A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974)

 

First-time viewers of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, drawn by its ever-growing reputation, may be surprised to discover that it begins with scenes of blue-collar men at work, allotting the top-billing not to Gena Rowlands but to Peter Falk: it’s an early indication of how the film is as much, if not more, about the “influence” as about the woman. Rowlands’ Mabel has no job, no close friends that we’re shown (albeit that her husband Nick is easily capable of filling up the house for an impromptu party), no apparent interests; after working all night on what was supposed to be a date night, he brings his crew back to the house for an early morning group meal, which of course she’s expected to spring into action to prepare. This all flows into the film’s abiding core mystery, how much of Mabel’s unusual or outright “crazy” behaviour is the “fault” of society, and of her husband in particular, a necessary release valve of sorts in a life which would otherwise be intolerably dull and repetitive; one wonders whether she might be demonstrating, in some sense at least, the most fully-inhabited, boundary-testing consciousness in the whole movie. Rowlands is as remarkable as everyone says, at once laceratingly present and comprehensively unknowable, funny and intimate and loving and scarily possessed. The film’s home stretch, after Mabel returns from some six months in an institution (of which, again, we see nothing), at first seeming weary and subdued, then gradually reclaiming some version of her old self, sums up all its worrying mysteries: is Nick helping her back toward something true, or bullying her into being the unusual but essentially submissive woman to which he’s accustomed? The final images of routine domesticity reasserting itself suggest a recovered equilibrium, but few will read it as an entirely happy ending.

Masculin feminin (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)

 

Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Feminin is typically characterized by citing its line about the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” which in tandem with one of its main characters being a budding pop star (number six in Japan!) would likely lead one to expect this to be one of the director’s more colourful films. In fact though, the movie (shot in black and white) is one of Godard’s more melancholy works of the period, with little exuberance or display of pleasure, not least regarding the central relationship between the singer Madeline (Chantal Goya) and the bouncing-around-jobs Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud), which is more talked about, often in unenthused terms, than depicted. It contains several acts of sudden and inexplicable violence, reflecting global conflicts in the background, but these acts fail to move those who observe them, embodying a pervasive sense of denial and willed ignorance, feeding into a worryingly drained human fabric (even going to the cinema is unsatisfying, both because of the unpersuasive narratives, and the technical flaws of the projection). This culminates in a sense of erasure: the film’s final stretch spends extended time on another couple, with Paul last seen and heard expressing his dissatisfaction with his work, before a last scene in which he’s gone altogether, and Madeline is alone with a horrible choice to make, almost frozen in indecision (a state likely reflected in the viewer, given the withholding of much relevant information). But at the same time, of course, the film teems with possibility: that one could indeed be such a pop star, or take advantage of the era’s gadgety innovations, or fool the military into sending round a chauffeured limousine, or spot Brigitte Bardot at a nearby table, or (in one deadpan moment) step into the shoes of someone else to see, as per the adage, if that yields any great revelation (it doesn’t).

The Sleepy Time Gal (Christopher Munch, 2001)

 

The many alluring wonders of Christopher Munch’s The Sleepy Time Gal start with that title, seeming to promise a bedtime-worthy child’s tale, but instead concerning itself with deep-rooted matters of separation and absence, of lives still structured and shadowed by the events of decades earlier. Its main character, Frances (one of Jacqueline Bisset’s best-ever roles, her unexplained accent aiding the mysterious undercurrent) was once a late-night radio broadcaster under the titular title, although that doesn’t seem particularly important in how she assesses her own life; of the many details and bits of personal history that tumble through the movie, the most hauntingly recurring is the memory of the daughter she gave up for adoption, Rebecca, played in adulthood by Martha Plimpton. Rebecca’s life as a New York corporate lawyer bears little obvious relationship to that of the money-strapped Frances, but Munch weaves in multiple correspondences, even suggesting the two women may have slept with the same man, decades apart. The film has a recurring lightness, an openness to possibility, yielding structurally unimportant but pointedly lovely scenes such as Frances’ encounter with a French tourist who’s out foraging for mushrooms, or a glimpse of her photographer son instructing a subject to get naked, or many little bits of history and commemoration (spanning George Washington to the dawn of a Black-oriented radio station); all of this partially offset though by darker intimations (the other son is in Britain, barely in contact, the movie suggesting he may be in dire straits). Munch’s finely calibrated work ultimately denies the form of closure we might have hoped for and expected (the two lead actresses never even share the same scene), while beguilingly asserting a form of reconciliation and understanding that transcend death and distance, intertwined with the power of art to forge connections that would otherwise be beyond one’s imagination or grasp.

