purposeful piece of wordplay.
It doesn’t have to be distractingly askew.
Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher
The Bottom Line
Overlong and uneven, but filled with musical magic.
Venue: Telluride Film Festival Directors: Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine
1 hour 57 minutes
Take, for example, Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher, the new documentary by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine (Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song). It’s a title you could skim a dozen times without stopping and going, “Wait, isn’t the idiom ‘life and times’?”
It takes very little time into Geller and Goldfine’s slightly overstuffed and slightly imbalanced documentary to recognize what they’re doing.
Peter Asher is one of several figures who served as the Forrest Gump or Zelig or Chance the Gardener of the counterculture — people who pop up in the background of seemingly every photograph taken across several decades, whose names grace the liner notes of every significant album, whose accomplishments merit acknowledgment in countless award show speeches.
If you’re a devotee of Swinging London of the ’60s or the Sunset Strip folk rock scene of the ’70s, he’s already an icon. But even if you’re not, his integrality to countless pop culture narratives beggars belief, because he has, indeed, lived many lives both in the spotlight and immediately adjacent. The pleasure of Everywhere Man is that every time you think you’ve seen the wildest piece of Peter Asher adjacency, the next chapter proves you wrong. Kinda.
The problem of having multiple lives, though, is that not all lives are created equal. At 117 minutes, Everywhere Man is a sprawling film, one that goes from exciting and unpredictable to the stuff of countless rock-n-roll biopics, but the directors treat everything equally — or else lack the material to make the second half of the documentary anywhere near as engaging as the first.
The bold-type version of Asher’s career is that he went from one-half of the British Invasion duo Peter & Gordon — you’ll recognize “World Without Love” — to the legendary producer who steered artists like James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt to the biggest hits of their careers. He has called himself one of the inspirations for Austin Powers, and his list of celebrity friends includes … everybody.
But it’s the little details and not the broad strokes that inspired Asher to write and perform the one-man show — or “musical memoir” — that Geller and Goldfine use as the spine of the documentary.
To hint at only a few of the head-scratching biographical oddities of Asher’s lives: His father was the physician responsible for identifying and naming Munchausen syndrome. He and his ginger siblings had acting careers promoted with the unlikely headshot promo “All Have Red Hair.” He contributed, directly or indirectly, to the relationships between Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He helped introduce Taylor to Carole King and helped convince Carole King to perform as a solo artist.
The first half of the documentary is a delightful and thoroughly unlikely progression through one of the most colorful artistic moments in recent history, steered by Asher’s own memories and appearances by friends including Twiggy, Eric Idle and many more. The music is wonderful and the archival footage a blast.
I compared Asher to Zelig and Forrest Gump and Chance the Gardener, but that’s reductive. Some parts of his rise were absolutely based on happenstance and circumstance: His sister was dating Paul McCartney (interviewed here in audio only), who allowed Peter & Gordon to record “World Without Love,” a Lennon-McCartney composition that Lennon hated. But however self-deprecating Asher often is, it’s clear that he was more than just in the right place at the right time. He was talented, and there were bigger-picture societal trends that he helped bring together.
Interestingly, as the documentary goes from the parts of Asher’s biography that might be interpreted as luck-driven to the chapters in which his genius is most obvious, it becomes less entertaining, albeit never unentertaining.
Taylor is a guarded, but appreciative interview subject, and if you’re interested in his growth from the first artist signed to the Beatles’ fledgling Apple label into one of the most significant figures in the ’70s folk movement, this is good stuff. Is it better than the 2022 documentary (Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name)that gives Taylor and King full focus? Probably not.
Ronstadt is a guarded, but appreciative interview subject, and if you’re interested in her growth from eclectic vocalist with a reputation for being “difficult” to one of the most versatile and beloved stars of the ’70s and ’80s, this is good stuff. Is it better than the 2019 documentary that gives Ronstadt full focus? Probably not.
The stories of his production innovations and inspirations are nerdy and cool, especially the talk of Asher being one of the first producers to insist on giving back-of-the-album credit to the individual musicians assisting bigger solo artists. But the stories of wild tours, drug use and the like are strictly old hat. Asher’s eagerness to talk about the good times and his immediate reticence to engage on the disintegration of his first marriage (the topic of a James Taylor song, “Her Town Too”) made me wonder what else was being left out.
It’s also odd that after all of the depth given to Asher’s personal relationships with the Beatles and Taylor and Ronstadt, we reach the ’80s and ’90s and the documentary is pretty much, “And then he worked with Diana Ross and Cher and Neil Diamond and Billy Joel,” who are all absent from the documentary.
Everywhere Man simply falls victim to Asher living such a conventionally impressive life after having already lived several unconventionally remarkable lives. What a pity!
Movies about the relationship between a person and one of God’s creatures is becoming a virtual genre of its own. My Penguin Friend, Penguin Lessons, The Starling and Penguin Bloom are recent examples, the latter starring Naomi Watts who was also on hand in Telluride last year with another similar story, this time with a Great Dane inthe sublime The Friend. This year, we have Claire Foy and the goshawk in H Is For Hawk, which world premiered Friday at the Telluride Film Festival and has much to offer, not just for bird lovers but for those suffering sudden loss and learning how to deal with grief.
This one is a true story based on a 2014 memoir by Helen Macdonald (played in the film by Foy), detailing her bonding with a goshawk after the sudden death of her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson) as a way of somehow replacing this void in her life. Helen is basically inconsolable, her life turned upside down until she sees a way out, or so she hopes. With memories still so vivid of going out into nature and birding with her dad, she meets with a breeder (Sean Kearns) and takes home a goshawk named Mabel, one she plans to train for a life in the wild, and at the same time give her hope to move beyond her despair. It starts out rocky with the restless and anxious bird, but we can tell through Foy’s fearless and dedicated performance that this is a woman who will not easily give up. And, of course, it is something that will connect her with dad, a professional and celebrated photographer, who often took her out into nature with camera in hand to capture moments with feathered friends and others.
Dealing with others in her life who try to be sympathetic, if a little skeptical, is another part of the story. There is Lindsay Duncan as Mum, warm but offering advice to keep her daughter from going completely off the rails, as well as best friend Christina (a sharp Denise Gough), who tries in every way to be supportive in this venture. Since the death of Dad is very early in the picture, nearly all of Gleeson’s role is told in frequent flashbacks of their time together, and the actor is charming, perfectly believable as a parent who truly loves being a dad. In fact, this is a rare kind of film that shows the unique and very universal relationship between a father and daughter rather than son, which is usually the Hollywood way.
