SURVEYING THE PEAK MOMENTS AT TELLURIDE

David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” an astonishingly beautiful and deeply disquieting piece of Gothic Americana, was the hot topic at the 13th annual Telluride Film Festival last weekend. Audiences either hated or loved the film, but no one was heard to deny the originality of the maker of “Eraserhead” and “Dune.”

Approximately 1,300 people--stars, directors, exhibitors, distributors, teachers, critics and just plain movie lovers--headed for this old mining town-turned-posh-resort in the Rockies for the three-day film marathon. They honored the old and the new, the famous and the obscure.

During Telluride’s 13-year history, festival directors Bill Pence, Tom Luddy and William K. Everson have created a special non-commercial atmosphere in which it is possible to appreciate film in all its diversity. At Telluride it doesn’t seem strange to find the latest film by Russian emigre Andrei Tarkovsky cheek-by-jowl to the action-filled Republic serials of William Witney, so clearly an inspiration to Stephen Spielberg.

Directors Alexander Mackendrick and Jiri Menzel and actress Isabelle Huppert were paid special tribute, and sex, humor and politics on the screen were this year’s panel discussion subjects.

Telluride perennials, documentarian Les Blank and West German director Werner Herzog, were elsewhere this year, but there was plenty of compensation as James Stewart, Robin Williams, Jerry Stiller and Laura Dern charmed locals and visitors alike. And at dinner at Telluride’s Victorian Sheridan Hotel you were as apt to find designer Ralph Lauren at the next table as a contingent of East European film makers.

As rewarding at it was to have critic Manny Farber and James Stewart to discuss the fine, under-appreciated Westerns that Stewart made with Anthony Mann in the ‘50s or to rediscover Rouben Mamoulian’s delightful 1935 film “The Gay Desperado,” the major impact of Telluride was in the tough-minded, illuminating and always highly personal reflection of contemporary life to be found in the best of its new films. A survey follows:

The centerpiece of the festival was unquestionably Soviet emigre Andrei Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice.” Made in Sweden, it has a Bergmanesque flavor with its small gathering of family and friends in an island setting and in its Swedish cast, headed by the superb Erland Josephson. In this increasingly surreal and highly symbolic odyssey, which incorporates a Faustian motif with Tarkovsky’s familiar preoccupation with parent-child relationship, Tarkovsky raises the question of whether civilization, in all its richness, is equal to the threat posed by a nuclear holocaust. The images, which bleed from muted color to black and white, are among Tarkovsky’s most beautiful and dreamlike.

In its deliberately disturbing way, “Blue Velvet” pushes to the limit a dramatic art form’s ability to sustain prolonged morbidity. And it caused a definite reaction among festivalgoers.

When Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern start playing detective, Nancy Drew-Hardy Boys style, they stumble upon the pitch-dark underside of Norman Rockwell small-town Americana. In its bleak moments, “Blue Velvet,” which centers on Isabella Rossellini’s lush, tormented lady-in-distress, has a dark, Edward Hopper film noir look and mood.

In its uniquely powerful and stunningly ambiguous way, “Blue Velvet” deals with sexual awakening and with the traditional American denial of the capacity for evil.

“The River’s Edge,” which was directed by Tim Hunter (“Over the Edge” and “Tex”), is as raw and jagged as “Blue Velvet” is confidently stylized. Inspired by an actual incident, it deals with the appalling apathy with which a group of high school kids respond to the strangling of one of their classmates by another--and suggests just how desensitized people can be to violence.

If “Blue Velvet’s” vision of Inferno is of the imagination, “The River’s Edge” is that of a documentary-like realism. Hunter, however, has allowed the talented and angular Crispin Glover to go over the top as the kids’ speed-freak leader; the calmly commanding Keano Reeves is a real discovery as the one youth in the group who gradually discovers he possesses a measure of moral imagination. “Blue Velvet” and “The River’s Edge” are strikingly linked, not only by concerns, but by the unsettling presence of Dennis Hooper, playing crazies in both films; hatefully in the first, pathetically in the second.

