The metaphor that kept coming to mind at the 40th Telluride Film Festival in Colorado Aug. 29 to Sept. 2 was provided by Alfonso Cuarón‘s film Gravity. In this magically imagined, 3-D epic, astronauts Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are menaced by the Kessler effect, in which colliding satellites cause a kind of chain reaction, a cascade of shrapnel that grows bigger and bigger, out of control.
It’s a totally satisfying thrill ride — you’ve never seen a mise-en-scène like it. Like the 2011 Telluride hit Pina, about choreographer Pina Bausch, this film uses 3-D for more than just throwing objects in the viewer’s face. The actors are choreographed in space, and the IMAX-like 3-D makes you feel inside that space. Gravity‘s astronaut adrift is more physically palpable than 2001‘s, or that of any movie I’ve seen.
The brilliant, marvelously acted mystery The Past, Asghar Farhadi’s successor to his Oscar winner, A Separation, also puts you inside a Kessler cascade — a series of bad moves by good people in a scary space, a Paris apartment menaced by divorce. A woman (Bérénice Bejo) invites her estranged husband (Ali Mosaffa) to meet her lover (Tahar Rahim of A Prophet). But the new guy can’t marry her, because his wife is in a coma, caused by semi-selfish actions by everyone, and billiard ball–like coincidences that make absolute logical and emotional sense. It’s a great story with lifelike characters and veil after veil of revelations.