Feminist Slant at Telluride Film Festival

High atop a mountain overlooking the small town that was the site of the 18th annual Telluride Film Festival this week, director Martha Coolidge had every reason to feel on top professionally as well as altitudinally.

Here, at the festival’s mountaintop Labor Day picnic, Coolidge was the most sought-after of the filmmakers who had ascended the long ski lift for lunch and an outdoor seminar. The surrounding well-wishers were assuring her that her new movie “Rambling Rose,” which premiered the previous day, was the popular hit of the festival.

“Rambling Rose,” set in 1935, stars Laura Dern as a confusedly promiscuous Southern housekeeper who inadvertently teaches an eccentric but straight-laced family about love and morality.

Still, Coolidge--expounding on the issue of women directors, the unofficial but obvious theme of this year’s Telluride festival--couldn’t get too lightheaded about her future, given the gender typecasting she says she’s endured.

“I’m looking ahead with hope and with slightly askance, tempered expectations, because I think that this industry is very tough on women,” added Coolidge, who’s made mostly youth comedies since her feature debut with “Valley Girl” nearly a decade ago. “Just to tell you, here at Telluride, I’ve had a couple of things pitched to me from people who’ve seen the picture, and it’s teen material still . I can’t believe it.”

Back down in the valley, relaxing in a town park that was earlier the site of a festival seminar on women directors, Nancy Savoca--whose new major studio film, “Dogfight,” also premiered at Telluride over the weekend--had much the same typecasting story.

“After my first film, ‘True Love,’ I got sent a bunch of scripts by the studios and I know they were scripts for a woman director,” said Savoca. “Most of them had the word girl in the title--’Girls Talk,’ ‘Girls Want Boyfriends’--and they were all these (expletive) romantic comedies about a woman trying to get a guy, or a woman trying to have a baby with any guy she could find, or about girls and guys on dates. And those are women’s movies, as far as they’re concerned.”

The three major-studio films directed by women on view at Telluride this year--by Coolidge, Savoca and actress turned first-time director Jodie Foster--indeed involve youth and incorporate comedy, but proved decidedly idiosyncratic for most of Telluride’s left-of-mainstream audience.

Savoca premiered her second feature, the forthcoming “Dogfight,” an early-to-mid-’60s period piece in which River Phoenix picks as a date the ugliest girl he can find, to win a bet among fellow Marines.

But the most attention was given to Foster, in town to receive a career tribute and to premiere her directorial bow “Little Man Tate” (in which she also co-stars), a Truffaut-like trifle about a gifted child’s need for normalcy.

Foster, Savoca and Coolidge shared a panel on women directors with performance artist Laurie Anderson (who, as honorary “guest director” of the festival, introduced films as well as screening her experimental videos) and actresses Dern and Mimi Rogers.

Downplaying the idea of some seminar-goers that more women directors might bring greater “sensitivity” to the movies, Foster told the crowd that in “The Accused,” for which she won a best actress Oscar for her performance as a rape victim, director Jonathan Kaplan had “done a more ‘feminine-sensibility’ movie than Kathryn Bigelow (the director of “Blue Steel” and “Point Break”) would’ve done. And there’s nothing pejorative about that at all. It’s just that (Bigelow’s) style and the things that she concentrates on are in our culture perceived as masculine-identified things.”

Savoca told the audience she thought her gender might actually have helped her get the gig directing “Dogfight”--for politically correct reasons, given the difficult subject matter.

“I think the studios were a little bit nervous about dealing with (a story about) unattractive women,” said Savoca. “Like, ‘How fat and ugly will they be? The poor director is gonna have to deal with this!’ Among other reasons, it was safer for them in a way to have a woman directing, because I can go out on the set and say ‘dog’ and it might not seem as bad.”

Though only one other festival entry was directed by a woman (Maria Novaro’s Mexican-based “Danzon”), Telluride presented a wealth of unusually complex female leads: Mimi Rogers as a sexual thrill seeker turned religious zealot who ultimately rejects God in “The Rapture”; 80ish Sheila Florence facing death in Paul Cox’s Australian “A Woman’s Tale”; Irene Jacob, best actress at Cannes, in dual roles in the French/Polish thriller “The Double Life of Veronica”; Gong Li in Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lanterns,” and even Louise Brooks as a beauty queen in the recently rediscovered silent film “Prix de Beaute.”

Sexual issues aside--or not so aside, as the case may be--Telluride usually gets at least one wildly controversial, love-it-or-hate-it premiere per year to get the festival’s thousands of registrants bickering. Two years ago, it was “Henry--Portrait of a Serial Killer”; last time, to a lesser extent, it was “The Comfort of Strangers.”

This year, there were two, as both Peter Greenaway and first-time director Michael Tolkin set the town talking. Tolkin’s “The Rapture” has a somewhat sympathetic but highly unflattering portrayal of “born-again” Christians--not to mention a literal heaven and hell--to raise hackles. Viewers also argued the merits of “Prospero’s Books,” an adaptation by the ever-controversial Greenaway of “The Tempest.” As Sir John Gielgud soliloquizes among a sea of mostly unclothed extras and extravagantly expensive-looking sets, the spectacle is dazzlingly surreal and often incomprehensible, if actually fairly faithful to the Shakespearean text in its own fashion.

Other Telluride favorites included “The Ox,” the second film ever directed by famed Bergman cinematographer Sven Nykvist, recipient of the festival’s other career tribute; Peter Medak’s “Let Him Have It,” about a famous English capital punishment case of the ‘50s; “I Want to Fly,” an Italian comedy mixing live-action and animated romantic exploits; and new films from Godfrey Reggio and Ken Burns, director of last year’s PBS series “The Civil War,” whose “Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio” airs on PBS Jan. 29.