Telluride Film Festival: What a Coincidence?!

There are about forty feature length films that are viewed at the TFF, "The King's Speech", "Black Swan", "127 Hours" to name a few. I was surprised that in such few movies this logline could apply to two of them-

"Disarming beautiful woman cause three men to fight over her to point of death."

The very modern Tamara Drewe which you can click on for my review

and The Princess of Montpensier...

by director Bertrand Tavernier, a French period piece set during the French Wars of Religions ( 1562-1598) when the Catholics and the Protestants basically hacked at each other in the name of God but really for political power.

                                  

The main character- Marie de Mézières, played by French actress Mélanie Thierry, is given away in marriage, contractually by her father in exchange for alliances with the right people and well a nice allotment of land for his hunting hobby.

Her lover, her husband, the kings brother and her tutor all fall madly in love with her, and as their country of France is in a bloody useless conflict, so are they in their own conflict over Marie.

Really?

Two movies of a women basically standing there- dolled up and men falling over each other to possess her. Are there only two kinds of stories involving women- the young disarmingly beautiful "ingenue" or the shell of a once beautiful women as portrayed in Another Year by Lesley Manville.

We really haven't come that far have we?

I loved the festival- but I have to give it a pretty bad rating on the "Girl" scale- no really positvie movie about women, no real women of power there- that is a bummer!