Scenes outdoors as Helen continues to train Mabel, making her comfortable to find her own food and thrive in the wilderness, are remarkably captured with some of the most beautiful cinematography of any film this year. Behind the camera is Charlotte Bruus Christensen, whose previous work in films like A Quiet Place and Far from the Madding Crowd indicate she was the perfect choice to take on this challenging assignment shooting the exquisite photography involving the lead hawks and Foy. Mark Payne-Gill contributed the wildlife cinematography. Rose Buck and Lloyd Buck were the hawk trainers so integral to the film’s authenticity. Regarding Foy, not only does she convince as someone learning the ropes of training a goshawk, and then developing true skills along the way, she also takes on a role that is not only highly emotional, but also challenging given a co-star whose behavior is not always so predictable. She’s nothing less than splendid in what is her best screen work to date.
The impressive thing about Philippa Lowthorpe’s assured direction and the script she co-wrote with Emma Donoghue is its resistance to easy sentimentality. This is undeniably a story about grief, loss and trying to cope with it all. In lesser hands, the film could have gone for cute animal stuff to lighten the load, but H Is For Hawk never succumbs to that temptation, and quite frankly, goshawks don’t make it easy for that to begin with it. Coming from Plan B productions, Film 4 and others, this is a film that doesn’t pander for tears, but genuinely earns them. It is the stuff of life.
Producers are Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner. It is looking for distribution.
Title: H Is For Hawk Festival: Telluride Director: Philippa Lowthorpe Screenwriters: Phillipoa Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue Cast: Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, Lindsay Duncan, Denise Gough, Sam Spruell, Sean Kearns Sales agent: Protagonist Pictures (international); UTA Running time: 2 hrs 10 mins
Sean and Amanda recap the long weekend in film news and discuss the biggest films out of the Telluride Film Festival, including the much-anticipated Anora, the SNL origin story Saturday Night, the Trump biopic The Apprentice, and more (1:00). Then, they react to the Venice Film Festival from afar and take stock of the impact that this weekend’s major festivals have had on the state of the awards race (58:00). Finally, they share the yet-to-be-released movies that they’re most excited for this fall (1:20:00).
Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner
So RaMell, how did you set up the filming between the actors to create this visual approach?
Ross: The film is conceived as all one-ers. In one scene, we shot everything from Elwood’s perspective, and then everything from Turner’s—one from the first hour, and then the other for the second. Very rarely did we shoot both perspectives on a scene, though, because of the way it was written and scripted. We don’t always go back and forth. So it’s shot like a traditional film, except the other character is not there. They’re just asked to look at a specific point in the camera.
Typically, the other actor is behind the camera, reading the lines and being the support to make the other person feel like they’re actually engaged with something relatively real. Because they’re all one-ers, though, the choreography is quite difficult. The challenging part was nailing the movement of the camera to feign what it would be like for a person to look, but not to overemphasize the concept of looking. If you try too hard to be POV, it’s impossible. That becomes the focus of interest to the audience, then you lose their connection. It’s why we shot entirely on long-lenses, 50mm and 80mm; this is not a GoPro thing.
Herisse: We’re being asked to do something that you’ve always been told not to do.
Ellis-Taylor: “Don’t look at the camera!” [Group laughs]
Herisse: And it is intrusive, so to kind of unlearn that and make it become the person that you are talking to—Turner, usually—was new and a challenge. But I found it exciting because of that. With time, it got easier. You can still be free in that, it just looks a little different.
Wilson: It felt physically restrictive. I didn’t realize until I was allowed to move—like when I was walking on the beds—like, I haven’t been moving!
Ellis-Taylor: RaMell was really good about saying it, but not saying it. I think about the scene where young Elwood is looking in a storefront, and it took us forever to get that, because the shot had to align. I can only say you have to lean into it and be like, Okay, this is going to take a long time, but I’m going to trust the process. In the scene where I visit Elwood, we were talking about where she was at that point. I was a little more disheveled and RaMell, you’re like, I don’t feel it. It felt like a technical thing, but I never felt inhibited by it, oddly. I should have felt, like, What the fuck? [Group laughs] Oddly I didn’t.
You continue the approach you’d introduced in Hale County in a lot of ways, this time by also visually honoring the book’s POV structure. How did it come to you with Nickel Boys?
Ross: It is the way I shot Hale County. There are three scenes in that movie where the camera is used the same way, and that was unconscious proof-of-concept to myself…. I’ve long had a POV film in mind, an art film, and then Dede [Gardner] comes along with this book. I thought, “At one point did Elwood realize that he was Black?” That’s a visual thing to me: Looking around the world, people are this; something isn’t weird then, but it’s weird in hindsight. That was the first mode of making the movie that I thought of. But I didn’t think that anyone would make the movie. I made the treatment. I asked [Joslyn Barnes] to cowrite. We built it out. When we finished the script, we weren’t like, “We’re going to make this movie!” We were like, Yo, I really love this script. What do you want do next? Because there’s no way that MGM/Amazon are going to make a POV film with these archival images built out. And it was greenlit.
Director Edward Berger, who made one of the best movies of 2022 with a vivid adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, shifts gears rewardingly to a movie set almost entirely inside the Vatican. Conclave, adapted from the popular novel by Robert Harris, demonstrates Berger’s versatility and also offers one of the best roles of his career to Ralph Fiennes, who is supported by an expert ensemble.
The recent Oscar-nominated movie The Two Popes also took us inside the Vatican to examine the true story of the ascension of Pope Francis (played by Jonathan Pryce). That was essentially a docudrama, whereas this film is pure fictional speculation about the behind-the-scenes machinations involved in choosing a new pope after the death of the previous pontiff. Fiennes plays the Dean of the College of Cardinals, who is charged with overseeing the election.
Conclave
The Bottom Line
A riveting peek behind the curtains of religious power.
Venue: Telluride Film Festival Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini Director: Edward Berger Screenwriter: Peter Straughan
2 hours
Screenwriter Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) keeps the story moving swiftly. A collection of intriguing characters supports Fiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence. He feels a close bond with an American cardinal, charmingly played by Stanley Tucci. Both men are suspicious of the Canadian cardinal played by John Lithgow, who is campaigning feverishly to be the next pope, but who seems motivated more by personal ambition than by any humanitarian or spiritual impulses.
A surprising contender is a cardinal from Nigeria, played by Lucian Msamati, and many in the Vatican see possibilities in the election of the first African pope. But there are other, more conservative cardinals like the Italian contender, played by Sergio Castellito, who would do almost anything to stop this upstart from dismantling the European hierarchy.
And then there is a mysterious newcomer from Kabul, played by Carlos Diehz. None of the cardinals even knew of the existence of this priest, who was apparently invited to Rome by the former pope before his death. And many of them are wary of a Catholic priest from a predominantly Muslim part of the world. Old prejudices die hard.
