Leave No Traces (Jan P. Matsuszynski, 2021)

 

Jan P. Matsuszynski’s Leave No Traces doesn’t make for the most comfortable viewing at a time of enforced deportations based on unfounded allegations and disregard for due process and constitutional rights; over more than two and a half hours, it patiently and (appropriately) drainingly explores a Polish legal system of astounding self-righteous malevolence, capable of drawing on seemingly unlimited resources for the sake of self-preservation. It focuses on the real-life case of Grzegorz Przemyk, an 18-year-old student who was detained by police in 1983 for trivial reasons and hideously beaten by them, dying of his internal injuries within a few days; given all the evidence, including a friend’s eye-witness testimony, the focus of investigation ought to be clear, but it comes more naturally to the authorities to slander, deflect and lie, most poignantly here in the character of an innocent paramedic who transported the already doomed Przemyk to hospital, targeted as a more acceptable scapegoat and placed under impossible pressure to make a false confession. The activity isn’t confined to the shadowy depths: when the country’s chief prosecutor (one of the few people in the film with an apparent ethical compass) comments that the whole thing would have been long forgotten if not for the near-crazed focus on protecting the identified officers, the next scene contains a radio news announcement that he’s been removed from his post. But the film, pointedly, excludes any examination of the offenders’ state of mind, of whether they feel guilt or remorse, this being irrelevant to the workings of the system. The viewer feels increasingly drained, furious, afraid, and hemmed in: early on, the BBC’s reporting, and considerations relating to an upcoming Papal visit, provide some momentum toward objectivity and transparency, but these eventually fall out of the picture, the process following no logic or morality but its own, even the sanest and most determined witness barely able to withstand the onslaught.

Ararat (Atom Egoyan, 2002)

 

Atom Egoyan’s Ararat is fairly typical of the director’s post-peak works: meticulously controlled, preoccupied with weighty themes, its structural intricacy spanning the public and the intimate; and, sadly, almost completely lacking in impact. The film concerns itself with the 1915 Armenian genocide, both as a valid subject for modern-day film-making (Charles Aznavour plays a director making a film called Ararat) and as a continuing source of preoccupation and trauma, both directly (Egoyan lumberingly contrives a reason for a customs officer to be discussing the history at length with a suspected drug smuggler) and by generational and cultural proximity (that same suspect’s father, an Armenian activist, was shot dead while attempting to kill a Turkish diplomat). The film’s thicket of interconnections (for example, the custom’s officer’s son is in a relationship with an actor in the movie, on which the suspect also works as a production assistant), seemingly intended to establish a sense of layered complexity, mostly feels over-determined and airless: the film lacks any hint of spontaneity or true discovery, its artifices and inventions at odds with any possibility of more than superficial empathy. It does evoke a nagging suspicion (or maybe it’s just a faintly benevolent hope) that Egoyan is playing a particularly sophisticated game (for example, why should we believe that a flashback seemingly showing the truth about a past death is any more reliable than the material we see being shot in a studio), that the earnestness and speechifying are parodic, mocking the whole notion that commercial cinema could possibly make a meaningful contribution to historical memory and understanding. But the weight of evidence indicates that the film is indeed as turgidly self-important as one experiences it as being. The actors are at best dull and poorly utilized (Marie-Josee Croze is one of the few centres of energy), and at worst (Elias Koteas is a prime offender) barely watchable.

Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1981)

 