One Way or Another (Sara Gomez, 1975)

 

Sara Gomez’s One Way or Another is a highly arresting blend of fact and fiction, announcing itself at the outset as a story of people some real and some not, never quite clarifying where the lines are drawn. The movie is in part the story of a relationship, between Mario, a manual worker, and Yolanda, a teacher, the class and other differences between the two embodying the broader cultural and structural divides that post-revolution Cuba struggles to integrate (the film’s rough-hewn black and white visuals and tentative or retrograde aspects often make it feel older than it actually is). For Mario, this means suppressing his natural tendency toward domination (Gomez’s My Contribution delved more specifically into the country’s engrained machismo); at times he seems gripped by frustration at all that he has to carry and calibrate within himself (several people suggest the relationship is changing him for the worst), his tension exacerbated by a workplace dilemma that pits personal loyalty against the collective good. For all its open-mindedness, the film betrays little skepticism regarding the righteousness of Cuba’s trajectory and dominant ideology, analyzing the lower classes in terms of their lack of access to capital, and coming close to condescension in noting how access to more modern housing and amenities doesn’t necessarily cause a break with the old, marginalizing worldviews and rituals (sacrificing a goat, for instance). When Yolanda is chided by her colleagues for talking too impatiently and stridently to the less-educated parents who fail to get the message about parental discipline and involvement, it's hard not to think her frustration is partly also Gomez’s own. But the film is by no means heavy going, although even its moments of lightheartedness – such as a bedroom scene when Yolanda teases Mario with her impression of how he walks differently with men than he does with her – carry a pointed undercurrent.  

Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter (Saul Swimmer, 1968)

 

Saul Swimmer’s Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter is a strange and rather downbeat showcase for the pop group Herman’s Hermits, following the general blueprint of  A Hard Day’s Night and others but with limited sense of exuberance, almost seeming inclined to hold the pop music racket at arm’s length. The peculiarly conceived plot revolves around a racing greyhound (the Mrs. Brown of the title) owned by Peter Noone’s Herman, he and his four friends (largely interchangeable in their blandness, physically and otherwise) seemingly keeping the band going mainly as a way of financing the dog’s activities; when it goes missing they return to their various menial jobs, apparently not much caring. The film feels somewhat depressing from its very first shots, driving through a horrifyingly derelict Manchester: a scene in a raucous local pub built around an old-timer singing My Old Man’s a Dustman carries much more spirit than its tentative ventures into “Swinging Sixties” territory, which carry an air of merely hoping to get out alive. The film’s diffidence extends to its romantic inventions: Herman barely acknowledges Tulip, the neighbourhood girl who openly pines for him, falling instead for an out-of-his-league model, but in the end the model is working in Italy and thereby seemingly unattainable, so it seems Herman will probably settle for Tulip anyway, as long as she realizes she may be cooking and cleaning for five men (no problem!) The songs are tuneful enough (There’s a Kind of Hush is likely to be the most recognizable nowadays, largely by virtue of the Carpenters’ cover) but it doesn’t say much for the Hermits’ legacy that the two musical highlights focus on others: a silly song about the joys of selling fruit and vegetables performed by Stanley Holloway, and a plaintive number about love being mainly for the young, somewhat reminiscent of Gigi’s I Remember It Well.

