Telluride at Dartmouth: The 37th Year

Conclave d. Edward Berger

Conclave was overall a strong film hampered by a final plot twist which reads as manufactured and indulgent.

Conclave was directed by Edward Berger, who previously made the Academy Award-winning German epic anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front (2022). The film stars Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence, who is appointed by the late Pope to lead the conclave, the process in which all the cardinals of the Catholic Church gather to elect a new pope. All cardinals are eligible for appointment—the main characters include Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), Lawrence’s good friend and a progressive like the previous Pope; Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a conservative who opposed the late Pope’s progressive ideals; Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), a moderate and middle-of-the-road option; Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), a Nigerian cardinal and serious contender; and Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), the Archbishop of Baghdad, who for safety reasons was secretly appointed by the late Pope.

Conclave is based on a 2016 novel of the same name, and the script closely follows the events of the novel. If I am to judge this film based on its own merits aside from the novel’s plot, the film did a fantastic job. The sound editing and score, which make liberal use of orchestral strings for dramatic emphasis, create an atmosphere of solemnity and seriousness which befits an event of this magnitude. Berger uses visual language to communicate the duality of the cardinals’ seriousness and high standing juxtaposed with the fact that they are also ordinary people. For example, the cardinals inhabit hotel rooms, sit on metal folding chairs in the cafeteria, and smoke cigarettes. There are still cliques and regional associations; clusters of cardinals from similar regions gather and chat in small groups the way middle school children might chat on the blacktop.

The film also succeeds in portraying the politics and evolving situation involved in the election, which takes place in successive votes until a Cardinal garners a two-thirds majority. It is compelling to watch the election unfold: seeing the favourites, the contenders,  clandestine strategy meetings, shifting fortunes, guessing who will win. The conclave feels relatable to other political situations we have experienced or can imagine, such as the corporate politics of who becomes the CEO or who wins in a primary.

Conclave has a great cast; Ralph Fiennes in particular is a strong choice to lead the film. Fiennes does well communicating the weight of responsibility Cardinal Lawrence feels leading the conclave. He also shows a range of emotions navigating the conflict between political pragmatism and the desire to make the right spiritual and moral choice. Cardinal Lawrence is a compelling protagonist to follow because he is revealed to be a real contender for the papacy despite an ardent wish not to become pope. Lawrence’s rare desire to reject political ambition and refuse to seek the papacy is a compelling trope and refreshing character to follow.

The film’s weakness lies in the final plot twist. After multiple Cardinals’ fortunes rise and fall over the course of the election, Cardinal Benitez, a previous unknown, unexpectedly wins. After Benitez accepts his appointment, Benitez reveals to Lawrence that he was born intersex, raised to believe he was solely male, and decided not to undergo gender reassignment surgery because he wanted to honour the body that God gave him. When it is revealed that the new Pope is part female, there is a real sense of schadenfreude in the film and in its intended audience—there is a gleefulness that the Catholic Church has been one-upped by this turn of events. In a film that otherwise makes this election feel realistic, the compounded revelations about all the Cardinals—for example, Lawrence discovers Cardinal Tremblay bribed several cardinals for the election—feel like engineered twists that indulge the author’s agenda and dislike of the Church.

The film and its protagonist Cardinal Lawrence seem to take the conclave seriously. However, the film is invested in the political drama of the conclave while ignoring the spiritual and holy tenor of the election which would surely accompany a real conclave.

For its merits and compelling narrative, I award Conclave three and a half stars.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig d. Mohammad Rasoulof

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a compelling film about an Iranian family set in Tehran in 2022 when nationwide political protests rocked the country.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig was directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, an Iranian independent filmmaker who is living in exile in Germany. For the content and messages in his films, Rasoulof has been censored and arrested several times, and the Iranian government confiscated his passport. 

When it was announced that this film was selected at the Cannes Film Festival, the cast and crew were interrogated by Iranian authorities and banned from leaving the country in an effort to pressure Rasoulof to withdraw the film. Rasoulof was eventually sentenced to 8 years in prison and fled Iran. This film is Germany’s submission to the 97th Academy Awards in the category for Best International Feature Film.

A lens through which to watch this film: when I attended the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, in his introduction for the screening Rasoulof said simply, “This is a film about total obedience.”

The film follows Iman, a devout and honest lawyer in Iran’s Revolutionary Court, his wife Najmeh, and his daughters Rezvan and Sana. After his recent promotion as an investigative judge, Iman is pressured to sign off on judgements without investigating the evidence, including on death sentences, due to the high volume of arrests from the protests. Rezvan and Sana grew up under a liberal regime with more personal freedom, and they view the protests in a different light than their parents. Najmeh, the girls’ mother, is protective of her husband’s career and her daughters’ safety and reputation, so she urges them not to get involved in protests or associate with rebellious friends.