The 1981 Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man is probably no one’s favourite Bernardo Bertolucci movie, feeling throughout more confined and murky and just plain small than his greatest works, even as it sporadically evokes them. And yet, the film rewards contemplation and re-viewing; its central enigma coming to seem more genuinely tragic (even if it does generate an almost strenuously happy ending, to the degree that the character’s voice over can’t even try to grapple with it), assessed both personally and politically. Ugo Tognazzi plays Spaggiari, the owner of a rural cheese factory with financial problems whose son Giovanni is kidnapped, the requested ransom threatening to take down the business, if not Spaggiari’s entire bourgeois-styled life; when it appears Giovanni is dead, Spaggiari evolves a plan of seeming to pay over the money he’s raised from here and there, while keeping it to plough back into the business. Spaggiari’s titular “ridiculousness” is partly a matter of background, of not being born among the elite, and partly of temperament, of overestimating his capacity for control and action (there’s a strong element of predestination in how he happens to be on the roof, with a new pair of binoculars, just in time to witness the kidnapping, and as noted the film’s final note is one of bewildered resignation). In turn, the viewer is likely to feel almost as unmoored: the two employees who agree to help Spaggiari in his scheme clearly know more than he’s aware of (and at one point the police search his house for unspecified reasons going beyond the kidnapping), and the film entertains competing notions (such as that of turning the factory into a workers’ collective) that seem easy to sloganize than implement. But as always, Bertolucci crafts a fascinatingly textured surface, constantly punctured by eruptions of eccentricity, of strange but humanizing detail, of sheer filmmaking panache.

Stars at Noon (Claire Denis, 2022)

 

Any brief account of Claire Denis’ grievously overlooked Stars at Noon must surely start with Margaret Qualley’s blistering lead performance as Trish, a remarkable creation of shifting registers and moods, capable of going in seconds from calculating and conniving to wildly spontaneous and eccentric, drinking to excess at all times of day and conveying utter sexual self-determination, which encompasses regularly using her body to make money. More officially though she’s a journalist, stuck in sweltering, volatile Nicaragua without resources or even a passport, her main object being to get over the border to Costa Rica, connecting with Joe Alwyn’s Daniel, a somewhat mysterious Englishman who has a gun in his bag but is less attuned than her to local complexities and players; the connection between the two has a classic romantic contour and physical combustibility, while infused with Denis’ immense customary vivacity, her bottomless capacity to render what’s coming next entirely unpredictable, without sacrificing an overall sense of control or coherence. The achievement is all the more remarkable for the utter lack of spoon-feeding, even the most basic information emerging only in sometimes offhand spurts, and all the dots by no means completely joined, which here seems entirely true to the depiction of individuals caught up (as we all are, in generally less cinematic manner) in events the totality of which they can only glimpse. But the film pulsates with a genuine sense of threat, again embodied in Trish’s almost wantonly vulnerability-defying behaviour; it feels deeply and worrying suspenseful even when mostly defined by torpor and inaction. And as always, Denis ventilates even the briefest encounters with glancing references to past encounters, with laden looks and remarks or shards of eccentricity; in her brilliant, generous hands, a mundane exchange in a dingy setting generates more excitement than the high-stakes encounters of lesser films,

Coup de chance (Woody Allen, 2023)

 

Woody Allen’s French-language Coup de chance might represent the “time-filler” in its purest, most luminous state, a film that exists only because its maker likes making movies and was able to put together the deal (as of the time of writing, the last one in Allen’s career), unlikely to offend or particularly bore the audience but with virtually no chance of elevating or informing them: the smooth, almost wall-to-wall jazz soundtrack, easy on the ear as it is, seems to confirm the project’s essential aimlessness, the impossibility that anything we’re given will ever result in revelation. The title, and the film’s final “twist,” refer to the role of randomness in our life, expressed several times in terms of the vast odds against any of us being alive in the first place as an argument for further surrendering to the possibilities of chance and coincidence, but the film represents just about the tritest application possible of such “philosophy.” It starts with young writer Alain recognizing Fannie, a girl he loved years ago from a distance, in the street; she’s now married to the wealthy Jean, living a bygone notion of upper-crust life involving frequent weekend hunting trips to their country home. Fannie and Alain start an affair; Jean finds out and taps into the same pool of practiced cold-bloodedness which had him dispose of an inconvenient past business partner; Fannie’s mother is the first to start putting pieces together. Despite the plot’s melodramatic highs and lows, and the capable if unremarkable cast, it all feels strangely even-keeled, the affair devoid of much passion, the ratcheting up of the plot devoid of much suspense or menace, the surprise denouement devoid of much sense of release or closure; it would be no surprise if the film were to go on for longer or, for that matter, if it were somehow to be revealed that it never really existed at all.