As the power plays grow more intense, a nun played by Isabella Rossellini turns out to have an important role in challenging the male hierarchy of the Catholic Church. The film raises timely issues of sexual and racist prejudices within organized religion, while also acknowledging the sexual scandals that have rocked the Church in recent years.
Fiennes gives a superb performance as a man beginning to have doubts about his faith as a result of all these scandals, and when he emerges as a top contender to be named pope, his crisis of conscience intensifies. We can see that he may be the most qualified candidate, partly as a result of these thoughtfully articulated doubts, but he may not have the stomach for the job.
Berger does a fine job controlling all of these performances, and he also creates a rich atmosphere for the production. The Sistine Chapel and other parts of the Vatican were reconstructed at Cinecitta Studios, brought to life by cinematographer Stephane Fontaine and production designer Suzie Davies. Although the elegant, cloistered world of the Vatican is invitingly captured, a more violent world intrudes when a terrorist bombing in Rome comes much too close for comfort. Editor Nick Emerson keeps the action hurtling forward. Composer Volker Bertelmann, who won an Oscar for his score for All Quiet on the Western Front, demonstrates his expertise as well as his versatility with his work here.
Even viewers who may guess the identity of the next pope will be surprised by the final twist, which is very much in keeping with the film’s ambition to bring the certainties of the past into an unpredictable, dizzying, but essential new future.
A mountain escape near Telluride, Colorado, takes mountain modern living up a notch with a spacious, … [+] light-filled design set on 70 scenic acres.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
In the Colorado town of Telluride, life revolves around the mountains. The same could be said of an expansive home on 70 acres that was designed to capture panoramic views of the surrounding alpine peaks.
The 9,000-square-foot home, built in 2010, is on the market for $8 million.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
The 9,000-square-foot spread at 280 and 282 Sage Grouse Road in the nearby community of Placerville was built in 2010, almost four decades after the defunct mining town transformed itself into one of the West’s top ski resorts.
Designed in mountain modern style, the home features floor-to-ceiling windows that perfectly capture … [+] views of the Sneffels Range.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
Telluride-based architect Daniel Houlihan of Fountainhead Studio designed the buildings in mountain modern style, making maximum use of views and the forested setting. The result is a spacious, light-filled home that accentuates the outdoors.
The residence was designed by Fountainhead Studio.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
It’s currently on the market for $8 million.
The open-concept kitchen features a large island/breakfast bar, custom cabinetry and stainless steel … [+] appliances.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
Floor-to-ceiling windows in the main residence look out over the Sneffels Range. “There are over a dozen 13,000- and 14,000-foot peaks that you can see from this home,” listing agent Garrett Simon says. “It’s a huge wrap-around view.”
A massive two-way stone fireplace divides the living and dining rooms.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
The property includes a main residence, a separate caretaker’s apartment and garage/“toy barn” to stow cars and outdoor gear. It’s a place big on privacy and seclusion, somewhere to unplug and relax in a remote location without forgoing luxury or access to town (the ski resort is a 45-minute drive away).
The home’s design integrates modern aesthetics with the unique topography of Telluride’s mountains.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
Inside the main home, high ceilings and natural wood dominate the living room and formal dining room, which both have doors that lead to outdoor lounges and patios. A large double-sided stone fireplace adds a cozy vibe to both rooms.
Sliding glassed doors create a seamless transition between indoor-outdoor spaces.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
In all, there are five bedrooms, six full and three half bathrooms as well as a wet bar, wine storage area and in-home theater. The outdoor patio, which is heated, contains a large built-in fire pit designed as a place to gather and view the mountains.
A heated outdoor patio allows for mountain living in comfort and style.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
A prospective buyer would be “an outdoor enthusiast family that likes privacy and loves nature,” says Simon, adding the property also would be ideal for horse lovers.
The home’s outdoor spa provides another unique connection to nature.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
The unincorporated area of Placerville sits between two national forests and covers 480 acres. It’s located at more than 7,000 feet in elevation. Telluride, well-known for winter sports and activities, also hosts a high-elevation golf course in summer.
In many ways, Cassandro takes the shape of a classic, inspirational sports biopic. The film, now streaming on Prime Video, follows an outsider who finds meaning in a particular competitive realm, tracing his most unlikely rise to stardom. It’s a description you could apply to dozens of Hollywood hits—a fact that the movie’s director, Roger Ross Williams, is keenly aware of. Those conventional bones give shape to the kind of story that, in reality, the industry rarely takes seriously—in this case, that of a gay Mexican American wrestler who defies the odds to triumph in his ultramasculine environment.
So goes the story of real-life lucha libre icon Saúl Armendáriz, which was previously tackled by Williams in the nonfiction short The Man Without a Mask. Here, Williams, whose lauded work in documentary has earned him both an Academy Award (Music by Prudence) and an Emmy Award (The Apollo), makes his narrative debut by reexamining a subject he already knows intimately. It’s why the film brims with confidence, from the casting of Gael García Bernal—an actor Williams pursued for years—to the focus on self-acceptance and familial estrangement, topics true to both Armendáriz’s and Williams’s actual lives. It’s why Cassandro feels quietly radical in its portrait—especially in the exuberant, soaring performance from Bernal, who’s receiving the kind of showcase he’s deserved for a long time.
That goes somewhat for Williams too. Cassandro (watch an exclusive clip above) arrives smack in the middle of a true breakthrough year for the director, if such a term can apply to someone who’s already got a healthy trophy shelf going. His work on the Hulu docuseries The1619 Project has him currently up for another Emmy, while his Oscar-contending new Netflix doc, Stamped From the Beginning, just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival—and his docuseries The Super Models just hit Apple TV+. “Cassandro was seven years in the making, and Stamped was three years; Super Models, a couple years,” Williams told me over coffee in Telluride a few weeks ago, where Cassandro screened. “And it’s all just kind of coming together within a couple of weeks now. Kind of crazy.”
Vanity Fair:This movie really lives on Gael’s performance. You’ve talked about how aggressively you pursued him for this movie, but how did you find him as a collaborator?
Roger Ross Williams: Gael really dug into the physicality of it and did mostly all of his own stunts. He really learned to wrestle. He also started training six months to a year before. He started pretty extensive bulking up and working out, but he really learned to be a wrestler. He embraced that part of it. He made an emotional connection to the material, because we talked a lot about how it’s about tapping into his own relationship to his own father. Working with Gael, it was really a lot about just talking. Just breaking down and analyzing the character and the emotional arc of the journey of the character. He’s very much an intellectual—and it was COVID, so we had a lot of long Zoom conversations. By the time he had gotten to set, we had worked that out. He was ready. So it was about executing the physicality of it. Spending hours and hours and hours being pummeled in the ring every day.
