Telluride – It was about 10:30 Saturday morning when a sharp collective gasp sliced through the silence of a sold-out screening at Sheridan Opera House off Telluride’s main street. That’s how unexpected the muted flash of violence in French director Michael Haneke’s “Hidden” was.
The drama, about a TV commentator who becomes convinced he and his family are being stalked by a North African man he knew when they were both children, isn’t the softest entry to the day.
But then the annual Labor Day film intensive has no time to waste.
Saturday, the 32nd Telluride Film Festival began its first full day. (The festival runs through Monday.) The earliest screenings started at 9 a.m. The last of the evening got underway at 11. More than 12 hours of programming left festival attendees with 39 choices, including films and panels.
Amid Saturday’s fare: a tribute to Mickey Rooney, a meeting of brilliant minds of performance artist Laurie Anderson and theater director Peter Sellars, and an actors’ conversation with William H. Macy and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Still, much of the early buzz of Telluride has to do with the feeling that the movies this year are as heavy as the lead gray sky.
“Doom and gloom,” someone commented coming out of a screening for patrons and press of Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain,” based on Annie Proulx’s short story. And the sun was peeking out then.
Later, a man exiting “Great Expectations,” a program of short films by very promising directors, said to his friend, “I come to Telluride to be entertained, not to be depressed.” When the most uplifting mini-film of the four selected is about a Third World girl and water, he may have a point.
But Telluride is a festival that insists movies matter. Pleasure can be a profound if troubling experience.
As one programmer said, in a “world more real than true,” these films wrestle with truth.
Truth and its consequences are the timely topics of “Capote,” about Truman Capote writing his nonfiction masterpiece, “In Cold Blood.”
Bennett Miller’s debut feature was the first film of the festival to screen at the new state-of- the-art Palm theater. It was also a world premiere, with Miller and his stars, Hoffman and Catherine Keener, in attendance.
As dark and weighty as “Capote” is, there’s bright news: Hoffman’s portrayal will probably garner critical accolades and award-season nods.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