Caligula: the Ultimate Cut (Tinto Brass, 2023)

 

Even in its restored “ultimate cut” version, Tinto Brass’s Caligula is mostly a joyless one-note slog, its almost three-hour length often feeling static and repetitive. The film’s signature move sets its main actors against multi-layered backdrops of eye-filling activity: people juggling, fire-eating, (very often) copulating or masturbating, or just hanging around with sex organs exposed, none of this yielding much sense though of circus-like decadence, let alone of historical engagement or exactitude. Malcolm McDowell easily embodies the ruler’s perverse, wayward self-righteousness, but his performance is pitched throughout at the same impervious level, allowing little sense of the unraveling that causes his downfall. The narrative starts with him in bed with his sister (Teresa Ann Savoy), proceeds through his murder of the ailing emperor Tiberius (Peter O’Toole, wearily ranting and made up to look ravaged) and spends much time on his selection of and apparent increasing co-dependency on a wife (Helen Mirren, seeming to be exploring a parallel universe in which her career became mired in Euro-trash). One perks up a bit on a few occasions when the movie shakes things up, such as in depicting Caligula’s perverse fixation on the wedding of one of his soldiers, which he disrupts in depraved fashion, or in the sequence of his would-be invasion of Britain, consisting of traveling a few miles from Rome and sending hoards of naked men into the water to reap papyrus, which he then brings back as “proof” of his triumph. Time and again, the movie pushes its people into strange poses and gestures and interactions, the sum of which might have cast a mysterious displaced spell if it didn’t all seem so arbitrary: sometimes one wonders if it would have been happier dispensing with any pretense of narrative, organizing itself instead as a series of ornate fragments. At other times, studying the dutifully but mostly unexcitingly staged creations, I started thinking about Peter Greenaway might have done with all this (and without even cutting back on the nudity…)

Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis, 1992)

 

Seen now, Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her might almost be a prequel to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, the latter film taking Zemeckis’s themes of overpromising and grotesquely misdelivering remedies to aging, and of reluctantly co-dependent women, and ramping them up for an even more sensation-seeking audience. The comparison especially comes to mind given the blandly rarified Hollywood setting of both films, and the reliance on female protagonists with no apparent inner life or aspirations other than youth itself; Fargeat at least provides the sense of a concept pushed to the very edge, making Zemeckis’ film feel even blander and complacently hysterial than it already did. The plot, such as it is, introduces a lifelong rivalry between two women (Meryl Streep’s Madeline and Goldie Hawn’s Helen), unaccountably coming to a head over plastic surgeon David (Bruce Willis, going through the motions as if under his own kind of life-depleting spell) who breaks an engagement with one to marry the other; eventually they both separately find their way to the mysterious Lisle von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini, doing her own barely-clad thing), whose anti-aging remedies come with awful and unavoidable side effects. The film’s squandered concepts and assets (in addition to its one-note lead actors) include the notion that all of Hollywood’s legendary premature victims (Monroe, Dean etc.) are still alive and youthful-seeming, executed with all the panache of a half-hearted flick through a Madame Tussaud’s brochure; the special effects are inevitably somewhat dated, which wouldn’t matter as much if they were used to more enjoyable ends. Further low points include the cringe-inducing depiction of Helen in her overweight cat lady phase …well you get the point. An early musical number, performed by Madeline in an ill-fated Broadway show, is one of the more enjoyable sequences, but it’s apparently intended to be so bad that half the audience walks out, so even that doesn’t work as intended.

Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)

 

Cries and Whispers ultimately stands among Ingmar Bergman’s most unsettling, pitiless films, such that a character’s closing memory of a day of happiness with those she loved most seems drenched in cruel self-delusion, a scavenging of scraps from a largely desolate life. The film is built around three sisters: the unmarried, dying Agnes (Harriet Andersson, whose screams of pain penetrate to the bone), cared for in her final days by Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), and by a maid, Anna (Kari Sylwan), the person on whom Agnes is most functionally dependent, sometimes cradling the dying woman against her naked breast. The scheme includes glimpses of the past, and scenes of Karin and Maria’s married lives, both involving incidents of desperate self-harm: Karin’s husband is shown to be particularly insufferable in his self-righteous formality, embodying a hypocritical society mired in rigid expectations and judgments (a scene where Karin’s maid helps her undress illustrates clothing as a medium of this layered oppressiveness). The stunning blood-red décor that dominates the film’s first section seems to express all that’s repressed and unsaid, while also inviting the violence and breakdown to which the film often feels on the verge of succumbing. But the film is as bleak in its small cruelties: Karin and Maria seem for a while to repair their long-fractured relationship, talking deep into the night, expecting to move forward on a better basis, but in the last exchange between them we see old micro-aggressions creeping back, albeit now in somewhat different form. In this regard, the film’s close-ups of clock hands heavily moving, and an early scene in which Agnes gets up from her sickbed to adjust the time, apparently just to produce a single chime, speak to a milieu divorced from its most basic capacities for measurement and control, for evaluation and action.