I imagine that was true for you too. Moving into narrative filmmaking, I thought about those wrestling matches and the world of lucha libre as a place where you get to explore a different kind of filmmaking. How did you want to capture that world? What kind of research did you do?
“Weren’t you shocked?” Saverio Costanzo has a smile on his face as he asks me about Joe Keery’s suave, delicate performance in Finally Dawn, the epic Italian film which world premiered in Venice over the weekend before making its North American debut days later in Telluride. Writer-director Costanzo, fresh off the long trip from the Lido to the Rockies, admits to feeling a little jet-lag from a Mountain Village restaurant on Sunday afternoon, but still gets giddy when the Stranger Things star comes up in conversation. “He was always smiling, he had an allure,” Costanzo says of Keery. “Cary Grant—he reminded me of this kind of man.”
Keery is one of the many unusually compelling ingredients in Finally Dawn, a portrait of ‘50s Rome that contains elements of everything from Costanzo’s My Brilliant Friend to last year’s Babylon to the work of Federico Fellini. It smashes together Italian ingénues with global stars, gigantic set-pieces with intimate character drama, a dark vision of a historical turning point with a rollicking, unyielding narrative of self-discovery. Among the more divisive titles in this year’s Venice Film Festival, Finally Dawn has a lot on its mind, unafraid of big swings or to soak in a little melodrama—or to cast a charming TV star untested in a film of this scope in a pivotal dramatic role.
Costanzo cast Keery and Emmy nominee Lily James as imagined, glamorous Hollywood legends of the period who enter the orbit of our doomed heroine, Mimosa (newcomer Rebecca Antonaci), a sheltered young Italian woman primed for a small, safe, ordinary life—only for fate to intervene. Finally Dawn opens in familiar territory for Costanzo, a kind of naturalistic and fizzy account of two inseparably close girls taking on the world with a wide-eyed innocence. Mimosa and her older sister love movies, and decide to audition as extras in a swords-and-sandals epic going into production in their city. “I felt like, ‘Oh my God, am I doing My Brilliant Friend again?’” Costanzo cracks, referencing the beloved Elena Ferrante adaptation he’s helmed over multiple seasons. “I believe you have to start the next thing from where you were landed. It was a way to get from there to somewhere else.”
And he certainly goes somewhere else here. Mimosa lands the extra job over her relatively poised sister, and is thrust into a dizzying and disturbing Hollywood machine. She is paralyzed by the presence of her idol, James’s Josephine Esperanto, a diva in the mold of Joan Crawford, and her onscreen crush, Keery’s Sean Lockwood, a kind of heartthrob in waiting. “Rome was an American kind of city at that time—Americans saved Italy from the Nazis and then from there they occupied Rome,” Costanzo says. “Americans were everything for Romans, for Italians. They were like Gods.”
The energy of Finally Dawn shifts in line with Mimosa’s evolution, from aspirational to unsettling. Her story is based on Wilma Montesi, a 21-year-old who was found murdered in Rome, leading to sensational news coverage, in 1953. The crime was never solved but is believed to have touched powerful entities, show business included. “Fellini used to say that it was the end of innocence for Italy because from that moment, everything changed,” Costanzo says. Appropriately, then, Finally Dawn takes on that emotional arc, and ostensibly references Fellini in structure—particularly La Dolce Vita and Nights of Cabiria—while evolving into its own kind of unique, hedonistic elegy, imagining what may have been the wild last day in this woman’s life.
“The greatness of this film lies, as far as I’m concerned, in renewing the invitation to desire even when it’s not worth it,” says Oscar-winning filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty). “One cannot help but imagine the future, the beautiful life, as a mythical illustration. Therefore, Costanzo’s work ceases to be a film about a bygone era and becomes a necessary hymn to the life of all of us and, above all, of the young people. Hoping, imagining, desiring, crossing a night to see the sunrise is still what one cannot do without.”
Mimosa’s night goes off the rails when James’s mercurial Josephine takes an obsessive interest in her. During filming on their brilliantly cheesy Cleopatra-esque spectacle—captured in one gonzo-comic setpiece by Costanzo—the leading lady keeps requesting that Mimosa be moved more to the foreground of a given scene, before having a dress bought for her and compelling Mimosa to spend the night with her, Keery’s Sean, and Willem Dafoe’s genteel driver.
While Keery leans into his natural charm in a new context, James is magnetically transformative. Costanzo offered her the part after watching Pam & Tommy, impressed by her take on Pamela Anderson. He liked that she brought both edge and toughness, qualities that he saw in stars of the 50s. When James signed on, they worked hard to mold her into an Old Hollywood actress as thoroughly as possible. Costanzo pitched her as a mix of Crawford and Bette Davis, and they discovered a long Crawford interview through which James could master an old-fashioned, mid-Atlantic accent. James nails the illusion that a woman of that profile, at that time, had to sell—before a startling final scene unveils the person underneath the performance.
“Lily is not aware of what she’s doing 100%, I believe, and this is the nice thing about her because she’s not intellectual—she’s just instinctual,” Costanzo says. “You see even her leg is acting in character, even the fingernail. She’s possessed by something.”
“Yes, I’m a nepo father,” Ethan Hawke cracked at the world premiere of Wildcat in Telluride, bright and early on Friday morning. The Oscar- and Tony-nominee wanted to get the obvious out of the way: Perhaps his most cinematically ambitious film as a director was starring his daughter, Maya Hawke, in by far the biggest role in her career. Wildcat marked the result of years of talking about Flannery O’Connor between the two, going back to Maya’s audition for Juilliard. (She prepared a monologue out of O’Connor’s famous letters, and was accepted.) So the crowd laughed at the joke, then settled in for a rich, layered, elliptical take on the iconic and now-controversial author—one that turned out to be more of a family affair than even the dual Hawke credits could’ve revealed alone.
Credit Laura Linney for that. Linney has known Ethan Hawke for decades; they starred together in the latter’s Broadway debut, The Seagull, in 1992, and have been close friends and occasional collaborators ever since. Ethan’s decision to cast her as Flannery’s—and Maya’s—mother holds intense significance, as does his narrative focus on the complex and tight bond between the two women. The film argues that a great deal of O’Connor’s radical, groundbreaking qualities as a writer are rooted in her upbringing in Georgia, both her connection to the South and her frustration at some of its stifling attitudes. A sense of memoir between the Hawkes and Linney seeps into the material. They each brought their ideas, sensibilities, and particular talents to the film, culminating in a singular collaboration.
That’s most evident when I meet the trio at a nearby café, sitting under the Colorado clouds at an outside table. There’s joy and curiosity and maybe a bit of anticipation for the first reactions to the smart, tricky Wildcat—which interweaves O’Connor’s biography with reenactments of her short stories, with Hawke, Linney, and other actors stepping into multiple roles. We get into a deep, often funny chat about what these three artists mean to each other, and how they brought all that to this film. (Wildcat is currently seeking U.S. distribution and has secured a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement, meaning the striking guild has permitted its stars to promote the film.)
