Middleburg 2023: Cannes holdovers and Sofia Coppola's "Priscilla"
Thursday, October 26, 2023 at 9:00AM by Lynn Lee
Hello TFE readers! I’m back after some time away, having completed an intense one-year work assignment that left me barely enough time to keep up with the movies, let alone write about them. To celebrate my return to normalcy, my husband and I spent a long weekend in Middleburg, VA, partly for relaxation (Middleburg’s a pretty little town in horse and wine country, ideal for a fall getaway) but mostly so I could get my fill of movies at the annual Middleburg Film Festival. As Nathaniel’s reported in the past, for a relatively young, non-centrally located festival, Middleburg punches far above its weight. It regularly manages to land many of the hot tickets out of Toronto, Telluride, Venice, and Cannes and has been a fairly reliable harbinger of what the Academy will like. Like the other festivals, it was a bit less star-studded than usual this year due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, yet still generated plenty of excitement due to the sheer quality of the films.
Day One
The festival opened on a high note with this year’s Palme d’Or winner, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall...
Ostensibly a murder (or was it?) mystery and courtroom drama about a man who fell to his death (or was he pushed?), at its core it’s an almost clinical dissection of a troubled marriage. More broadly, it's subject is the difficulty of drawing the truth from inevitably subjective and incomplete accounts. By turns tense, raw, and unexpectedly funny, the film derives much of its power from the always-great Sandra Hüller as the prime suspect, as well as a quiet but affecting supporting turn from Milo Machado-Graner as her son.
Day Two
It pains me to admit as a Sofia Coppola fan, but Priscilla didn’t really work for me, despite strong performances by Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi as Priscilla and Elvis Presley. “Girl in a gilded cage” is squarely in Coppola’s wheelhouse, yet the first hour veers between tedious and creepy because of how transparently, if subconsciously, Elvis takes advantage of Priscilla’s youthful innocence – not to sully it but to put it on a virginal pedestal, just for him, for as long as possible. Although the film gets more engaging once Priscilla starts to assert herself, her ultimate self-liberation feels oddly rushed. On the plus side, the visual recreation of her evolution from schoolgirl to Elvis dress-up doll to independent woman is note-perfect, as underscored by the Q&A after the movie with Spaeny and costume designer Stacey Battat. There’s nothing lacking in the craft behind the film, just the underlying concept. YMMV.
The Zone of Interest was the first screening for which my husband joined me, and I’m afraid he regretted doing so – given that he practically stormed out afterwards, proclaiming the film had no redeeming features. I chalk up that reaction as an unintended compliment to Jonathan Glazer’s ability to get under the viewer’s skin. What I had previously half-jokingly referred to as the “Auschwitz Pastoral” is just that: a surreal portrait of tidy, prosperous Nazi domesticity against a backdrop of endlessly smoking chimneys, dog barks and occasional gunshots, and the suggestion of distant screams lurking in Mica Levi’s unsettling score. The film captures with disturbing precision not just the banality but the flowers and fruit of evil (and I mean that quite literally – thanks to Glazer, I’ll never be able to look at a lush garden or greenhouse the same way ever again).
After the effective slow burn horror of the first half, Glazer pulls a move similar to one I didn’t care for in last year’s All Quiet on the Western Front – a kind of thematic panning out to the, well, bureaucracy of slaughter, to underscore a point that doesn’t really need underscoring. Still, overall, the film definitely hits its mark – it leaves the kind of chill that burns.
In part two: Thoughts on Oscar potentials and American Fiction, All of Us Strangers, Perfect Days, and The Holdovers
Reader Comments (1)
I want to see all 3 of these films with Priscilla being the #1 of the three because I love Sofia Coppola!