Un conde (Yves Boisset, 1970)

 

Even by the standards of the many films in which an officer of the law bends the rules, Yves Boisset’s Un conde (The Cop) is often breathtaking in its cool transgressiveness, with its protagonist Inspector Favenin (Michel Bouquet) methodically and pitilessly evidencing his willingness to shoot unarmed suspects dead, to commit extreme perjury, to issue any kind of threat in pursuit of the goals he considers righteous. The effect is all the more chilling for Favenin’s unprepossessing nature, austerely dressed in black suit and tie, barely expressive and saying no more than he needs to: he describes the police as efficiently disposing of the waste inevitably produced by a well-functioning system, a metaphor that in its lack of glamor seems to place him somewhat outside the core sociological machine. But then the film evidences a near-symmetry on its opposing sides of the law: both Favenin and his main quarry Dan Rover motivated by deep loyalty to a colleague they assess as worthy and reliable, both ultimately placing revenge over almost all other considerations, and even sharing a deep antipathy for the politically-connected criminal “Mandarin” who straddles both worlds (perhaps being all the more contemptible for that), his bidding carried out by notably ruthless thugs. As the film reaches its conclusion, Favenin appears to perceive that his actions have exceeded what can be rationalized, and tries to resign, but it's rejected (his boss clearly being motivated primarily by political and image-conscious considerations); his situation as the film ends is deeply uncertain, placed in an almost liminal suspension between opposing sides of the law and the vastly different futures they embody. Boisset would explore this broad territory further in films such as L’attentat, a work largely populated by self-satisfied men in dark suits charged with stoking the mechanisms of law and order and transparency, notwithstanding their deep immersion in self-dealing and manipulation.  

The Quatermass Xperiment (Val Guest, 1955)

 

Val Guest’s The Quatermass Xperiment, a movie version of Nigel Kneale’s pioneering TV series (six episodes were transmitted live, four of them now lost), holds up quite well, spanning large-scale technological spectacle and intimate body horror, benefiting from its feeling for everyday locations and personality types. The film starts with the return of a spacecraft launched under the supervision of the titular Dr. Quatermass, crashing into a farmer’s field, two of its three-man crew mysteriously vanished and the other, Richard Caroon, in poor shape which only worsens from there (and that’s putting it mildly). The film benefits significantly from Richard Wordsworth’s performance as Caroon, suggesting depths of anguish beneath a scarily drained exterior as he wreaks increasing havoc (the film makes diverting use of a zoo in particular), and contrasting nicely with a host of no-nonsense British presences. The climax comes in Westminster Abbey during a live television broadcast, thereby fusing the alien menace with escalating technological home invasion, suggesting the potential symbiotic multiplicity of modern threats to one’s stability (presumably this was even more effective in the original TV transmission, but the climactic episode was among those lost). Viewed from a modern-day perspective, those threats might include the choice of an American actor, Brian Donlevy, to play Quatermass, in the original another Brit, the resonances only deepened by the knowledge that it was prompted by commercial considerations, the actor’s initial bulldozing intransigence (which softens a bit as the movie goes on) only deepening the sense of unwelcome disruption (which nevertheless is mostly met with British subservience; it’s notable that Quatermass launched the space vessel without waiting for official permission). And if that’s not enough, the film may nowadays evoke thoughts of something like the Covid lab-leak theory, in its depiction of inadequately ring-fenced science spawning a potentially exponentially expanding contamination...

La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)

 

Alice Rohrwacher’s wonderful La chimera has a predominantly bucolic, sun-baked feel about it, but it teems with unforced inventiveness and audaciousness. Its central character, Arthur (Josh O’Connor), is a classically conceived enigma, most often clad in a rumpled white suit, a trained archaeologist who’s thrown in his lot with a group of Italian grave robbers, living largely hand to mouth, his behaviour significantly molded by the memory of his dead love, whose aging mother (Isabella Rossellini) seems to be his main ongoing human contact. The film is in part a chronicle of a man rediscovering his own sense of purpose and ethics, by removing himself from prevailing human timelines and considerations, ultimately in a sense aligning his own fate with that of the objects he’s plundered and exploited. But before that scheme fully emerges, Rohrwacher demonstrates her immense facility, cycling through musical sequences, silly camera tricks, montages of past escapades that might almost form the credits sequence of a weekly network show, bits of quasi-magic realism, and some enjoyably broad plotting (the group is duped into giving up its biggest ever find, via a simple ruse by a rival gang). The film’s most startling moment comes when the group finds a large ancient statue of great beauty and immeasurable value, and a member casually lops off its head (albeit planning to reattach it later) for ease of transport; we subsequently see how such commercial rapaciousness crafts its own value-creating narratives, with the headless statue ultimately being marketed to collectors as a “new Venus de Milo.” But partly through his shock at such desecration, Arthur starts to shift toward a truer version of himself, and although the ending is objectively grim, it glistens with a sense of arrival that may surely infiltrate and elevate the viewer.

Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

 

Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers might prompt the (of course too easy) comment that the main body to have snatched must be that of Ferrara himself, given the generic nature of the material and, for the most part, the director’s handling of it. This telling of the story confines the action almost entirely to a military base where the main focal point, teenage Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar) arrives early on with her family, relocating for as long as it takes her father (Terry Kinney) to carry out an environmental assessment. The evocation of a location seemingly dense in toxic materials suggests the malady might have a more organic origin here than in previous versions, but this turns out to be a misdirection (unless one intuits that the high chemical levels contributed to the aliens’ choice of their ground zero). Likewise, an initial suggestion that the film might focus on fractured family relationships comes to very little, other than that Marti’s stepmother, who she apparently tolerates rather than likes, succumbs far more easily than the rest of them (the potentially wrenching fate of Marti’s younger brother is significantly undermined by sub-standard special effects).The film runs under an hour and a half, resulting in storytelling that blurs the line between efficiently concentrated and merely cursory, the aliens for example seeming improbably easy to fool at several key points. Among other weaknesses: the use of voice over at the beginning and end seems oddly displaced, and the insertion of female nudity largely risible; Forest Whitaker's couple of showy scenes seem barely integrated with the rest of the movie. It’s always interesting enough though, and its closing moments are effective, the barrage of combat footage against a backdrop of existential uncertainty now almost seeming to anticipate Ferrara’s recent treatment of the Ukraine war in Turn in the Wound.

Fate of a Man (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1959)

 

Sergei Bondarchuk’s Fate of a Man ends with a citation from Mikhail Sholokhov, the author of the source material: “I’d like to believe that this Russian, this man of unbreakable will, will stick it out, and that the boy will grow at his father’s side into a man who can endure anything, overcome any obstacle, should his country ever call upon him to do so.” The words may sound stirring, but when attached to a work that so amply demonstrates the horror of war, it forms a rather depressing final note: that is, when applied to a protagonist, Sokolov, who lost his wife and three children, the boy in question being an orphan to whom Sokolov becomes a symbolic father after coming across him alone and scrounging for food, one might feel the measure of future success ought to be greater than the opportunity to be fodder in a further cataclysm (a thought that takes on extra resonance when considered in the context of Ukraine-related losses). But then, even after all he suffers (facing an apparently imminent death at least three times, and more broadly living through unimaginable deprivation and battering), Sokolov (memorably embodied by Bondarchuk himself) still takes an almost childish pride in knowing that his son rose from humble beginnings to reach the rank of captain before being killed, and while the film contains several performatively cruel or useless Nazis, the Russian side is spared such dissection, the film implicitly approving of Sokolov’s murder of a countryman who fails to show adequate solidarity (it also demonstrates, in one of its most intimately tense sequences, how the Russian capacity for alcohol might be a life-saver). Still, it’s stunningly visualized throughout, providing any number of eye-filling vistas, and the human chronicle at its core is often mesmerizing, no matter one’s awareness of its stacked ideological underpinnings.

Bluebeard (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1944)

 

Edgar Ulmer’s somewhat plaintive version of the Bluebeard story doesn’t focus on a man who murders his wife; indeed, eroticism and conventional desire are entirely absent, the killer shown early on to be Gaston Morel (John Carradine at his most austere), a puppeteer, formerly a painter, whose murderous compulsion is driven by the gap between artistic idealism and often sordid reality. He hopes the retreat to puppets, in all their miniature abstraction, will suppress his instincts, but his compulsion pushes him toward greater fidelity in their creation and costuming, eroding their value as a suppressant, which in combination with economic realities draws him back toward the easel and its inevitable consequences (Morel’s art dealer is shown to be paying him only a fraction of what he charges for his paintings, adding to the sense of diminished agency). Beyond the establishing shots of Paris at the beginning and the end and the French-sounding character names, the film hardly reflects its setting, taking place in a shadowy, oppressive environment; a climactic chase across the rooftops, if not again for a few glimpses of painted landmarks in the background, would seem like an escape into pure angular abstraction. The budgetary limitations are obvious, but Ulmer renders it all tonally and visually coherent, almost inevitable-seeming, as if any easing of constraints would be to yield to undesirable temptation: the climax’s shots of real water, for instance, feel in this context intrusive, even gauche. The sense of claustrophobia is amplified by the implosive nature of the plot, the intersections between the few key characters allowing Morel’s latest love object not only to have access to the police’s key clue but also to know its meaning, and by an almost aggressively ever-present music score (if there’s an unscored moment in the film, I didn’t register it).