Vanity Fair:Maya, you brought this idea to Ethan, to write and direct a film about Flannery O’Connor. What was your discovery process with O’Connor’s work, and what made you think of your dad as the filmmaker for this?
Maya Hawke: I went to a wonderful high school that had teachers who got to choose their own curriculum, and I had a wonderful teacher named Ben Runner who assigned Flannery to me. I really liked him and wanted to impress him, so I went and found A Prayer Journal so that I could be like, “Not only did I read the recommended reading, but I did find this other book and I thought I’d talk about it.” It started there. I really connected to her desire and ambition and her self-doubt and her fear and the way that those things interacted with her desire to work…. And it felt connected to my dad. He’s always talked about his relationship with his own religion and coming from, in some ways, a religious Southern background.
Ethan Hawke: The more you say that, the happier your grandparents will be.
Maya: He’d been showing me Thomas Merton and Emerson all of these different things my whole life, these different ways of looking at and examining one’s relationship to God. It was fun for me to be like, “Oh, I have this thing, A Prayer Journal, and we can add it to that conversation about Merton and Emerson and keep talking.” You know, because every girl wants to impress her father with esoteric religious southern gothic American writers. [Laughs]
Ethan: It worked on me.
Clearly. So she brings all this passion to you. What was your reaction to her pitch, and how did you envision the movie?
Ethan: Even as you hear her talk right now—it’s like, I come at directing as an actor. That’s how I learned about directing is by being directed by bad directors, okay directors, great directors.. And one of the things that really good directors do is they follow an actor’s passion. If Kevin Kline comes to you and says, “I want to play Falstaff badly. And you’re a theater director. I got a good idea for you. Why don’t you direct Henry IV?” That’s going to go well for you. When an actor has a passion and a fire, that’s a great place to start, and this actor happens to know me really well and know what I’m interested in. I absorbed what she said, and I started seeing the possibility of making a movie about imagination and the nature of, “What is the intersection between human creativity and faith and imagination and reality?” Some strange equation using Flannery O’Connor as a launchpad for that exploration. And she thought that was a good idea.
And then I called Laura and I explained that to her, and Laura said, “I think that’s a good idea too. Let’s try to do that.” The wheels start turning and everybody starts working: “Well, not this, not that. No, not like that. Oh, I don’t like biopics.” This thing evolves and turns into something you screen at 9:00 AM at Telluride on top of a mountain.
Over the past few years, Netflix’s strongest Oscar contenders—handsomely mounted dramas like The Power of the Dog and All Quiet on the Western Front—have earned Hollywood’s admiration through their unimpeachable craft and singular directorial visions. It’s been harder for Academy members to fall in love with them, though; they end up playing second banana to movies like CODA and Everything Everywhere All at Once that wear their hearts on their sleeves, unafraid of going a little sentimental. But I suspect the streamer may finally have a movie that both checks those accessible boxes and will find widespread respect around town, and it’s Nyad.
The biopic directed by Oscar winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo), which premiered tonight in Telluride, may not be the toast of critics as the subtly brilliant Power was, or demand a ton of below-the-line love like those battlefield sequences in All Quiet. But it’s got a stirring story to tell in the journey of Diana Nyad, who at 64 years old swam over 100 miles in a single run from Cuba to Florida, an extraordinary feat of willpower and perseverance that the film rightly milks for all of its emotional impact. It’s a hard movie not to like and an easy one to love, cleanly hitting familiar beats that still strike a chord.
This goes especially when you’ve got Annette Bening and Jodie Foster in the main roles, delivering true star turns that come together as their richest and most notable performances in years. It is too early to game out a quickly intensifying best-actress race—later this weekend out of Venice, we’ll get our first read on Emma Stone in Poor Things and Carey Mulligan in Maestro, both of whom are already generating deafening buzz—but Bening’s warts-and-all portrait will be a compelling, undeniably central part of that conversation. Her noted history of many Oscar nods without a win rather neatly matches the film’s theme of never giving up, and Bening’s intensive preparation—and resulting physical transformation—only adds to that resonance.
Foster, meanwhile, is a huge part of Nyad as Diana’s best friend and eventual coach, Bonnie Stoll, emerging as the movie’s heart once their complex bond takes center stage. It’s been nearly 30 years since Foster was Oscar-nominated, for Nell, and the two-time winner stands an excellent shot of making this year’s final five for best supporting actress. She’s got the screen time, the wry banter, the emotional weight, and the sheer presence. For a movie very much about two women in their 60s, both out lesbians and both brashly outspoken, seeing Bening and Foster so fiercely embody those characters feels like a persuasive campaign narrative just waiting to take shape.
How far can Nyad go otherwise? With the Academy of 2023, a certain threshold of critical embrace is important, and this movie—which, again, doesn’t exactly fear its genre’s well-worn conventions—will need to clear it for consideration in the best picture and directing races. There is some controversy in the air regarding the movie’s subject, which, knowing how awards season tends to devolve, could make way for some kind of backlash. As of now, though, I’m seeing a very strong contender for Netflix. If things keep picking up for the movie—with Bening and Foster starting to get out there, following a SAG-AFTRA strike resolution, being a key factor—we’ll also be talking about Claudio Miranda’s immersive cinematography out of the Caribbean shoot, Rhys Ifans’s lovely work as Diana’s boat captain, and Julia Cox’s witty adaptation of Nyad’s memoir.
The cathartic final act is rousing enough to make me wonder just how far the movie can go if it indeed finds that kind of across-the-board momentum. Academy voters increasingly prefer wrapping their arms around a movie that gives them the warm fuzzies, a tale of social import that doesn’t let the storm clouds take over. When you watch Bening reach the Key West shore as the music swells, with the theater audience cheering right along with her, it’s clear that the sun is shining.
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It’s common during festival season for a slew of major Oscar candidates to premiere within days, sometimes hours of each other. But I cannot remember a single festival, on a single opening night, unveiling four very legitimate, very deserving lead-acting contenders—in a year where their race was already looking competitive.
In Telluride, thus far, it’s been all about the men. That may soon change, as Annette Bening’s Nyad premieres later tonight and Emma Stone’s Poor Things—fresh off of red-hot reviews in Venice—makes its way to the Rockies later this weekend. But waiting in line for movies, walking down the street, sitting for big premieres, the chatter I kept hearing about last night and all of Friday centered on four male lead performances. How they’ll navigate pre-established contenders like Leonardo DiCaprio (Killers of the Flower Moon) and Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer), to say nothing of Venice’s breakouts Adam Driver (Ferrari) and, presumably, Bradley Cooper (Maestro), remains to be seen.
