Victor Victoria (Blake Edwards, 1982)

Even as a major Blake Edwards enthusiast, I’d always been a bit cool on Victor Victoria, held back in large part by Julie Andrews’ inadequacy in the main role (of course her implausibility is part of the artifice, but even so, the lack of any real charged sexual ambiguity remains a drawback). On a most recent viewing though, I found myself becoming rather blissfully entangled in the film’s counterpointing of performance and projection, reflecting that it may be about looking more than being seen. Take most obviously the final scene, in which Victoria (having discarded her Victor persona) reclaims and validates her relationship with James Garner’s King Marchand simply by sitting passively beside him in the audience, to watch Toddy (the priceless Robert Preston) ham his way through one of Victor’s signature routines. Most of the scenes between Andrews and Garner consist of one watching the other, or trying to figure out the other, or else of the two discussing the ambiguities of their relationship: the movie hardly conveys what that relationship might look like in fully achieved form (of course, that’s a staple of the mismatched relationship genre, but here it’s not so much - as the phrase goes - a bug as a feature). The filming of Victor’s musical numbers tends to emphasize their unknowable otherness: consider in contrast the much more easily titillating number performed by Lesley Ann Warren’s more straightforwardly defined character, with its very different depiction of the audience. The emphasis on observation isn’t confined to the stage: the film is a near-network of spying and surveillance (including the late introduction of a Clouseau-type character), all rooted in definitional confusion (at a key point of confusion, Marchand finds clarity by going to a dive bar and picking a fight so he can get beaten up). Even now, much of the film seems to me to play more flatly than it might ideally have done, but the intricacy of Edwards’ thematic and visual schemes only becomes more impressive.

Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958)

Tati’s Mon oncle is the most serene of viewing experiences, constantly and uninsistently funny, almost mystically precise in its framing and design and effects. In a different film, the portrayal of a modern bourgeois France stifling its sense of joy and spontaneity through its materalism and pretensions might seem oppressive and hectoring, and the contrast with the traditional community and its sense of messy togetherness might seem largely sentimental: Tati holds them in a beautifully contrasting equilibrium (his Hulot bridges the two worlds, the unemployed if not unemployable uncle to the son of a wealthy factory manager). Some of the film’s most sublime ideas are its smallest, such as Hulot’s routine of adjusting the angle of his open windows to direct the sunlight onto the caged bird below and therefore to maximize its singing: it’s through such tiny rituals and pleasures, you sense, that a worthwhile life is built (although the nature of Hulot’s inner life can only be guessed at). In this sense, there’s a commonality between the two worlds, except that at the other end of the spectrum, the routines have become oppressive and self-defeating – supposed technological breakthroughs that cause more problems than the simpler methods they’re replacing, or absurd affectations like the fish-shaped garden fountain that the lady of the house obsessively switches on whenever a visitor arrives (unless it’s Hulot, or a delivery person, or someone else of insufficient status) and then off again as soon as they leave. The movie ultimately suggests that the battle is effectively lost, banishing Hulot to the provinces, and subtly suggesting – through a subsequent moment of rare bonding between father and son – that maybe it’s time to cut the sentiment and commit to new normals (and onward to Tati’s next film, the imposing Play Time), leaving all the rest to the dogs. And by the way, you’ll seldom see such well-cast and -directed dogs either…

La Luna (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1979)