Occupied City (Steve McQueen, 2023)

 

Steve McQueen’s imposing Occupied City, running over four hours, consists of scenes of modern-day Amsterdam, observing people working or playing or hanging out, with a voice over that identifies each location and relates it to a piece of WW2 history. My memories of the city are hazy, but the film conveys the impression that there’s hardly a street or public space untouched by this part of its history, that doesn’t carry the traces of individuals who hid or were betrayed or were snatched away or shot on the spot (or who collaborated, or sold their souls): if nothing else, McQueen’s work (based on a book by Bianca Stitger) would be dauntingly impressive as a research project alone. The information provided is often wrenching, and the even-toned, unhurried narrator gives each an appropriate weight, but the film’s nature and length are such that we can’t possibly absorb and hang on to the details of each (they’re also not in any kind of chronological or other easily discernible order); even as the film embodies the necessity of memory and engagement, it acknowledges the impossibility of fully attaining it. It suggests in turn that almost any present-day action carries elements of both submission and resistance (one of the final sequences follows a climate action protest), molded by our alertness to history and context, to connections and consequences; deepening the resonances even further, the film was partly shot during the pandemic, allowing scenes of lockdown announcements, social distancing, vaccination clinics and so forth, another form of “occupation” leaving its own toll and traces. McQueen’s brilliant ending emphasizes the specifically Jewish nature of the Holocaust, noting the perseverance of belief and tradition while acknowledging intertwined cultural evolution (resonating against what the film tells us about the anti-Black racism of the Dutch wartime leadership), and providing a final note of blended ominousness and celebration.

Only Yesterday (John M. Stahl, 1933)

 

The opening scenes of John M. Stahl’s Only Yesterday plunge the viewer into the midst of the 1929 market collapse, fluidly capturing a high-society New York milieu of aggressive superficiality going over a cliff, including a memorably extended single shot of a devastated man walking from the exchange floor, stopping in a daze for a shoe shine, and leaving a big tip before walking into a restroom from which a gunshot then rings out. John Boles’s James Emerson is introduced as another ruined investor on the verge of suicide, before discovering a newly-delivered letter on his desk that takes us into the flashbacks that form the main narrative, the perspective now that of a young Southern woman, Mary Lane (Margaret Sullavan) who falls for Emerson during WW1 while he’s at a military base before being shipped out, has a child in his absence, then wrenchingly learns on his return that he doesn’t even remember her, eventually accepting her lot as a single mother. The contrast of urgent societal disarray and protracted personal endurance is both ungainly and intriguing; likewise that between Mary’s clarity of motivation and expression and Emerson’s relative ambiguity (deliberately or not, it’s never entirely clear whether he’s a breathtakingly self-absorbed sexual adventurer or rather an easily-swayed dolt). The misalignment of perception and motivation culminates in grandly melodramatic fashion, the two “reunited” and knowledge restored under circumstances that seal their separation; the scenario’s improbability seeming less strained than it otherwise might, given the film’s grounding in a then-current crisis that might likewise have been dismissed as impossible if it hadn’t actually happened. The title perhaps sums up the sense of fracture, attaching to a film concerned less with the collapsing of past and present than with a life lived in full awareness of what might and should have been, but was incomprehensibly denied.