But let’s get into each of these—they deserve a spotlight. My first screening on Thursday evening was for Rustin, the biopic of the unsung Civil Rights Movement icon helmed by George C. Wolfe. The film is conventionally structured and occasionally a little hokey, but the sterling ensemble cast and Wolfe’s deft handling of its intersectional concerns—Bayard Rustin facing discrimination for being both Black and gay, sometimes within his own communities—keeps it afloat. What makes it soar, then, is Colman Domingo. This is the moment many of us who’ve been watching the longtime character actor have been waiting for. His performance is exuberant, filled with the kinds of capital-B Big scenes that awards voters love, but also laced with a subtler conviction throughout, the sort of actorly transformation that doesn’t win make-up and hairstyling teams Oscars, necessarily, but is no less impressive.
It’s a huge, showy turn in a movie that may not gain major traction elsewhere, an occasional liability when it comes to the Academy. (Recall Danielle Deadwyler’s unforgivable snub last year.) One actor who will not have that problem? Paul Giamatti.The Holdovers, which I caught today after my colleague Rebecca Ford covered the premiere last night, feels like vintage Alexander Payne, a substantive comedy that finds a group of loners coming together for a few hours of hijinks, personal revelation, and tender heartbreak. It’s a feel-good tale with bite and personality, ideal for a slowly evolving Academy membership. Giamatti anchors it with a wildly funny embodiment of That Teacher You Hated In High School, one that turns improbably, bracingly heroic in the moving final act.
Is it too funny to beat out the seismic dramatic work of folks like Domingo and Murphy? Maybe, since there are more in that latter category too. One new name to add to the conversation that folks may not have been paying much attention to is Andrew Scott.All of Us Strangers appears to be the toast of the fall festivals so far, scoring a clean 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and a rare 98 on Metacritic; these numbers will likely go down, but they’ll remain indicators of enormous critical support, which matters a great deal more to the Oscars than it used to. A queer love story and ghost story rolled into one emotional wallop, the drama is poised to mark Andrew Haigh’s awards breakthrough, having previously directed Charlotte Rampling to her first Oscar nod for 45 Years. Scott’s sensitive, incredibly poignant work as the anchor of Strangers means that, should the film emerge as the broader contender it ought to, he’s firmly in that conversation too—remarkable since it’s his first lead role in a movie.
Finally, Barry Keoghan is in a very different situation. Saltburn is as far from a weighty tearjerker as you can get—and, it seems, pretty far from a critical darling too. Emerald Fennell’s previous film Promising Young Woman had its detractors as well, and that didn’t hurt when it came to her Oscar win for best original screenplay, but the divide here is even sharper. One hopes that won’t intrude upon the industry’s ability to recognize the astounding physicality and emotional torment that Keoghan taps into. He was nominated for his first Oscar just a few months ago for The Banshees of Inisherin, and this is a whole new level of screen acting. The awards trajectory for Saltburn looks uncertain, but that shouldn’t get in its star’s way.
Writer-director Emerald Fennell’s blazing, blaring debut feature, 2020’s Promising Young Woman, presented a kicky setup—a traumatized woman getting revenge on predatory men by faking helplessness and waiting to pounce when they try to take advantage of her—but eventually lost its narrative way. Though she won a screenplay Oscar for her troubles, Fennell couldn’t figure out a satisfying way to land the plane.
For much of Fennell’s new film, Saltburn, we feel we are in steadier, more confident hands. This time, Fennell’s premise is less reliant on zeitgeisty social commentary, which relieves some of the pressure that Promising Young Woman, in all its #MeToo alertness, buckled under. We’re back in the early 2000s at Oxford, that furnace of intellect, wealth, and on occasion wealthy intellect. Familiar characters are introduced: Oliver (Barry Keoghan) is a shy nerd from a troubled, decidedly un-monied background while beautiful golden god Felix (Jacob Elordi) is the scion of a noble family. Felix is louche and alluring to all around him, but perhaps especially to lonely Oliver, who casts furtive glances Felix’s way but otherwise remains a distant admirer.
Until, of course, a chance encounter, and suddenly Oliver is swept up in Felix’s intimate attention. Fennell teases at the implied queerness of this collegiate dynamic, letting it hang in the air as, perhaps, one of the film’s great questions. A character plainly states the literary allusion, but they needn’t have: everything about Saltburn, at this point, is an obvious modernization of Brideshead Revisited, Eveyln Waugh’s great novel of money and desire and burbling homoeroticism.
That becomes glaringly clear when Oliver is invited to spend the summer at the country manor—castle, really—where Felix’s family spends their days languid and blithely snobby, indulging in drink and cigs (and no doubt other things) while they regard Oliver with a wary curiosity. The Oxford stretch of the film is nervous and sad, but once Oliver arrives at the ludicrous Saltburn estate, Fennell turns up the comedy. Oliver’s early days at Saltburn are a wry, increasingly sinister delight, made all the more so by Rosamund Pike’s sharply amusing turn as Felix’s ice-queen gorgon of a mother, who states—as if it is psychiatric fact—that she has an innate revulsion to ugliness.
She’s glad, then, to see that Oliver, slouched and blandly dressed as he is, has some sort of dark beauty in his eyes. Keoghan, a rising Irish actor who here puts his magnetic oddness to good use, makes us believe that these haughty sophisticates could indeed see something worth ferreting out of Oliver. Sure enough, he proves, rather quickly, to the manner born. He falls in with Felix and his sister Venetia (an appropriately purring and unstable Alison Oliver) as they read Harry Potter books and lounge by the water—they also play drunken tennis in formalwear, naturally—while keeping Felix’s sneering gay American cousin, Farleigh (Archie Madekewe), at a safe enough distance.
Some kind of game is being played here, but Fennell is coy about exactly what that is. Are Felix and his cohort (which also includes the lord of the manor, played as a rich dullard by Richard E. Grant) ensnaring Oliver in some kind of trap? He’s a toy to be played with for sure, but to what end? Gradually, though, it seems that Oliver might have the upper hand, that he is a much more capable calculator than anyone, including us in the audience, have given him credit for.
Fennell has fun with these wicked possibilities, letting her actors flounce and skulk around in between jags of crackling, clever dialogue. It’s a pleasure to be in the company of these noxious people, all looking resplendent in the film’s shadowy lighting and artfully composed tableaux. (The film is, somewhat unnecessarily, presented in a square aspect ratio, as has become a tiresome trend in the last ten years.) The period setting made me nervous at first—I dreaded how many knowing, “rememberthis cultural object from the aughts?” winks we would be made to endure—but Fennell makes references sparingly.