Casino Royale (John Huston, Ken Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish, Joseph McGrath, 1967)

 

The James Bond “spoof” Casino Royale, with its five credited directors, is frequently almost aggressively shoddy, with dashed-off special effects, a lurching plot, and little or no attempt to impose tonal consistency, which just sometimes, if you manage to orient your head the right (or should that be the wrong) way can seem like a loose-leaf radicalism. With multiple characters identified at various times as James Bond, the film suggests that the label and the myth already outpace the reality, and that as such the right of entry to the role of Bond might transcend calculations of age or gender or basic competence (in this respect the real world might still only partially be catching up, with the vague buzz over whether the character might next time be incarnated by something other than a white man). In tune with that philosophy, the film often feels almost randomly assembled: for example Peter Sellers is seen in the opening moments before disappearing for the best part of an hour, then later gets dispatched so offhandedly that one could miss it (lack of actorly cooperation apparently contributed to the choppiness, but maybe it’s all for the best); Woody Allen has a couple of disconnected scenes early on before popping up to dominate the end stretch; it’s a film where one scene might feature Oscar winners like John Huston and William Holden, and another might be given over to TV-level shtick delivered by the likes of Ronnie Corbett. The climactic showdown has the Americans arriving in the form of Cowboys and Indians, and the French as led by Jean-Paul Belmondo, and George Raft in a tuxedo delivering a single line, and two clapping seals, and Allen hiccupping up blue clouds, and it’s a mess that’s frankly very little fun to watch, but one truly wonders if anyone ever seriously imagined that it would be, or (more probingly) whether in truth watching Bond films has ever been. Burt Bacharach’s indelible score does its best to impose a buzzy sense of unity, but of course it could never be enough.

The Protagonists (Luca Guadagnino, 1999)

 

Luca Guadagnino’s 1999 feature debut The Protagonists is in part a sober investigation into and commemoration of a shocking crime that took place some four and a half years before the making of the movie, in which two privileged British youths killed Mohamed El-Sayed, an immigrant they’d never previously met, leaving few clues until one of them confessed a month or so later: the film includes interviews with some of the investigating police officers, a medical expert, and El-Sayed’s widow, much detail on the actions leading up to the crime and several reenactments of the thing itself, all of which goes to construct an appropriate sense of informed horror. But at the same time, it frequently has the flavour of a caper movie, showing the group of young filmmakers flying from Italy to Britain, to work with Tilda Swinton (who shows up with her two real-life kids) as the figurehead, at times dramatizing events in a playful or even titillating manner. And further, the final stretch verges on the (overused as the term may be) Lynchian, setting the duo’s search for a suitable victim (their original idea was to find and kill a pimp) in an erotically abstracted environment rather than the low-end dive of reality, introducing a homoerotic communal shower scene, and imagining the earlier meeting of El-Sayed and his wife as an urbane, almost Bond-movie-type spectacle. Overall, The Protagonists feels fresh and engaged and alive, immersed in the streets of London, in its people and its ideas, in invention and connection and music, such that one intermittently wonders whether the film is becoming untethered from its core purpose. But at the same time, it speaks by its very existence to its immersion in the loss of El-Sayed, and at the end one feels his life has been elevated, explored and repositioned in the manner normally applied only to the most revered of the departed.