Alain Cavalier’s “Therese” is another stunner, a slyly humorous, stark and terrifying consideration of the nature of sainthood. As stylized and erotically kinky in its way as “Blue Velvet,” “Therese” has as its young real-life heroine, played by Catherine Mouchet with a smiling, steely implacability, a teen-ager in whose utter determination we see religious ecstasy becoming a craving for death. “Therese” is too witty, too detached to be merely anti-clerical. Instead, Therese emerges as a paradox, inspiring admiration for her unswerving single-mindedness as well as revulsion for her self-indulgent self-destructiveness in an environment which alternates between warm affection and stupid brutality.

Robin Williams, Jerry Stiller and Joseph Wiseman all have some of the best moments of their careers in “Seize the Day,” which Fielder Cook directed from the Saul Bellow novella. Williams, a figure of long-suffering, kindly dignity, is a sweet loser approaching 40, desperate for a job, treated barbarously by his ice-cold father (Wiseman) and exploited hilariously--if cruelly--by a con man (Stiller, in the part of a lifetime). “Seize the Day” is as modest as it is affecting, and its downward spiral is deftly offset with humor.

The question still hanging at the festival’s end was whether the film, intended for public TV, will get the theatrical release it deserves. Also an example of effective low-budget film making was Lizzie Borden’s “Working Women,” which takes place during a day and an evening in a bordello located in a claustrophobic Greenwhich Village walk-up apartment. Some of the acting is callow, but Borden invites us to see in the madam-prostitute relationship all employer-employee relationships--and that prostitution itself can be an awful lot like other jobs.

The French-Canadian film “Decline of the American Empire” takes its title from the notion that as a civilization wanes its people become more preoccupied with love and sex. The shorthand description of this witty and ribald winner would be to call it a “Big Chill” with more depth. Writer-director Denys Arcand alternates between a group of four women and four men, mostly middle-aged academics, who by the end of the day will gather for a lively and treacherous evening in which the foibles of both sexes will be revealed with much earthy humor and wise compassion.

Also on the lighter side was Jiri Menzel’s “My Sweet Little Village,” a rambling, affectionate celebration of small-town life centering on the fate of the community’s one retarded citizen, a sweet homely youth, whose home is coveted by a bureaucrat whose presence will be beneficial to the town and its farm commune. This is Menzel’s best, most slyly political film since his Oscar-winning “Closely Watched Trains.”

The Polish presence at Telluride was strong, led by Krzysztof Kieslowski’s somber, compelling “No End,” which parallels a wife’s unfolding grief for the loss of her husband with the fate of an imprisoned political dissenter who was to have been defended by the husband. Set in 1981, just after the government crackdown, “No End” raises complex and challenging moral questions about freedom of expression, the perils of compromise and the struggle simply to survive.

Also screened--and much praised by those who saw them--were Agnieszka Holland’s “A Lonely Woman,” set in the same turbulent period as “No End,” and Richard Bugasjksi’s “The Interrogation” (1981), which tells of an innocent woman, played by Wajda favorite Krystyna Janda, tortured and imprisoned during the Stalinist ‘50s. Bugasjksi’s film remains banned in Poland. Kieslowski and Holland spoke at length about the crucial role film has played in the politics of Poland, with Holland going so far as to suggest that there might have been no Solidarity movement without the cinema.

Inevitably, there were disappointments, but they were few. Marco Bellochio, the Italian master of bourgeois decay, made an ill-advised remake of the French classic “Devil in the Flesh,” which offers beautiful people, some teasing sex and some heavy-handed political asides. Paul Cox’s “Cactus,” a gentle love story about a young Frenchwoman (Isabelle Huppert) in danger of losing her sight and a blind young Australian (Robert Menzies), seemed routine after the impact of the offbeat eroticism of his “Man of Flowers” and the fierce passion of “My First Wife.” Not helping matters was Cox’s anti-American sentiments--he later said he regretted them--in the course of the tribute to the embarrassed Huppert.

Not to be overlooked were the curtain-raisers, a series of excellent short films. They included the American Film Institute’s fine 20-minute documentary on Orson Welles’ unfinished “It’s All True,” which tells of the discovery of 18 to 20 hours of the unfinished film and pinpoints the tragically unjust downturn in Welles’ Hollywood career, and the eerie, animated “Street of Crocodiles,” made by the Brothers Quay.