A few old tunes come wafting out of Millennial post-adolescence (MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” is one of them, duh) and we see the family watching The Ring and Superbad. Otherwise, though, Fennell does not force us to consider the film’s time. It’s place that she’s more concerned with, this ominous Eden where Oliver is stepping into the full bloom of his being—whether that is a newly self-assured, benevolent observer or a shrewd machinator.
In 2011, the British filmmaker Andrew Haigh told the story of a young gay man living in an anonymous high rise and seeking some kind of human connection. That film, Weekend, is a modern gay classic, discursive and melancholy and sexy. Twelve years later, Haigh is back to a high rise, this one an eerily empty luxury condo-plex in London, for his new film All of Us Strangers, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on Thursday.
In that building lives a gay man, Adam (a muted but effective Andrew Scott), bored and shiftless in middle-age. He’s a screenwriter struggling to get started on a project about his family but mostly spending his time watching television and snacking into the wee hours. One day, as also happened in Weekend, a chance encounter puts Adam in close proximity to a handsome stranger, Harry (a scruffily appealing Paul Mescal), who seems to be the only other tenant in this gleaming new building. While their flirtation journeys toward sex and romance, Adam also ventures back into his past. Quite literally, in a way: when he visits his childhood home, perhaps in search of inspiration, Adam finds his parents there, young as they were when they died in a car accident—maybe the first and most significant confirmation that Adam’s was meant to be a solitary life.
All of Us Strangers is a ghost story, occasionally frightening but otherwise pitched in the tender, searching language of mourning. Adam’s parents, sensitively played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, seem to have been waiting for their son to come home; they know nothing of his life and are eager to see and hear how he’s grown. Just as Harry, back in the quiet of Adam’s apartment, prods Adam with questions whose answers help fill in a portrait of a man adrift in solitude, an orphan who seems to have, somewhere in adulthood, once again lost purchase.
Which is a common feeling among middle-agers, but perhaps especially so—at least, in Haigh’s argument—for gay people whose very existence can isolate them from the comfortably accepted patterns and rhythms of the regular world. Being gay is not a lonely life anymore, Adam insists to his mother when she suggests as much. Not like it used to be, anyway. We don’t really believe him when he says it, though; nor does he seem to. All of Us Strangers, with that evocatively damning title, is about alienation, particular perhaps to gay men of Haigh’s age who grew up on a fault line of identity, as a new progressivism, a tolerance and openness, attempted to wrench free of the horrors of the past.
Has Adam fallen through that crack? Not quite. But he dangles over it, and is glad to have Harry’s hand, pulling him, however briefly or not, toward the light of contentment, of self-acceptance. And yet he can’t shake his grief, for his parents and for, in some senses, the life they had hoped for him. The ease of heterosexual marriage and children and houses with yards. Adam has lost friends to that inevitability, perhaps partially explaining his rather empty existence in the city.
As it considers these losses—both Adam’s discrete tragedy and a more ineffable desolation—All of Us Strangers wanders into abstraction. Haigh’s film whispers with mystery; the fact of Adam’s parents, suddenly returned, is not the only unsettling unknown of the movie. Dream bleeds into reality as Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s jarring score pings and murmurs and drones. The film’s lush visuals are discordantly offset by that eerie soundscape, and by the harshness of Haigh’s ideas. (The film is loosely adapted from Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers; the gay text is all Haigh’s.)
The impact of All of Us Strangers will likely vary wildly depending on the beholder. With such a despairing thesis, the film may seem awfully foreign to some younger queer people who, while no doubt still suffering the batterings of an often hostile world, can’t quite identify with Adam’s internal wrestling: his fear, his coded shame, his hermetic longing. Older viewers may run headlong toward the film’s despondency, finding solace, even catharsis, in its haunting ache.
It’s a difficult work, raggedly emotional but chilly. Which was also the case with Haigh’s 2015 film 45 Years, in which a long and mostly happy marriage must be reassessed when something like a ghost comes lilting out of the past. That film is going for deep feeling but is, instead, a rather clinical study of human thought and behavior. All of Us Strangers has a similarly antiseptic quality. For all of its piercing insight and arresting performances, its steamy sex, its devastating conclusions, the film operates at a remove, from behind a pane of glass. Perhaps because Haigh gives Adam so little tether to the realm of the real; so much of the film is lost in plaintive reverie. All of Us Strangers is itself a kind of specter, looming and dreadfully insistent and yet incorporeal, impossible to truly embrace and hold tight to for dear life.
The day before shooting commenced on Anatomy of a Fall, star Sandra Hüller posed the question to her director, Justine Triet, on which their entire film seemingly hinged: “Is she innocent or not?” Hüller had never stepped into the shoes of this kind of character, a grieving widow who may or may not also be the killer, but the veteran German actress was ready for the challenge. “The older I get, the more I know that it’s just a question of perspective sometimes,” she says. “When I was younger, I always made sure I was on the right side of the moral position—it doesn’t work anymore.” Still, old habits die hard. So when she pressed Triet for an answer, the filmmaker replied with what Hüller now calls the “famous sentence”: “I want you to play her like she’s innocent.”
Hüller took that directive, “panicked” as it initially made her, and out of it emerged one of the year’s richest, deepest, and most complex screen performances. Her work also anchors a film that takes the ambiguity around a woman’s credibility and ingeniously spins it into a suspenseful drama of ambition, power, and interrogation. Triet and Hüller debuted Anatomy of a Fall at Cannes in May, a festival of heavy hitters; the film was so rapturously received that it hardly seemed surprising when it was awarded the coveted Palme d’Or. “My answer is a bit of a Teletubby answer, but that was really quite magical and joyful,” the French-born Triet says through an interpreter. “Cannes tends to be a pretty violent place, so to have such a unanimous response was great.”
Over Zoom for their first interview since that triumphant debut, Triet and Hüller share a connection that both of them individually highlight for me—not that they need to. It’s obvious in how they keenly listen to one another as they speak and build on each other’s insights. The film also serves as ample evidence. Anatomy of a Fall is a star vehicle, one that allows Hüller—a celebrated European star poised for a major international breakthrough this year, also given her lauded turn in fellow Cannes prize–winner The Zone of Interest—to unleash her command of craft. Yet her tour de force performance is also central to the vision of Triet, who sculpts a film of fascinating inquiry and towering intensity. It’s why both are about to embark on a robust awards campaign, propelled by US distributor Neon—Anatomy of a Fall will make stops at festivals in Telluride, Toronto, and New York, positioning itself as an across-the-board contender.
