My Ain Folk (Bill Douglas, 1973)

 

Although Bill Douglas’ autobiographical trilogy about his Scottish upbringing makes for tough and generally cheerless viewing, the use of the possessive pronoun in all three installments (My Childhood/My Ain Folk/My Way Home) denotes a certain stubborn pride, one indeed inherent in the very choice of project, and beyond that in the sense of exacting attention to detail however painful. The trilogy is almost all in black and white, the only exception in the second installment coming at the very start, with the young protagonist Jamie watching the end of Lassie Goes Home, its ravishing colour momentarily seeping to the surrounding frame; it suggests that Douglas intends to position cinema as a site of transformation, but the film never returns to such transcendence (rather amusingly, a later glimpse of the cinema has it showing a George Formby vehicle, more likely a medium of cultural fixing than of escapism). Indeed, Jamie is denied the most basic elements of childhood stability (the title is bitterly ironic in this regard), his mother dead and his father only fitfully interested, living with a grandmother whose attitude toward him is wildly variable, seemingly subsisting mostly on apples: it’s sometimes unclear exactly what we’re watching, but this reflects the boy’s marooned, under-nurtured state. Whatever the physical, material and psychic limitations of the lives Douglas observes, his people fill the spaces they occupy with their eccentricity or character or willpower or localized form of charisma; Jamie’s ultimate removal to central Edinburgh is a potential liberation, but any sense of exultation is tempered by him being locked up in the back of a van, as one might transport a diseased person, or a criminal. The third film will confirm that his transplanting to the city yields no easy redemption or renewal, that his way “home,” or to a means of productively engaging with home, is to be far more circuitous.

Vie privee (Rebecca Zlotowski, 2025)

 

If someone who’d sat through most of Rebecca Zlotowski’s Vie privee were unavoidably prevented from seeing the last twenty minutes, they’d probably assume (however regretfully) that they weren’t missing much, that the “reveal” would likely be as lumpily unconvincing as much of what preceded it. They’d be wrong though: this is a rare film in which the final stretch substantially elevates one’s retrospective assessment of the work as a whole. For most of its length it’s yet another shakily “Hitchcockian” contrivance, the psychiatrist Dr. Steiner (Jodie Foster) shocked by the sudden death, apparently by suicide, of one of her favourite patients, convinced she must have been murdered by a family member, coming up in short order with a motive and apparent evidence, roping in her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil), with whom she’s still more than friendly, as co-investigator. The revelation in effect (and this is all already under spoiler alert) is that Steiner really isn’t that good at her job: she doesn’t listen adequately, lets her imagination run away with her, and doesn’t recognize the boundaries and compromises of the doctor-patient relationship (the symbolic slapping down even extends to providing three possible explanations for something she considered an important clue, and then dismissively asserting that it doesn’t matter which is true). The movie is bogged down by heavy-handed dream sequences (cementing Spellbound as the most prominent Hitchcock reference) and some turgid writing, but elevated (when is it ever otherwise?) by Foster in her predominantly French-speaking role, seeming particularly engaged in her scenes with Auteuil, in whose company her somewhat pinched, worn quality yields to greater lightness. At the end, Steiner’s ex asks if she ever considered that he orchestrated the whole thing to win her back; she laughingly dismisses the idea, but it playfully reinforces the notion of reality as often being a matter of who tells the best story.

Mr. Hoover and I (Emile de Antonio, 1989)

 

Emile de Antonio’s last film, Mr. Hoover and I, is an engagingly self-revealing final statement, providing conveniently potted reasons why we might feel like going back to rediscover his earlier work (which covers McCarthyism, Vietnam, the JFK assassination, Nixon and more), laying down a case for his own importance even if we don’t do that. The film consists largely of direct-to-camera address, interspersed with loosely-curated life glimpses, primarily of de Antonio hanging out in John Cage’s kitchen (given the time spent on watching Cage preparing bread, it’s perhaps peculiar we never get a glimpse of the finished loaf) and getting a haircut from his wife. De Antonio slips in the fact he’s been married six times and name-drops a plethora of other famous friends, and his self-mythologizing sometimes becomes a bit excessive, such as in his assertion that he’s had to endure everything short of the death penalty. His factoids and reminiscences often seem somewhat disconnected - for example, he dangles a single observation that he suggests goes a long way to proving Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t have acted alone, before immediately moving on (this is one movie you wouldn’t mind being longer, assuming the added time went into hard information rather than into more haircut footage). The peculiar shapelessness is particularly evident in the treatment of its titular subject, with long stretches where J. Edgar Hoover isn’t much mentioned, the scattered anecdotes and indictments not quite adding to a coherent sense of Hoover’s overall place in history. De Antonio comments that aspects of Hoover’s behaviour betrayed delusions of royalty (for example, his insistence when staying in a hotel that an elevator always be waiting on his floor with the doors open); it’s one of several respects in which the film, when viewed in the age of Trump, brings to mind that while (as per the director’s closing comments) history may not repeat itself, it persistently throws up corrupted and degraded echoes.

R.M.N. (Christian Mungiu, 2022)

 

The title of Christian Mungiu’s R.M.N. refers to the Romanian acronym for a brain scan, which would perhaps signpost the director’s diagnostic intentions a bit too neatly, except that the title isn’t explained in the English subtitles at least, and one would perhaps guess it’s a short form for Romania itself. It encapsulates then the film’s slippery nature, often seeming close to laying it on too thick, but consistently swerving and layering and challenging one’s interpretation. The main narrative intertwines Matthias, a Romanian who returns to his home in Transylvania after working in Germany, and Csilla, a former girlfriend now managing a bakery operation which brings in several workers from Sri Lanka after failing to fill the positions locally, their arrival potentially snapping the tolerance of a community already under economic strain (and in which a mixing of Hungarian and Romanian ancestries and day to day languages already constitutes a degree of challenge). Mungiu makes it clear that much of the opposition is fueled by ignorance and ungrounded paranoia, but also sympathetically observes a culture straining (particularly the traditionally dominant masculine part of it) to adapt to the demands of a fluid, modern, diverse Europe; he hints at ruptures in perception and causality, with his son traumatized by having “seen” something that appears to occur much later (or perhaps is that it’s strangely duplicated, among other possible explanations).  The ending is almost swooningly abrupt and ambiguous, but to my mind carries an elegiac air: a character issues a desperate apology (less for a specific action, it seems, than for all that the integrated, multi-cultural continent leaves in its wake) followed by a return to something of previously secondary importance, that the EU is funding a French researcher to count the local bear population, which might seem like respect for local ecosystems and habitats, or alternatively to be an absurd misallocation of resources, the final note carrying a hint of both.