Simba: the King of the Beasts (Martin & Osa Johnson, 1928)

 

Martin and Osa Johnson’s silent 1928 African-made Simba: the King of the Beasts remains fascinating viewing, at times poignant in the abundance of life before the camera (will anyone ever photograph rhinos in such quantities again?), amusingly quaint in such shots as the vintage cars struggling to stay upright on rocky terrain or to make it across a river; it’s at its best in simply observing elephants or lions in their naturally sustainable (if eternally parched and brutal) ecosystem. Martin Johnson is a largely reticent figure, certainly in contrast to his often gun-brandishing wife: she brings down several magnificent animals in the course of the film (the deaths are all presented here as them-or-her necessities, but who knows…), while also finding time in the final moments to bake a celebratory apple pie. The film sadly comes with much attitudinal baggage, ranging from a reductively anthropomorphic approach to the animals (variously described as among the happiest on earth, as being inveterate trouble-makers, as declaring “Wait for me,” etc. etc.- and of course the Johnsons are hardly cinema’s only offenders in this respect) to a relentlessly belittling attitude toward indigenous Africans (the very first shot of Osa shows her seeming to needlessly chide an over-burdened servant for dropping an item), labeled among other things as “half-savage,” or “half-civilized” (interesting notions, if they were at all interrogated); the film tells us there are more lions in a particular area “than any Black man” can count to, opines that an aging Queen is “no beauty,” and stupidly compares the local dress to that of the then fashionable flapper girls, just to give a few examples. Still, despite those not insignificant caveats, and notwithstanding the overly repetitive insistence on the mortal danger in which the Johnsons willingly placed themselves, the film easily earns one’s overall admiration.

Paradise Calling (Arielle Dombasle, 1988)

 

A cinematic oddity for sure, Arielle Dombasle’s Les pyramides bleues features half the principal cast of Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach (herself, Pascal Greggory, Rosette), but could hardly be more tonally and narratively distant. She plays Elise, the partner of the wealthy Alex (Omar Sharif), increasingly uneasy at their decadent life (the breaking point comes when he randomly fires a gun into the jungle and kills a pet dog) and eventually fleeing to a convent in France; Alex and his main lieutenant (Pedro Armendariz Jr.) evolve a convoluted plan to get her back, involving a new-age religious cult that’s all too ready to compromise its supposed principles for financial gain. The film contains several gratuitous-seeming scenes of female nudity, a few times involving Dombasle herself; if there’s any attempt here to resist the objectification of male-dominated commercial cinema, it’s sadly hard to detect. But then, almost everything about the film is either disappointing or mystifying or both (it doesn’t help that one is most likely to come across the English version, titled Paradise Calling, in which just about everyone other than Sharif is lifelessly dubbed). For a film that’s notionally about shifting concepts of faith, it’s relentlessly superficial in probing everything from the contours of Elise’s beliefs, to the supposed theology of the cult (which doesn’t seem to go much beyond “God is love”), to Alex’s seemingly genuine change of heart in the closing stretch (evidenced by his riding a bus among the common people and enjoying it, and filling a room in the house with religious icons); the relish with which the cult leader embraces corruption is more eye-rolling than chilling. And as if all of that wasn’t enough, the film contains the primary narrative within a clunky framing device closing on an apparent promise of seduction and a spirited but hardly reflection-aiding performance of Guantanmera.

Torch Singer (Alexander Hall & George Somnes, 1933)

 

The 1933 Torch Singer, directed by Alexander Hall and George Somnes, is a calculatingly melodramatic star vehicle for Claudette Colbert, but rooted in a still-bracing initial frankness as her pregnant character Sally shows up penniless at what we understand is one of the few New York hospitals willing to extend charity to an expectant mother who won’t name the father (he’s a wealthy businessman who’s in China for some unspecified reason, not knowing what he’s left behind); for a year or so afterwards she manages to make it alone (an extended scene of Sally during bathtime with her own and her roommate’s baby showcases why the expressive “Baby LeRoy” was deemed worthy of star billing for a brief period), but eventually gives up the child to adoption, and thereafter achieves notorious stardom under the snappier stage name of Mimi Benton (while eventually picking up a contrasting sideline as the sweet-voiced “Aunt Jenny” on a daily kid-oriented radio broadcast). Colbert is magnetic and alluring throughout, not least modeling a series of perilously low-cut dresses, but one’s attention is even more fully drawn to Mildred Washington as her maid Carrie, emanating an alertly playful intelligence, all the more fascinating for the knowledge that the actress died of peritonitis in the year of the film’s release; it's a funny coincidence (presumably) that one of the film’s other most striking presences is also Black, the uncredited 4-year-old Carlena Beard delivering a sweetly unaffected-seeming minute or two, Colbert seeming genuinely charmed by her. The film becomes more conventional and less interesting once Sally’s lost love reappears on the scene and she becomes ever more preoccupied with regaining her child (which, hardly a spoiler, the movie accomplishes with not a thought for the rights or emotional investment of the adoptive parents), and the final moments feel as resigned as they do triumphant.

