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.