Hüller inspired Triet to write Anatomy before she even knew of its existence. They’d previously worked together on Triet’s relatively comic 2019 movie, Sibyl. “I knew that her character [in Anatomy] would have something kind of ungraspable,” Triet says. She even named the protagonist Sandra a year or so before sending the actor the script. Triet devised a cunning moral drama disguised as a legal one, incited by Sandra’s husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) falling out of their house’s window to his death. Was he pushed? Did he trip? Out in the remote snowy French mountains, Sandra and her sight-impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) find the body and call the police in agonizing shock, but as the mechanics of the tragedy are outlined, more questions arise than answers. “I really wanted to stay away from all of the narrative reflexes of a whodunit kind of film,” Triet says. “Where something is unknown and will remain unknown, we have to compose with what is there in the meantime.”
That “meantime” provides Anatomy’s dramatic crux, with Sandra eventually forced to plead her innocence in court, represented by her old friend Vincent (Swann Arlaud). We learn about Sandra and Samuel’s history through competing narratives, between prosecution and defense, and within the malleability of memory. Sandra’s notoriety as a published author comes up in the courtroom; so too do her relatively fluid sexual preferences. She does not apologize for who she is. Hüller situated herself in a context in which everything she said and did informed the narrative. “It’s very much a film about the audience and what their perspective is on a woman: on a successful woman, on a bisexual woman, on all these things—and how the thoughts on her change with every information they get,” she says. It’s why Triet took so much time in the courtroom, even as the film is not particularly interested in the conventions of courtroom drama. “This space was going to be where a kind of rewriting occurred,” the director says. “A scripting of this woman’s life and a diving into her mind.”
That scripting turns especially thorny for Sandra, who’s required to defend herself—explain herself, really—in French, a language she does not speak so proficiently. This went for Hüller as well—the German actor is fluent in English, but needed to learn the Anatomy’s native tongue alongside the character. (The film flits between French and English throughout, but features enough of the former to qualify for France’s international feature Oscar contender, should the country select it.) “There are so many layers in it, and the language layer is one of them,” Hüller says. “To be in the position where you constantly have to explain yourself—there is a risk that people get things wrong that you say.”
A blushing Hüller offers to leave the Zoom room when I ask Triet what drew her back to the actor—what about Hüller, previously best known for leading Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, so compelled her to develop such a demanding, slippery character study around her. I ask Hüller to stick around—“Americans love this stuff,” I reason—and she does quietly, with a slightly embarrassed smile. Off the cuff, then, Triet offers a rather striking tribute to the actor. She talks about the way she first saw Hüller walk onto a French set and integrate herself seamlessly. She talks about Hüller’s “incredible” preparation, and how when action is called, her interpretation “transcends the script.” She talks about their bond: “We have a really incredible connection—we’re the same age, and there’s almost a kind of kinship between us.” One senses she could go on forever.
Triet moves into English at one point to add another detail, almost apologetic at the length of her answer. “But Americans love it!” Hüller says, now laughing. Triet concurs with a smirk, and so she concludes with a rather profound observation: “Despite being a wonderful technician, that’s not what Sandra is playing on. She’s playing with her soul.”
The film cannily, sparely flashes back to Sandra and Samuel’s life before the latter’s demise, diagnosing what appears to be the deterioration of a marriage. One scene captures an explosive argument between them, played with a searing specificity by both Hüller and Theis; my mind immediately went back to it when Triet mentioned her star performing with soul. The two-hander is a miraculous act of performance that feels, somehow, both expertly modulated and utterly spontaneous. “Actors really like to do really big things sometimes, and they love emotions, and they want to show it—but in my experience, and maybe I’m the only one, normally people try to avoid that in their lives because it’s really painful,” Hüller says. “It takes a long time until somebody says, ‘Okay, this is enough, and now I’m going to scream at you.’”
An estate in Telluride, Colorado, comes with a three-story home on almost 29 acres of untouched land … [+] with a creek and a pond.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
In Telluride, Colorado, the rugged landscape is a total scene-stealer. The same can be said of a luxury vacation home designed to “steal” the spectacular scenery that half a century ago jettisoned the area from an old mining town into a star ski resort.
Turkey Creek Ranch at 8210 Highway 145 comes with a three-story home built in 1994 on almost 29 acres of untouched land with a creek and a pond. The property is surrounded by national forests.
The home was built in 1994 and since updated and enhanced.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
“The home was designed for this specific piece of land,” says co-listing agent Ben Jackson of Telluride Real Estate Corp. “I would call it a marriage of the property and the building because it’s set in such a way that you pick up sweeping views from every window.”
The contemporary home faces north, showcasing views of the San Sophia Ridge in the San Juan Mountains and peaks at nearby Telluride Ski Resort. The exterior of each story presents a series of long curves with rounded corners, offset with glass walls and thick sloping roofs. Inside, the curves form view towers at each end of the building to create light-filled rooms that point ever outward.
The contemporary home faces north, showcasing views of the San Sophia Ridge in the San Juan … [+] Mountains and peaks at nearby Telluride Ski Resort.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
Rooms are set on two levels above a garage and covered porch area. The house was remodeled to remove walls and create an open plan in which the living room flows to the dining area and kitchen—and then outside to a wide, rounded balcony with mountain views. Six bedrooms (some of which can be turned into office space or other types of rooms) are located on the upper level. All levels of the house are connected by an elevator.
“The architect made the house slope down to be built with the land instead of blasting and building into the land,” Jackson says.
The house was remodeled to remove walls and create an open plan in the kitchen, living and dining … [+] room areas.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
The home was designed by Michael Fuller Architects based near Aspen, the other, flashier ski town a couple of hundred miles northeast of Telluride. The award-winning firm also designed a landmark Telluride home on a rocky slope to capture the best views of 365-foot Bridal Veil Falls, the tallest free-falling waterfalls in Colorado. No surprise, the house is nicknamed The Falls.
Turkey Creek Ranch sits at a cool 9,000 feet in elevation. It’s a setting with maximum privacy that’s just minutes from the ski resort and the town of Telluride. It also provides easy access to outdoor passions that Colorado is known for.
The home was designed by Aspen-based Michael Fuller Architects.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
In summer, you can go horseback riding, hike into the surrounding national forest, golf at the ski resort, and fish or stand up paddle on the on-site pond. In winter, along with downhill skiing at the resort, you can snowshoe or cross-country ski from your back door.
It’s also a house that’s good for entertaining, inside and out, Johnson says the owners have had “80 people in that house, in the living room, dining and kitchen area, and they could have had 50 more.”
The property is on the market for $10.79 million.
Telluride Real Estate Corp.
Telluride opened its first ski lift in 1972, quickly becoming a popular, off-the-grid ski spot with abundant access to the outdoors. As its popularity grew, so did the number of wealthy people seeking luxury homes (actors Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey have had property here) amid the mountain backdrop. The population is about 2,600 people.
The property is on the market for $10.79 million. Jackson shares the listing with Andrew “Drufur” Williamson at Telluride Real Estate Corp.
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