Peau d'ane (Jacques Demy, 1970)

 

Jacques Demy’s Peau d’ane might appear to be among the most purest-hearted of films, if one focused only on the tangible pleasure of its inventions – a donkey that excretes gold and jewels, an old woman who coughs up frogs, dresses that look like the weather and the moon and the sun, fairy godmothers, a talking rose; underlying all of this though is a sense of adult mores and anxieties, evidenced in particular by how the plot turns on a father’s incestuous wish to marry his daughter (the film acknowledges that all little girls may at some point express such a wish regarding their fathers, but the sensibility here is plainly pitched beyond such innocent naivete). Like so many mythic narratives, the film would seem arbitrary in its twistedness – why did the route to save the princess from her father’s desire and to deliver her into the arms of her true love have to follow such a highly specific course? – if not for Demy’s unwavering specificity and deliberation, for the sense that the obstacle- and oddity-strewn world here reflects the complexities of our own more earthly strivings (even that fairy godmother is highly fallible, her decisions coloured by some hinted-at romantic grievance against the king). One feels that Demy would have rejected digital trickery even if it had been available to him: such is the tangible sense of delight in, for example, painting the faces and horses and prevailing décor of one kingdom in blue and of another in red, or in the physically very varied casting; he refers to technologies that don’t yet exist in the world of the film (and ultimately even has a helicopter touch down) and has the princess take a puff on a pipe (which duly makes her cough), all of this held in mysteriously perfect balance by the director’s immensely infectious, even if vaguely melancholic, belief.

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.

Closed Circuit (Giuliano Montaldo, 1978)

 

The opening section of Giuiliano Montaldo’s Closed Circuit is a real nostalgic delight, immersing us in the old-time movie-theater experience of people waiting for the doors to open, lining up for their stubby tickets and the like; the place teems with posters for Italian B-movies starring the likes of Mimsy Farmer and Ray Lovelock (Torn Curtain was the only higher-end item I spotted), and the film takes in the varied clientele including the guy who only comes in to hang around the washroom, and the frequent patron who comes in late and sits right in front of someone else who thus has to move (Aurore Clement is the best known cast member, but her role amounts to very little). The fatal shot during the film’s climactic gunfight coincides with a real-world shot that kills that late-arriving patron; the police are immediately on hand, preventing everyone from leaving, eventually carrying out a reenactment with a ticket taker in the victim’s place, only to have him suffer the same fate: they locate a bullet hole in the screen, but in a spot where no shooter could possibly have been standing. The notion of an audience that perpetually watches the same film and never gets to see the end has Bunuelian possibilities, and the film sometimes comes close to that (without the unmatchable elegance), although the ultimate explanation marks it as a quasi-precursor of something like The Ring, or perhaps of Kyoshi Kurosawa. Whatever one may think of the denouement (and I’m not sure myself, which at least marks it as providing something to mull over, it makes terrific use of the real-life film within the film (A Sky Full of Stars for a Roof, the lead actor of which, Giuliano Gemma, is possibly more memorable as showcased in Closed Circuit than in any of his actual starring movies).

Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

 

On a present-day viewing, Antonioni’s still-ravishing Blow-Up may seem to be primarily about come-uppance and control: decades before the “Me Too” wave of consequences, it depicts the clipping of the wings of an arrogantly self-righteous, almost professionally obnoxious male (the successful photographer Thomas, played by David Hemmings). We don’t know of course how far that extends – maybe a few minutes after the movie ends he shakes it off and snaps back into place – but Antonioni’s superb orchestration of the famous climactic mimed tennis game suggests a permanent shift in Thomas’ relationship to the world, leading to his final erasure from the cinematic image, rapidly followed by the final credits over the ground where he no longer stands. Building up to that, the film has a greater vein of fragility and futility than one may remember; the sense of conspiracy and unseen orchestration (evidenced for example in how his place is ransacked during a very brief absence) may bring to mind Jacques Rivette (as does Thomas’ labyrinth-like live-work space, one of the most endlessly fascinating interior locations in cinema, and one that likewise evidences an environment almost entirely shaped by his whims and desires). The film’s more then-modish aspects - the eye-filling fashions, the appearance by the Yardbirds, the glimpses of “swinging London” – render it spellbinding as cultural history, while also now seeming suffused in transience and alienation, perhaps most succinctly rendered in the moment when Thomas fights a previously deadened-seeming audience for a piece of the smashed-up guitar that Jeff Beck tosses into the crowd, but then finds on triumphantly emerging into the street that he has no use for it, and throws it away. Still, the film teems with the vibrant possibility of creation and connection in the here and now, even as that’s offset with an awareness of how little it may all mean later (the fact of Hemmings being only third-billed despite having by far the biggest role now seems like its own kind of taunt).

Wild Target (Pierre Salvadori, 1993)

 

Pierre Salvadori’s Wild Target is a low-profile entry in cinema’s bizarre surfeit of comedies focusing on the hitman trade, etching strictly minor variations on the done-to-death concepts. In concept, its main character Victor (Jean Rochefort) is a deeply sad character, who we understand was basically forced into the family business by dominatingly cold-hearted parents (his mother's in a care home but still knocking off the odd person); he’s now in his fifties and still unsure about his sexuality (the movie has a distinctly homophobic vein), his obsessions and tics rendering him all but incapable of spontaneous enjoyment. On impulse, he decides not to kill Antoine (Guillaume Depardieu), a delivery man who inadvertently witnesses one of his kills, taking him on an as an apprentice instead (the movie omits the scene in which the men reach this unlikely pact, as it would probably be impossible to make it even vaguely persuasive), and then also can’t bring himself to finish off his next target Renee (Marie Trintignant), who’s flagrantly placed herself on a gangster’s wrong side by selling him a forged painting on which the paint wasn’t even dry, the three of them becoming the targets of the gangster’s henchmen and his replacement hired killers. There’s a lot of potential fun to be had in persistent amorality, but that’s not realized here: much of what’s presumably intended as deadpan seems merely low-energy, and one often wonders whether the actors are even aware of each other. That’s a particular shame given the sad resonances attaching to both Depardieu (seen here just a couple of years before a fateful motorcycle accident that contributed to his death at 37) and Trintignant (murdered some ten years later by her boyfriend); in a better film so preoccupied with death, their presence might have been heart-rending, rather than shrug-inducing.

Hotel (Mike Figgis, 2001)

If nothing else, Mike Figgis’ Hotel chomps with relish on creative possibilities: it has the resources to bring in the likes of John Malkovich and Burt Reynolds for a day or two’s work, thereby swimming in six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon oddities; it plays with split or four-quadrant screens (in the latter respect building on Figgis’ immediately preceding, more tonally conventional movie, Time Code), sometimes to observe the same action from different perspectives, at other times to counterpoint the main action with art-house erotic or otherwise alluring distractions; it crams in references from both high culture (preeminently The Duchess of Malfi) and.low (celebrity gossip TV). The film has a foot in Grand Hotel-type territory, drawing on the location as a site of criss-crossing lives and possibilities, but primarily focuses on movie-making itself, on a Venice-set production of Malfi, temporarily derailed when its near-feral director (Rhys Ifans) is shot and sent into a kind of coma, eventually replaced by its producer (David Schwimmer). The movie at various times evokes vampirism and cannibalism and lycanthropy, all of them potential metaphors for the less convivial aspects of movie-making; at other times it evokes cinema’s dance-like aspects (the apparent ultimate power behind the film, played by Reynolds, is identified in the credits as “Flamenco Manager”) or jazzier free-form connotations (bolstered by Figgis’s light, pulsating score); the final scene identifies itself as a “trick,” but it’s one underlaid with menace and foreboding. For all its attributes, the film often feels overly dour and withholding and pleasure-starved (it cites the Dogme mentality, a big thing at the time), no doubt taking some impish satisfaction in being among the least conventionally ravishing productions ever set in Venice. Hotel may have more or less marked the end of Figgis’ commercial viability – since then his filmography is mostly a stream of under-seen shorts and obscurities and one-offs – but that only adds to its defiantly reckless allure.

