At last, we’ve ended the season of awards strategists playing coy about their fall plans, hinting that they might be showing a movie “in the mountains” or “near the sea” but refusing to say the names of any of the major fall festivals out loud. With the bulk of the Toronto International Film Festival and Venice Film Festival lineups now public, we can follow the trail of hints to figure out what’s coming to Telluride, which doesn’t officially announce its schedule until the day before the festival begins in early September. The fall festival landscape is now in front of us — so what does it all mean?
Truthfully, we won’t really know the shape of this awards season until we actually see these things. A high-profile festival premiere like Danny Boyle’s Ink, which will open the Venice Film Festival and was recently picked up by Netflix, could be the start of a months-long awards juggernaut — or it could be Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, which opened Venice and played the New York Film Festival last fall before… disappearing completely.
You can at least guess at what’s strongest, though, by figuring out which films will hit multiple fests, if not all three. The TIFF lineup is often the key to figuring it out — a “Canadian premiere” means the movie has had its world premiere in another country, including the United States, but not Canada; an “international premiere” has had its first public screening in its country of origin, if the home country isn’t in North America.
So something like Apple’s biopic Tenzing with Tom Hiddleston, which was given the Canadian premiere designation, is likely to hit Telluride first. The same is true for the Andrew Scott-starring Elsinore and Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care — all three are absent from the Venice lineup, but not world premieres at TIFF. (Given that Leigh’s last film, Hard Truths, was somewhat infamously turned down by Telluride and Venice, before TIFF hosted its transcendent world premiere, hitting two fests is already the redemption story of the year as far as I’m concerned.)
Among the titles that will world premiere at Venice, I’m sure we’ll all have a close eye on Primetime, starring press tour maestro Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen. And I’m eager to see reactions to Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine and Florian Zeller’s Bunker — particularly since McDonagh’s film currently isn’t part of the TIFF lineup and I may be waiting a while to see that one with my own eyes.
I was also heartened to see some high-profile world premieres on the TIFF lineup, since I maintain that future crowdpleasers are absolutely better suited to that festival than any other (see last year’s rough reception for Frankenstein at Venice and Telluride before it soared at TIFF). Amazon MGM’s I Play Rocky, which launched a very entertaining trailer last week, ought to be the perfect TIFF world premiere — something with which director Peter Farrelly has previous experience (his Green Book won the audience award in Toronto in 2018 before its best picture run). Likewise, Chris Rock’s Misty Green — which A24 finally officially teased and dated this week — should find itself as a hot TIFF ticket; it’s the first film Rock has directed since 2014’s Top Five, which premiered at TIFF to raves and launched a bidding war eventually won by Paramount. And even polite Canadian audiences ought to flock to the Taron Egerton vehicle with the provocative title, Everybody Wants to F*** Me, while I will be lining up to see Alden Ehrenreich follow up his Tony win by facing off against Helen Mirren in A Talent for Murder.
You will be hearing much, much more from me on all of these titles in the coming months, of course. And for you longtime Prestige Junkie After Party subscribers, don’t worry, we’ll be doing a fall festival draft again that might be even more chaotic than the last one. For now, though, let’s stick around in the world of film festivals — sort of — with my conversation with Kent Jones, the former head of the New York Film Festival, who still knows everything about the world of independent film even though he’s now on the other side of the lens.
Late Arrival
Kent Jones still remembers the feedback he got from a film festival that didn’t program his new film, Late Fame. Jones knows better than most what it takes to get into a film festival — he was a programmer and later the head of the New York Film Festival until 2019, holding the keys to one of the most sought-after lineups in the world. Now working as a filmmaker — Late Fame is his second narrative feature, after several documentaries and 2018’s Diane — he’s on the other side of things.
“There was a film festival that didn’t show the movie, and one of the programmers said, ‘Well, the thing is that it’s like nobody really connects with anybody else in the end,’” Jones remembers. “And I’m just like, ‘Yep. I don’t know what to tell you. You described the movie perfectly.’”
Late Fame, starring Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee, is about much more than missed connections (I promise I have not spoiled anything!). Time folds in on itself in all kinds of ways in the film — not in a twisty Christopher Nolan sense, but the way that happens when you walk down a block where you used to live and can see the past and present at the same time. Adapted to the present day by May December screenwriter Samy Burch from a late-19th century novella set in Vienna, Late Fame stars Dafoe as Saxberger, a former poet who has settled into a workaday life as a postman. When he’s tracked down by a group of optimistic and pretentious young men who revere his poems from his 1980s heyday, he has a brush with the promise of the title, and a glimpse of what’s left of the art scene he’d long since left behind.
The version of New York in Late Fame is very real in some ways — Jones, 66, insisted on shooting exteriors in the East Village. The group of well-off young men (led by Edmund Donovan’s Meyers) is a little over-the-top in eschewing technology and even modern slang, though they are very recognizable to anyone who’s spent time within blocks of NYU. But then there’s Lee’s character, Gloria, who styles herself deliberately old-fashioned like the boys but also actually has to work for a living.
The club where Saxberger watches awestruck as Gloria performs the 1920s cabaret classic “Surabaya Johnny,” Jones admits, “is a place that probably doesn’t exist anymore. It’s the kind of place where Bette Midler probably sang.” But it’s a revelatory moment for the character, whom Jones says “is treated like a mascot by the guys,” but is genuinely living for her art in a way the young men can’t quite imagine.
As veterans of two different New York art scenes — Jones was a film critic for Cahiers du Cinema and Film Comment, Dafoe was a founding member of the downtown theater vanguard The Wooster Group in the early 1980s — the director and star of Late Fame didn’t need to talk much about the generation gap at the heart of the film. “We spent most of our time talking about Soho, what it was and how things changed in New York,” Jones remembers.
But he also asked Dafoe how he thought a poet like Saxberger could leave his art behind entirely. “One thing leads to another, and then the scene is over,” Dafoe answered, according to Jones. “That was his answer — ‘I know people who’ve gone down that road.’”
Jones has watched many things change in the world of film since his days working at Manhattan’s first video store, and like many filmmakers has seen projects stop and start and die altogether. “Making movies, man — plans fall apart very quickly,” he says. He’s certain the sales model for independent film is only going to get more challenging — “no movie theaters,” he says plainly — but sees the current demand for “movies actually made by individuals” as inevitable, and not just as a backlash to the superhero IP era of Hollywood.
“It’s the opportunistic way that some companies operated,” Jones says, pointing specifically to A24, which backed films from auteurs like Joanna Hogg and Claire Denis early in its existence. “The circumstances were such that they were very, very favorable to women filmmakers. But is Claire Denis still making movies for them? No. Is Joanna still? No.”
In a world defined by the “brutality” of online salesmanship and “this mania for packaging, boiling down, smoothing out” to sell something, Jones credits the festival audiences he spent years programming for as being “inherently open” to something new. That hopefully includes Late Fame, which premiered last year at the Venice Film Festival and also played Jones’ former haunt in New York, before being acquired by Magnolia Pictures late last year. After another bow at the Berlin Film Festival in February, it opens in theaters next month.
“It’s a story that grabs something in me, and my attitude is always that if it moves me, it’s going to move somebody else,” Jones says. With a focus that shifts among its three central characters and its refusal to condemn any of them, Jones continues, “It can’t be boiled down to one thing or another. Can it be easily packaged? I don’t know. But maybe that’s the package.”