Playing 'In the Company of Men' (Arnaud Desplechin, 2003)

 

The title of Arnaud Desplechin’s Playing ‘In the Company of Men’ announces the most obvious of the film’s strange layerings: it’s an adaptation of Edward Bond’s play of that name which is also to some degree a record of the adaptation, with the actors seen working out and discussing scenes in the rehearsal room. That device is used more sparsely than one might expect though, and since few viewers will have any knowledge of the underlying play, it’s difficult to fully gauge its significance. Early on, it appears that Desplechin intends it to add a layer of playful illumination to the somewhat dark and claustrophobic text, best exemplified by a midway acknowledgment that Bond’s play lacks any female characters, “solved” in the film by importing Ophelia from Hamlet for the purpose of a few grafted-on scenes; it’s also notable that the film’s most fully-realized passages, in conventional terms, are flashbacks, depicting a character’s accounts of time spent serving on a submarine. But any resulting sense of an “opening out” is counterweighed by a core narrative that if anything becomes more interiorized and quasi-impressionistic as it goes along, leaping over several major decisions and actions, culminating in a dramatic action which barely seems “justified” in conventional terms by anything that preceded it (the plot turns on some major corporate scheming and deal-making, almost all of which is presented here as a matter of briskly intense discussions between a few people at a time). Any sense of abstracted remove (also inherent in the core familial relationships, between a father, an adopted son and heir, and a servant who comments that he also perceives himself as a kind of son) is again offset though by a couple of startlingly visceral moments, both involving intimate and potentially repulsive engagement with the blood of others, and as such countering what might be seen as the figuratively relatively “bloodless” presentation elsewhere. Ultimately, the film is as slyly enveloping as Desplechin’s best, evoking an unusually knotty blend of reactions and aftertastes.

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.

Hi De Ho (Jack Binney, 1947)

 

The 1947 Hi De Ho, a Cab Calloway vehicle directed by Josh Binney, delivers in the area that most matters, some eighty per cent of its seventy-two minute running time consisting of straightforward performance, mostly by Calloway with or without his band, but several times yielding the spotlight to others, and in fact allowing a sensational tap dance team, Miller Brothers and Lois, to steal the show. The other twenty per cent goes mostly into a half-hearted melodrama involving a jealous lover and a villainous club owner, with Calloway (playing himself) foiling an attempt on his life and having his lover die in his arms: that’s all wrapped up with a half hour to go though, rapidly shrugging off the tragedy to pair the star off with someone else, culminating in an on-stage marriage. Some might judge the structural oddity as simple ineptitude, likewise the apparent lack of finesse in such matters as framing, writing and acting, exemplified by the (conceptually rather chilling) scene in which the police show up to find a dead body and a dying woman and, given that there’s an apparent perpetrator to be immediately apprehended and removed, can’t be bothered even to cursorily investigate what went on. But such a judgment would ignore the film’s historical significance as a “race film,” cheaply made for Black audiences, set in an entirely Black universe, with no white faces on screen as far as I could see, no acknowledgment of the dominant film-making culture. The film’s avoidance of familiar techniques and codes confirms a rejection of the dominant ideology, marking a film fully of and comfortable within its own alternative paradigm, built around a true Black star whose stature and resonance owe nothing to imposed machinations or endorsements, his impact reflected in the film’s many shots of Black patrons (one of whom, amusingly his own bodyguard, hardly ever looks up from his copy of Variety, as if eternally waiting for it to yield some relevance).

News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977)

 

In Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, an unseen female reads a series of letters received from her mother in Belgium, while we watch a series of long takes of New York City, and that’s it. We glean easily enough that the recipient has moved to the city, that her mother constantly worries about her, but much basic information is absent (it must also often be lacking in the recipient’s responses, given the mother’s regular comments about their brevity and absence of hard facts). One might correctly guess that the voice is Akerman’s own, that the places we see (predominantly far from postcard-worthy, much of it transit-related) reflect Akerman’s own time in New York, but it wouldn’t be as apparent that the letters and images are separated by several years, the latter gleaned on a return trip. It amounts to a strangely moving representation of absence and unknowability, the letters consisting largely of mundanities, but occasionally referring to life events (her father’s illness; the closure of part of the family business; the purchase of land to build a new home) which as lived events were no doubt virtually all-consuming. Akerman’s reading hardly distinguishes though between the monumental and the ephemeral, her voice often barely audible over the noise of the subway or the traffic, on occasion getting drowned out altogether. Most of the people observed in the film either don’t notice the camera or seem barely interested; in one strangely gripping exception, a man draws himself up and stares in its direction almost as if about to charge, before withdrawing and retreating far into the background, a small sign perhaps of cinema’s power, even in this minimal mode. Another comes from the final shot, taken from a ferry traveling away from shore, the skyline and the film itself receding in unison, the sense of absenting deepened now by the pre 9/11 presence of the twin towers.