Alexandria...Why? (Youssef Chahine, 1979)

 

An early scene in Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria…Why? might sum up its likeable haphazardness: a group of friends goes to the movies in 1942 to see Ziegfeld Follies, a movie which wasn’t made until 1946, and which is represented here in part by scenes from a different movie, and in clips lifted from a 1970’s That’s Entertainment compilation, even leaving in a snatch of Gene Kelly’s voice-over narration about Eleanor Powell. It’s an early tip-off that the movie is best taken as a tumble of unreliable memories, one in which basic narrative details are frequently unclear; the extreme over-reliance on stock footage is objectively a weakness, but one which embodies the often uncomprehending distance between people and the events that shape their lives. The main focus is on teenage Yehia, fixated against the odds on becoming an actor (his specific obsession with studying at the Pasadena Playhouse would seem weirdly arbitrary, absent the knowledge that Chahine himself studied there and is channeling his own life experience); the quest made all the more quixotic by Mohsen Mohieddin’s often wild overacting in the role; other plotlines include a wealthy uncle who abducts a drunken British soldier and then falls for him, a Jewish family that leaves for Palestine, and various bits of espionage and resistance. The storytelling is often extremely choppy, major demarcation points coming and going, characters and concerns popping in and out, ultimately all ending in rushed celebratory fashion as the family and its contacts works every angle to help Yehia fulfil his dream, excess sentiment held at bay by an utterly goofy final shot. In terms of the evolution of Chahine’s work, the film holds up less well than its immediate predecessor Return of the Prodigal Son, which exhibits many comparable weaknesses/oddities while attaining greater overall resonance, the memory of its astounding, bitter blood-spattered finale causing Alexandria…Why? to feel almost like doodling by comparison.

Bleak Moments (Mike Leigh, 1971)

 

Almost too aptly titled, Mike Leigh’s debut film Bleak Moments revolves around Sylvia, a thirty-something secretary in a small accounting firm who lives with her developmentally-challenged sister Hilda, being very slowly and ineffectually wooed by Peter, a teacher. Anne Raitt is fascinating as Sylvia, sometimes strikingly severe looking, as if about to step into a Gothic melodrama, probably overly reliant on cigarettes and sherry, but with ample hints of a playful inner life, a faint smile drifting across her face as she softly tweaks the conversation with comments that don’t quite find an audience (such as introducing herself as the President of Venezuela, or asking a visitor if he wants some nuts before admitting she doesn’t have any). The lives on display are all highly constrained: by their drab and cramped living and working spaces; by inescapable circumstances (Sylvia’s colleague and friend Pat joylessly cares for her bed-ridden mother); by hang-ups and anxieties (Peter seems to find every word a struggle, regurgitating things he read in books without conveying any deep engagement with them); by sexual naivete and inadequacy (there’s no sex in the film, but that’s the point). It frequently shudders with awkward silences: a date night between Peter and Sylvia, depicted in excruciating detail, moves from the most atmospherically challenged Chinese restaurant imaginable to a strangulated and somewhat poignant aftermath in Sylvia’s living room. But Leigh also allows glimpses of small beauty and possible transcendence: Sylvia and Hilda are both captivated by the tentative but sincere singing and guitar-playing of a man who rents their garage, and Pat is drawn to a faith-healing group, becoming convinced that Hilda might find a cure there. Sylvia vehemently opposes this fancifulness (it’s the most emotion she displays about anything) but the ending suggests she may be tacitly allowing Pat to take a shot, a concession more likely however to extinguish one of the film’s few shards of hope than to fulfil it.