2025 Telluride Film Festival Report – Day 2 – ‘A Private Life,’ ‘Tuner,’ ‘Ghost Elephants’
Day two at Telluride Film Festival includes ‘A Private Life’ with Jodie Foster, ‘Tuner’ and Werner Herzog’s ‘Ghost Elephants’.
Sometimes the questions you seek answers to aren’t even clear themselves. Sometimes the lots you're dealt in life help define who you will be when you stop regretting who you wanted to be. Sometimes searching for the thing your soul seeks is only tarnished by actually finding it. The theme for the day (here I go again, finding themes through the randomness) seems to be that the path you take isn’t always the path you end up on, and how you find your way through will determine how you feel once you reach the destination, even if it wasn’t the one intended or hoped for.
This is just a poetic diversion to tell you about my Day 2 in Telluride. Come along on the journey.
A Private Life
Jodie Foster says, “This is just a little French film.” There is so much contained in that description, all of it wonderful. Rebecca Zlotowski is a Female French Director. I use that simplistic, capitalized description because it defines for me a very particular style or mini-genre of film directors’ films I really enjoy. In the company of auteurs such as Mia Hansen-Løve, these réalisatrices de films have a smaller, personal viewpoint approach to their filmmaking. Often the intrigue is internal, intimate. Some find these slow, deliberate explorations hard to get into, but if you let the telling take its time, it can take you to fantastic places of the human psyche.
This film takes that inner journey through the mind of a Freudian psychiatrist, suddenly struck with reasons for the death of a patient. Did she miss something? Was there foul play? As the story unfolds into a very French Hitchcockian mystery, with twists and turns galore, we follow the internal search for answers when the questions aren’t yet really clear.
Jodie Foster inhabits the full humanity of her characters. In her first full leading role in French, that skillset plays real and immersive. In her preparation for the role, which was extensive and intense, as per usual for her, she surmised that Freudian therapy is a two-way street between the analyst and patient. So to is how this film is presented. There is as much to find out about the audience in the exchange as from the characters on the screen. If you can’t tell, I found the session rewarding indeed.
Tuner
Academy Award-winning documentarian turned first-time (though it really doesn’t show) narrative director Daniel Roher set out to challenge himself as his answer to the post-Oscar question, “What next?” So obviously, he chooses to co-write his first screenplay about a piano tuner apprentice with hyperacusis, an extreme sensitivity to loud, sudden sounds, who turns to safe cracking to help out his mentor and girlfriend, as one does. Roher decided if he’s going to make a narrative film, he’d make one he’d want to see. He accomplished that. This film plays out in the spirit of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver (2017) with rapid-fire editing, intense sound design, and a great score and soundtrack.
Roher’s collaborations and connections serve him well in this first foray. The story pops, the characters feel real with understandable motivations, even if it takes them to extremes. The music school setting allows for some wonderful imagery of piano parts interposed with brilliant musical compositions, seamlessly interposed into the narrative. It’s a romp that moves you and misses very few notes.
I don’t know what his answer to “What next?” will be, but I’m quite prepared to find out where Roher is going to take us.
Ghost Elephants
Sometimes looking for what you search for is better than finding it. I wasn’t planning to see Werner Herzog’s latest nature documentary, Ghost Elephants today, but I wrote my plans down in pencil and found myself seated, ironically in the Werner Herzog Theater watching Werner Herzog introduce the film. Even he was at a loss to describe how meta it all seemed of this “only in Telluride” moment.
The film is a straightforward documentary following Dr. Steve Boyes personal decade-long journey to find a lost branch of the elephant family, elusive giants among giants in the most remote parts of the Angola Highlands. We meet Boyes and he shares his dream quest, gathers the last great elephant trackers and a team of scientists, and sets out on the arduous journey. All narrated by and as only Hertzog can with humor and internal observations, foreshadowing and heart.
It may not come as a surprise that the expedition, in a small way, succeeded in what they set out to do. In almost bigfoot-style footage, they saw the mystical elephants – a glimpse, then gone. Then we’re left with Boyes having to weigh the cost of losing his dream, replaced only with reality. Check out the film yourself when National Geographic releases it.
As you may notice, this review isn’t accompanied by a photo, as I usually do. I think it is fitting to leave these ghost elephants as mysterious as they once were. So call it an intended choice.
More tomorrow.
Read More 2025 Telluride Film Festival Coverage:
Christopher Schiller is a NY transactional entertainment attorney who counts many independent filmmakers and writers among his diverse client base. He has an extensive personal history in production and screenwriting experience which benefits him in translating between “legalese” and the language of the creatives. The material he provides here is extremely general in application and therefore should never be taken as legal advice for a specific need. Always consult a knowledgeable attorney for your own legal issues. Because, legally speaking, it depends... always on the particular specifics in each case. Follow Chris on Twitter @chrisschiller or through his website.