Millhouse (Emile de Antonio, 1971)

 

If one can say nothing else good about Richard Nixon, we can stipulate that the most cringe-inducing moments in Emile de Antonio’s Millhouse: a White Comedy belong not to the 37^th President but to Bob Hope, seen cracking some wretched jokes at the expense of the gay-themed movie Staircase. That aside, much about de Antonio’s film inevitably lands differently in an age of unbound Trump: it’s commented and illustrated that Nixon’s policies regularly serve the interests of the elitist class, that he smears his opponents, that his statements don’t always align with the facts, but by current standards, he seems virtually quaint as an embodiment of such transgressions. The film’s broadest strokes – such as imposing extracts of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech over one of Nixon’s own, presumably to evoke a gap both in vision and rhetorical power, or contrasting an optimistic economic assessment with something comparably upbeat delivered by Herbert Hoover before the great depression – feel more laboured than insightful, and even if considered as a record of its own time and place and culture, it often seems more ambiguous than perhaps intended. For instance, de Antonio includes the “Checkers” speech in largely unexpurgated form, and while elements of that now seem clunky, it also has a degree of methodical self-exposure (Nixon, seemingly diligently, sets out all his personal assets and liabilities) that doesn’t readily invite straightforward mockery on its own terms (on the contrary, he remains fascinating in his contradictions, somehow at once both deeply off-putting and poignant, both strategically astute and hapless). In truth, the film asserts Nixon’s inadequacy and wretchedness more than it dissects and demonstrates it, a rhetorical excess also evident elsewhere in de Antonio’s work (In the King of Prussia for example is limitingly one-sided, notwithstanding the viewer’s likely broad agreement with that side).

Me and You (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2012)

 

At one point in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Me and You, the turbulent Olivia muses about Buddhism, about being able to transcend one’s confining point of view and achieve an elevating objectivity, an aspiration denied within the film if only by the extreme specificity of the situation: the teenage Lorenzo, given money by his mother to attend a school ski trip, instead spends it on an ant farm and a week’s supply of food and holes up in a room in the building basement, eventually joined by Olivia, an older half-sister who needs a place to go cold turkey. The film has a predictably redemptive arc – he makes her promise not to take drugs again, she makes him promise to stop hiding and live a fuller life – but there’s no particular reason to think either commitment will be kept, the film being more possessed by the allure of stubborn denial and self-indulgence than by resistance to it. Bertolucci explores the possibilities of the space with practiced ease, but Lorenzo’s withdrawal (juxtaposed against a poor little armadillo he sees early on in a pet store, endlessly doing figure eights around its tiny cage) mirrors that of the director’s own: this is yet another late film (after Stealing Beauty, Besieged, The Dreamers) set predominantly at a bourgeois remove from the messy external world. Even at her young age, Olivia is an artist who’s already had some exhibitions, with at least a few moneyed contacts; the basement space far exceeds in volume and the included trappings what anyone would likely be able to access for such a purpose; etc. etc. The film lands then primarily as peculiar fantasy, an impression bolstered by the prominent use of David Bowie’s Space Oddity in the closing stretches; typical though of of Bertolucci’s facility for expanding and ventilating even small cinematic gestures, the familiar version is preceded by an Italian-language one, the lyrics of which seem to be in no way a direct translation of the original.

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (Blake Edwards, 1976)

 

No matter how generously inclined you are towards the Pink Panther series (a lot, in my case), it’s hard to find much to praise in the fourth installment (not counting Bud Yorkin’s Inspector Clouseau), The Pink Panther Strikes Again: complacency and slackness intrude at virtually every point, and whereas Christopher Plummer and Catherine Schell at least seemed to be enjoying themselves in the previous film, everyone here seems either tetchy or listless. Inspector Dreyfus, this time round a Bond-level madman who gets hold of a death ray machine that can erase entire buildings and cities from thousands of miles away, spells things out all too explicitly by calling Clouseau more powerful than his deadly machine, but it speaks to the series’ most intriguing element, the consistent sense of a universe bending its laws around its protagonist. Clouseau misses the most obvious clues and indicators, yet is inexorably drawn to the heart of things; he survives serial assassination attempts without even realizing they existed; he embodies the self-involved ineptitude that’s poisoning our world (it’s not too much of a stretch to find some contemporary political resonance) and yet thrives (despite apparently rendering walls and floors strangely fragile): seen as such, Dreyfus is fundamentally a righteously poignant character, a quality undermined here by the absurd and shoddy plotting. But in contrast to the average comic child-man, Clouseau is specific in his physicality, often seen stripped down to his hairy torso, driven by primal urges which he presumably knows how to satisfy (despite being unable to execute the most basic aspect of the surrounding rigmarole), the effect drawing on Peter Sellers’ well-known personal turbulence, feeding into making Clouseau a more immediate and vaguely threatening presence than he might otherwise be (especially when supplemented with the sadistic undertones of the random attacks by his manservant Kato, which make no allowances for bedroom guests).