The plot of this film is divided into three acts. In the first act, nationwide protests erupt after a girl is killed by police over allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Najmeh urges her daughters not to engage with or associate with anyone from the protests. However, during the protests Rezvan’s college friend is shot in the face with buckshot; the girls smuggle her home and beg their mother to treat her wounds. 

This first act of this film demonstrates how social media plays an important role as an information hub under a repressive regime. In contrast to the state-sanctioned news program Iman puts on the television during dinner, social media and in particular Instagram is a vital method to understand real events on the ground. The film uses real protest footage; it is a mix of fictional narrative and real images and videos of the protests. 

In an era where social media is almost unilaterally dismissed as a waste of time and a tool for corporate greed and misinformation, The Seed of the Sacred Fig demonstrates that social media still has a role to play in society. These alternate modes of communication which are not controlled by the government sometimes do have valuable information, and they can be a means through which citizens can coordinate, protest, and share information.

In the second act, Iman’s work-issued gun goes missing, and he becomes convinced that one of the women in his family has stolen it. In the third and final act of the film, Iman brings his family to their childhood vacation home to grill answers out of them, and the situation evolves into a deadly game of hide and seek when he tries to force the women to confess.

In this current geopolitical atmosphere where international conflicts such as the war in Ukraine and the conflict in Israel and Gaza are front of mind, particularly for the West, this film is an important reminder of the recent events in Iran: political repression under the hard-line government and intense, deadly government crackdown against dissent.

Through the family members in the film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig explores the conflict between obedience, duty, and morality. Iman wants to do his job by the book, and despite pressure from his superiors, hesitates to sign off on death sentences. 

Najmeh is a product of the old regime and a restrictive upbringing, but her actions in the end are truly to protect her daughters, even though she disagrees with their feminist sensibilities. The underlying and growing realisation that Najmeh is very strict with her daughters and sides with Iman because she is trying to protect them from their father, who can actually become quite violent, is a compelling nuance to the film’s commentary on gender roles and how the Overton window in Iran differs between the older and younger generations.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig highlights the experience of Iranian society and in particular, Iranian women in the transition to a hard-line Iranian government from a more moderate regime. The family’s relationships and situation are well-designed to convey the nuance of conflict. I award this film four stars.   

Saturday Night d. Jason Reitman

Saturday Night was a decent thriller, but the degree of its idolisation of Lorne Michaels and SNL is palpable. Depending on your relationship to SNL, Saturday Night is either homage and fan service, or it will feel like it is not a movie for you.

Saturday Night, directed by Jason Reitman (Juno, Jennifer’s Body, the Ghostbusters sequels), is based on the 90 minutes before Saturday Night Live’s debut on October 11, 1975. The film follows SNL founder Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) on set managing the chaos of a brand-new television production while trying to convince the NBC brass to allow his show to go to air. I would list the main cast, but the movie is chock-full of stars, including actors such as Willem Dafoe, J.K. Simmons, Nicholas Braun, and Finn Wolfhard. In fact, I found one of the most fun parts of watching this movie was just seeing how many recognisable faces would pop up.

Television productions are famously chaotic; Saturday Night creates a tense, ticking atmosphere as Lorne Michaels and his crew rehearse the rundown, put out fires literal and metaphorical, and leave sketches on the cutting room floor. Some production trivia: the filmmakers, Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, made a great effort to be as faithful as possible to the events of what actually happened that day. The filmmakers spoke to as many people as they could who were present (and currently still alive) that evening in 1975, from cast and ensemble to the crew and production executives.

Saturay Night creates the feeling of a real television set and a frenetic atmosphere. In a typical movie or television show, everything outside the camera’s purview is full of production crew, equipment, and an entirely different world from what has been constructed for the set. In this film, there were two floors of a set without borders. To create the feeling of a real SNL production set, actors and extras were taught to imitate production roles (such as set painter and camera operator) and the camera pans around and follows Gabriel LaBelle throughout the set. This feat of having an entire set with many moving simultaneous pieces immerses the audience in the setting and in the flow of the movie.

One weakness of Saturday Night is that it is at times difficult to follow: there are too many people to learn their names, and everything happens so fast that you only fully understand what’s going on if you have the background knowledge to understand who all these people are. Generally, this is an event-driven movie rather than a character-driven one. While watching the film, I had the sense that I should recognise who all these original cast members are, and that the relationship between Lorne Michaels and his partner Rosie Schuster is storied and important, but the film gestures at these backstories rather than tells them. I’m not familiar with SNL’s inaugural cast; I felt as a viewer that without this prior knowledge I was missing out on important resonances and references in this film.

