TELLURIDE, Colorado – In Mike Mills’ “C’mon C’mon,” a beautiful, longingly funny film that premiered Thursday night at the Telluride Film Festival, Joaquin Phoenix plays radio journalist Johnny, who is recording interviews with America’s youth. Ask children and young people about their fears, their dreams and their thoughts about the precarious future of the world. When his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) leaves for a few days to take care of an extremely difficult family business, Johnny steps in to look after their 10-year-old son, Jesse (Woody Norman), whom he has. He spent a lot of time with him, and he turns out to be a smart, curious, and emotionally complex man when he goes on his uncle’s cross-country tour to listen to young people, learn to speak and listen to the youngest person in his life – that It rarely happens like this on the screen. For one, the irony itself is recognized when Johnny briefly flirts with the idea of interviewing Jesse for his project, a possibility that wisely never arrives. (It would be redundant anyway in a movie that’s already a full-length conversation.) Second, one of Mills’ arguments is that the incessant mess of life has a way of creating its own strange patterns and repetitions. Family tensions and work stress blur, as do the stories we sometimes hear about other people and the great drama of our own everyday life, the New York Film Festival, which will be published by A24 later this year, is a fine-grained family drama, a casual road movie and the latest reminder of Mills’ talent for transforming elements of his personal story into moving personal cinema. Beginners ”,“ Women of the 20th Century ”). Introducing his latest film, Telluride, 55-year-old Mills noted that much of the film – beautifully played by Phoenix, Norman and Hoffmann and shot in brilliant black and white by brilliant Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan – was inspired by his own humiliating, exhilarating experiences as Parents. But he also brought another complicated layer of reality into the mix: Johnny’s interviewees are all real children talking about their true experiences, which came from Detroit, New York, and New Orleans. And while staying largely on the narrative periphery, Mills is obviously genuinely intrigued by what they have to say, especially as they prepare to step into a world that the supposed adults have screwed up as extensively as possible to think of that world while I say, “Come on, come on,” and not even thinking of my own little corner of it – a decay into solipsism that I hope can be granted, and perhaps even corroborated, by Mills’ rightful rights insist on the interconnectivity of all human experiences. I thought a lot about my own 5-year-old daughter, who couldn’t be more different from Jesse in some ways, and couldn’t be more different in many others – the wild energy, the dessert-focused eating habits, the sudden and sometimes heartbroken Breakdowns, bursts of creativity and imagination – couldn’t be more similar. I also thought about how my impatience and frustration as a parent was compounded by my COVID-19 existence at home, and how quickly I turn my child off instead of hearing them – sometimes, and here’s an irony, so I make time have to sit down and watch independent films that are as sensitive and emotionally empathetic as this one. A scene from Asghar Farhadi’s film “A Hero”. (Amazon Prime Video) All of this was especially weird and surreal to ponder while wearing a double mask in a crowded but uncrowded theater in Telluride – the first film festival I personally attended since the pandemic broke out, and with it that too really away from home for the first time in 18 months. Undoubtedly speaking for many of us who have decided to travel, it is a pleasure to be back here in this beautiful former mining town, to breathe the fresh mountain air and to see some hopefully excellent new films. It’s especially meaningful to be back after the pandemic forced Telluride to cancel its 2020 edition, a blow to the few thousand movie buffs for whom this Labor Day weekend event is a cherished annual highlight. This year, the festival returned with a characteristically robust program that spanned five days instead of the usual four, and with several security measures, including requiring all festival goers to provide proof of vaccination and a negative COVID test prior to pickup Passports. As reassuring as these mitigation strategies are, their security promise is of course both precarious and conditional and can sometimes (a contradiction in terms?) Lock the cautious festival-goer in a kind of emotional limbo. Suddenly confronting the long invisible faces of friends and colleagues after months of social drought is both a source of gratitude and a source of disorientation. expressed their gratitude for those who dared the journey and asked for their patience for a festival that would necessarily be different from those of previous years. Whether because of travel anxiety or full shooting schedules, some key actors were noticeably absent from the premieres of their films, including Phoenix and Will Smith, the star of Reinaldo Marcus Green’s highly acclaimed drama “King Richard”. Riz Ahmed had to cancel his own Telluride travel plans at the last minute, despite being selected to receive a tribute from the festival in connection with the unveiling of his new film “Encounter”, the latest film by English filmmaker Michael Pearce. Inmate who drives away in the middle of the night with his two young sons whom he has not seen in years, “Encounter” was shown to festival-goers on early Thursday and at the end made an amusing, if accidental, road movie double calculation with “Come on.” , come on.” The comparison doesn’t exactly flatter Pearce’s film, an unequal Farrago from science fiction thriller and child kidnapping drama, which is just held together by Ahmed’s powerful and committed performance as a man on the edge. Still, and a handful of moving moments with his young co-stars (Lucian-River Chauhan and Aditya Geddada), it’s a particular disappointment after director’s strong (and much more successful ambiguous) psychological thriller “Beast”. The father-and-son drama, which has already hit Telluride with strong reviews and a big Cannes award, was “A Hero”, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi and his strongest work since the Oscar-winning “A Separation”. . ”With a typically laser-like focus on the complex motivations of a wide variety of characters, this carefully constructed drama hangs on a man (Amir Jadidi) serving a prison sentence for unpaid debt; the young son with whom he is trying to reunite; and a mysterious bag of coins that could hold the key to reversing (or exacerbating) the family’s misfortunes. Comprehensive in its survey of good intentions and how quickly they can get mad once they go viral, “A Hero” arrived in Telluride after winning second place at the Cannes Grand Prix a few weeks ago – another festival that stands out recovered after the cancellation last year, and hopefully not the last.
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