Bernardo Bertolucci has said that the genesis of La Luna lay in a childhood memory of the moon rising behind his mother’s face as she looked at him, a moment at once intimate and unbound, perhaps capable of shaping one’s perceptions for a lifetime, but also sealed off, providing no suggestion of a resulting narrative. Bertolucci’s remarkable extrapolation holds closeness and fracture in grand equilibrium, setting out a mother-teenage son relationship capable of swinging in seconds between transgressive physical closeness (certainly meeting some kind of definition of incest) and melodramatically expressed antipathy, leading to a climax in which a long-broken family is finally made whole again, but in which the physical distance between them is emphasized, and the opera singer mother’s inherent Otherness is symbolized by placing her in the midst of rehearsal, a diva surrounded by dozens of extras. There’s certainly then a pervasive sense of life as display, embodied in Jill Clayburgh’s extravagant performance as Caterina (at once too large a presence, blocking out the light, and yet its only reliable source); but also of corresponding emptiness and loss, trailed early on when her husband worries about a dream he hasn’t had a chance to tell her about, and soon afterwards suddenly dies, and embodied further through various episodes in which Caterina revisits past people or locations of significance. The film is a series of gorgeously imagined physical and thematic spaces, its depiction of warped privilege carrying at least some social charge; it encompasses the painfully stark (the cold details of the son’s drug addiction and its implicit call for self-obliteration) and the happily absurd (near the end, Caterina tells the boy that she broke up with his biological father because he loved his mother too much, her half-laughter suggesting how what was once fraught loses its potency with distance and time).

Hot Blood (Nicholas Ray, 1956)

I couldn't say whether the portrayal of the “gypsy” community in Nicholas Ray’s Hot Blood is even remotely accurate, but it seems now like a near-fever dream of otherness: a community living within our own, but following its own rules, with its own “king” and economy, mainly interacting with the outside world only to keep the law at bay. The king (Luther Adler) is dying, and determined to bring his brother Stephen (Cornel Wilde) deeper into the fold, primarily by dictating his marriage to Annie (Jane Russell) (organized marriage is a mainstay of the culture). Stephen resists, but the marriage happens anyway, triggering a behavioural dance between the two that resonates against the actual dancing that recurs throughout, swinging between connection and repulsion (Russell, as always, communicates a piercing, self-assured strength, even as her motives are in most respects passive). The film is a series of remarkable widescreen compositions, often teeming with people in every corner of the frame, and you may struggle to recall a film (blood-letting epics aside) that makes such vivid use of primally bright red. Most of it is plainly and exultantly artificial, but there’s a remarkable exterior shot outside a trailer dealer, with the road extending to a vanishing point, evoking the suppressed desire for escape. The suppression wins out however: in the last scene, Stephen proposes to Annie for real, winning her immediate acceptance; he carries her off and they’re gone from the movie, the individualism of this second coming-together indivisible from their sublimation into the community, and their separation from the world as we know it. The film is too abstract and self-contained to lie among Ray’s greatest works – there’s little real sense of discovery or exposure to it - but on its own bizarre terms it immerses you in crudely passionate expressiveness.

Leon Morin, pretre (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1961)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s Leon Morin, pretre has a tightly-wound and somewhat claustrophobic-sounding core: Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), a woman in a small French town, displaced from Paris during wartime, enters the confessional with the aim of mocking the priest (Jean-Paul Belmondo), but ends up relying on him as a spiritual adviser, and perhaps more. Melville’s filming of the initial confession flags his intention: he uses a multitude of angles, dissolving the physical divide between them, creating a figurative filmic space that suggests the transformative significance of what we’re witnessing; thereafter he works predominantly through short scenes separated by blackness, often presenting fragments of narrative for which a full context is missing, creating a sense of a world in which coherence is inherently evasive, perhaps best understood through pointed incursions. The source of the destabilization is the war, pushing people into actions they might not otherwise have countenanced; it’s almost as if the conflict were conceived by God to provide a fertile ground for moral testing (at various times the film addresses collaboration with the enemy, resistance, adultery; it shows one child innocently calling one of the German soldiers her friend, another turning his back on an officer who approaches him). Barny and Morin’s interactions often feel like a kind of game, enjoyed equally (if in different ways) by both sides (Belmondo’s perpetual sense of suppressed amusement is most effective in this regard), but the stakes are deeply serious, and the religious inquiry is as gripping as the exposition of a thriller. When Morin speaks against the ornateness and excessive ceremony of the church, and rails against the congregation from the pulpit for habitually leaving the service early and other slack practices, one almost hears Melville expressing his own evolving film-making aesthetic, underlined by the revelation in the last few minutes of how few possessions Morin owns in the world, followed by a final shot which suggests resultingly elevated capacities.