For a film about a sketch comedy show, there isn’t actually much comedy in Saturday Night. As a film about SNL’s inaugural live show, it would have served the movie to show more of what made Saturday Night Live special. Instead, the film operates on the axiom that SNL is amazing and groundbreaking; the movie positions Lorne Michaels as the visionary, stressed-out scrappy underdog, and SNL as a charming new-generation rebel running circles around the stuffy NBC censors.

I predict that Saturday Night will be popular this awards season, because it caters to the tastes of Hollywood creatives who love SNL and vote in the awards. Saturday Night was a good movie, and the frenetic atmosphere is well-constructed. However, the movie would probably be more interesting to people who worship at the altar of SNL. I award Saturday Night three stars.

Will and Harper d. Josh Greenbaum

Will and Harper is a solid documentary that humanises the transgender movement by focusing on the friendship between Will Ferrell and his friend Harper Steele. Surprisingly, the film does a decent though imperfect job of avoiding stereotype in their trip through ‘middle’ America.

Will and Harper, a documentary directed by Josh Greenbaum (Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, Strays) follows Will Ferrell’s 17-day road trip with his friend Harper (formerly Andrew) Steele. The documentary begins with a disarmingly honest interview with Will Ferrell about the upcoming road trip and his relationship with Harper. Will Ferrell got his start on Saturday Night Live in the mid-1990s, where he became best friends with Harper who started as a writer on the show. There’s a lot of archival photos and some video of the pair performing together and spending time together. In interviews, the pair talk about how Harper sent an email to many of her friends coming out as a transgender woman during Covid. Will was supportive but also was grappling with the revelation from a person whom he has known for so many years. Back when Harper was living as Andrew, Harper talked about how she loved to road trip through America and go to diners and drink beer. Harper expressed an interest in retracing her steps and repeating the experience, but she was apprehensive about doing it as a trans woman; Will offered to support Harper and do the road trip together.

Overall, I think the documentary does a good job of humanising the transgender movement because it focuses on Will and Harper’s friendship, and following the life story of this specific person who lived as a man for much of his life and then later in life decided to come out as transgender. Harper shares her experience being a closeted transgender woman to Will, who also serves as a proxy for the audience. Harper talks about how she had felt like she was a woman for much of her life, but felt incredible stress trying to hide it while simultaneously seeking out times and places where she could wear a dress and feel more authentically herself.

One of my concerns watching this documentary was that it would lean into stereotype as Will and Harper drove through ‘middle’ America on their road trip. Will and Harper straddle a strange line between markers of American masculinity—such as being interested in ‘cheap’ beer and sitting in Walmart parking lots drinking said beer—and being famous enough to be liked or at least recognized in public, while having politics that diverge from traditional ‘red’, ‘middle’ America. I think overall Will and Harper interact with the Americans in these different states normally, though their stop in Texas seemed engineered to draw unfriendly attention—and then the documentary used Twitter/X screencaps to reinforce the idea that Texas is a deeply red, unfriendly enclave of intolerance. Leaning into the open forum of Twitter/X felt a bit unfair; you can find any manner of put-downs, cruel remarks, and intolerance on Twitter if you’re looking for it.

I believe one of the most interesting parts of this film is in the background—the way that Will and Harper are treated because of Will Ferrell’s fame. To be sure, a documentary camera following the pair will already attract attention. But almost everywhere they go, people start following Will with their cellphone cameras, regardless of how they feel about his politics. Casually following Will Ferrell around and seeing how people interact with him in public gives insight into the fishbowl of fame and a little bit of what it feels like to be famous and recognisable. I felt sympathy for Will while watching this documentary; he’s likely used to this treatment by now, but it’s uncomfortable to imagine how difficult it would be to undergo normal life while constantly being perceived and recorded by strangers. 

Will’s fame also adds complexity to Harper’s road trip quest. On the one hand, it protects Harper if she was concerned at all for her physical safety, and Will’s fame feels at times like a Trojan horse to pressure people toward acceptance of Harper as a transgender woman. On the other hand, the attention on Will amplifies the attention on Harper as his travelling companion; it’s possible Harper would fly under the radar more if she wasn’t with Will and wasn’t being followed by documentary cameras.

Overall, this is a good road trip movie because the friendship at the center of it is compelling. It is interesting to learn about Will and Harper’s friendship as people in their late 50s and early 60s having new and complicated conversations, navigating a new phase of their relationship. The documentary treated non-coastal America a little more fairly than I expected it to. I award this film two and a half stars.