Bird (Andrea Arnold, 2024)

 

By conventional measures, the father in Andrea Arnold’s quietly extraordinary Bird, Barry Keoghan’s Bug, isn’t much of a parent (his best idea for making money is to cultivate psychedelic toad venom), but his affection and engagement are real, and he’s at times hilariously pragmatic and non-judgmental; his 12-year-old daughter Bailey, with whom he lives in a somewhat dilapidated building, is deprived or neglected in some ways (the movie doesn’t mention school at all) but has preternaturally strong instincts, and an acute connection to the natural world. As the movie continues, this becomes the foundation for a near-catalogue of possible modes of growth and transcendence, encompassing everything from a local vigilante gang that seeks to make the world better by beating up one unworthy person at a time, to deeper appreciation for music (useful in getting the toad to do its stuff) and family, to magic realism elements ranging from wild birds doing Bailey’s bidding to the title character, a stranger who latches on to her and whose presence, backstory and even basic nature defy any clear explanation. And it’s an explicitly and complexly female vision, with the androgynously-named Bailey early on cutting her hair and thereby seeming more superficially masculine, but from there experiencing her first period, experimenting with make-up, embracing her role as older sister to the siblings that live with their mother, and even agreeing to attend a wedding in a hideous catsuit she’d earlier spurned, and yet despite all these markers of growing womanhood becoming someone more evidently self-defined and unreadable. The choice to run the end credits alphabetically by first name, making no distinction between large and small contributions, accompanied by various snippets of goofing around, ends the film on a note of celebratory inclusivity, and it is indeed a thrillingly uplifting viewing experience, even as one remains aware of the underlying financial and social precariousness.

I'll Be Alone After Midnight (Jacques de Baroncelli, 1931)

 

Jacques de Baroncelli’s I’ll Be Alone After Midnight gets off to a cracking start, with a montage of aggrieved individuals attacking their adulterous spouses, including a woman throwing sulphuric acid in her husband’s face, and a defence lawyer speaking up for crimes of passion; it then focuses on Monique, a moneyed woman afflicted with perhaps the all-time cheating husband, deciding after he storms out to get her own back by spending the night with a man. Her friend and neighbour Michel is more than willing to fill the role, but she seeks something more transient, and ends up buying up a balloon vendor’s entire stock, releasing them with her card and the titular message attached to each, entrusting her immediate sexual fate to the wind. Monique and Michel are the only characters identified by name, the others defined (apparently as much to them as to us) by their function – a soldier, a clerk, a thief and so on. Beneath the farcical surface, there’s something distinctly sad about the idea of so many men twisting their lives into a knot for the sake of what from today’s perspective seems like at best a mechanical and soulless quickie, counterpointed by the somewhat pitiful Michel, early on seen inscribing photographs of Marie with messages he wishes he’d received from her, and then displaying them around his living room: when she succumbs to him at the end, it seems just one step removed from coercion, with almost no possibility of enduring. The inclusion of a Black musician among the prospective suitors might have seemed moderately progressive, if he wasn’t portrayed as a tiresome, illiterate idiot who mainly only communicates through his saxophone. That aside though, there are some bouncy musical sequences, and the whole thing wraps up in under an hour without even seeming that rushed about it.

Zoo (Frederick Wiseman, 1993)

 

Frederick Wiseman’s observation of the Miami zoo isn’t among his more satisfying works, seeming mostly content to record interesting events and sights, without particularly probing their ethical, financial or other underpinnings. Of course, given the setting, this makes for a frequently fascinating chronicle: the film includes among much else a rhinoceros giving birth, a gorilla having its teeth cleaned, and a hunt for feral dogs that penetrated the fences and killed several animals. There’s a “circle of life” aspect to how we see one of those dogs, tracked down and shot dead, thrown into the same incinerator that earlier saw the end of the sadly stillborn baby rhino, but while Wiseman captures such correspondences and echoes, there’s nothing in the film that interrogates the basic artificiality of the enterprise, the propriety of (say) clubbing to death an emblematically cute white rabbit so it can be fed to a snake that lives its whole life in not much more than a glass box (perhaps Wiseman would have said the film provided sufficient information for the viewer to form a judgment, but that would underestimate the complexity of the issues). The greatest ambiguities of all, of course, are between observers and observed, the gaze of the animals sometimes seeming (at least) as intelligent as that of the visitors, the (again, under-explored) difference of course being the explicitly captive nature of the former. A brief glimpse of a management meeting suggests the conversations at that level are most about donors and bringing in money, although it’s too fragmented to tell. The movie ends on an enjoyable but not very taxing piece of parallelism, the sights and sounds of a “Feast with the Beasts” black-tie fundraising event effortlessly evoking earlier scenes of animal-feeding. Some of what Wiseman records (the performing elephants being a prime example) would no longer be viewed as favourably; in such respects the film again feels (in contrast to other Wiseman works) somewhat complacent, reduced by the passage of time.

Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

 

One might feel that Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession hardly needed its explicit monster movie reveals: even without them, the film is about as strangified and crazed as narrative cinema ever gets. As with few others, it’s virtually impossible at any point to guess what’s coming next: even the smallest aspects of performance are distorted and heightened, indeed conveying a sense of widespread possession that can’t be placed in a tidy narrative box. Not that Zulawski tries to do that of course: his film provides no point of comfort, starting by stripping away the security of marriage, ultimately suggesting one can’t take refuge even in one’s basic sense of will and self. The film is set in West Berlin, with numerous shots of the Wall in all its brutal functionality; what we see of the city though is almost unremittingly drab, and weirdly unpopulated, undermining any sense of ideological superiority. Within this space, Mark (Sam Neill) returns from some mysterious, apparently espionage-related mission to learn that his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) wants to split up; in due course he learns she had a lover, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent) who has himself been abandoned for some unknown other, and also meets his son’s teacher, who looks almost exactly like Anna. It’s futile to pick out individual scenes of note, but the initial meeting between Mark and Heinrich, encompassing elements of seduction and communion and of startling, pitiless violence, sums up as well as any how the film seems to teeter on a behavioral precipice. Zulawski discharges his genre obligations adeptly enough, delivering shocks and blood and startling visuals, but as noted, they appear here as extensions of an already fraught social intercourse (one in which for example Anna and Mark both engage in self-mutilation; another character calmly commits suicide; an innocent bystander near the end can be as gently coaxed into taking and firing a gun). It’s a draining viewing experience, leaving you feeling destabilized by its furiously strong-willed maker.

Avanti! (Billy Wilder, 1972)

 

Even major film buffs might struggle to identify a link between, among others, Dario Argento, Paul Morrissey, Billy Wilder, Marco Bellocchio and Elio Petri, but one exists in the form of cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, whose work on Wilder’s Avanti! came in between assignments for those latter two. No doubt Avanti! isn’t the maestro’s most distinctive work, any more than it’s anyone else’s, but he aptly maintains the requisite sun-baked palate, while navigating such novel framing challenges as a naked Jack Lemmon emerging from the sea or the bathtub. That might not sound like a recommendation, but it’s a film of sustained small pleasures, one in which Wilder elevates even the most potentially mundane scene with a well-delivered quip or bit of business (many of them handled by Clive Revill, in career-best form as a pragmatically unflusterable Italian hotel manager). Absent that, the overall trajectory isn’t too surprising: short-fused businessman Wendell (Lemmon, who else, mannerisms held mostly in check) comes to Italy at short notice to recover his father’s body, learning that during his annual health breaks the old man was carrying out a ten-year affair with a British woman whose daughter Pamela (a very winning Juliet Mills) is there for the same reason, the two having died in a car accident together; Wendell and Pamela initially clash, but by the end, well… The film’s sense of cyclicality and inevitability makes it well-suited for comfort viewing-type revisiting (albeit maybe not annually), despite many programmatic aspects, and dated trappings such as endless remarks about Pamela’s barely discernible weight problem (especially given a now-laughable comment about how Americans are all so thin), although a diplomat’s brief summary of the state of the Middle East still holds up sadly well. In terms of Wilder’s late work, the film is a close companion to Fedora, an artifice even more dislodged from time, in which pleasure is even more intimately informed by loss.