The Devil's Exorcist (Jorge Darnell, 1975)

 

Jorge Darnell’s The Devil’s Exorcist is a surprisingly effective meeting of disparate elements, from the clinical  to the woozily transgressive, blurring the line between haphazardly opportunistic and shrewdly evasive. The film was made a couple of years after The Exorcist and starts with a shot of a young girl writhing in possessed manner on her bed, but instant expectations of a Friedkin knock-off are never quite realized: the main narrative line involves a doctor (seemingly a behavioral specialist of some kind) trying to help the girl, but her efforts aren't conceived or described as an exorcism, and it’s only at the very end that the film presents an event that can’t be attributed to mental illness or interpreted as a subjective vision. Made in the dying days of Spain’s Franco era, the film draws (cautiously) on expanding artistic freedom, while remaining tethered to the past, a tension encapsulated in the contrast between the girl’s wealthy family (the father’s disinterest is cited as one possible cause of her dysfunction) and the old family servant, whose every appearance evokes a vanished culture, and in the contrast between overbearing formal spaces (the girl suffers near-meltdowns both in a church and on a visit to a wax museum) and the clean white lines of the institute where the doctor practices; some of its imagery, such as disembodied arms protruding from swimming pools and walls, might have been plucked from a fuzzily-conceived art exhibit. The film presents other extreme contrasts of tone and content, for example between the girl’s chillingly matter-of-fact murder of a sick child in the hospital (one of several events made all the more disconcerting by the absence of any subsequent mention or consequences), and the climactic prominence of a stuffed fish seemingly almost daring us to scoff (I somehow resisted).

Who Killed Teddy Bear (Joseph Cates, 1965)

 

Joseph Cates’ Who Killed Teddy Bear is an unexpectedly haunting oddity, a rare mix of trashiness and delicacy, strangely dignified in its manipulativeness. A brief synopsis more easily evokes the trashy aspect: a nightclub worker, Norah, starts to receive vaguely threatening phone calls, a chance event bringing her to the attention of a police detective, Madden, who oscillates between rumpled charm and a seeming unnatural interest in, if not affinity for, such aberrant behaviour (eventually attributed to his wife having been murdered); the threat escalates in familiar genre fashion, right up to the killing of a co-worker mistaken for Norah after borrowing her coat. The film is documentary-like in its surveying of New York’s seamier side, providing loving pans over long rows of nudist magazines, “dirty” books, porn theatre marquees and the like; as if to illustrate its underlying duality though, there’s an extended, equally fascinated sequence following Norah through the theatre district, taking in marquees and posters for the likes of Any Wednesday and Golden Boy. As Norah, Juliet Prowse radiates crisp intelligence and engagement; the frank presentation of her character contrasts with that of the perpetrator, Lawrence (Sal Mineo), often photographed half-naked and in extreme close-up, the imagery both sensual and aberrant. The theme of damage and danger runs through Lawrence’s younger sister, her development hampered by a childhood accident, Lawrence seeking to suppress her sexual identity even as he can barely control the expression of his own; Norah’s employer (Elaine Stritch!), whose comforting of Norah suddenly evolves into an attempt at seduction; the deaf nightclub bouncer, injured early on in an unrelated confrontation: even in its more straightforward moments, in its staging of the activity on the nightclub dance floor for instance, the film often feels oddly compulsive or desperate. The ending is again broadly unsurprising in narrative terms, but feels as pathetic and forlorn as it does cathartic.

My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktev, 2024)

 

Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow exerts its mighty grip partly through the director’s calculated form of intimate near-invisibility: the film’s subjects occasionally address or question her as she holds the camera, but for the most part she’s silent and unacknowledged even at moments of extreme stress or sadness, her fortitude reflecting that of her subjects, a group of mostly female television and podcast reporters observed in the run-up to and then the initial days of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. The film is five and a half hours long, its length allowing a visceral sense of escalating fear and pessimism: an evening-long New Year’s Eve broadcast on December 31, 2021 has one guest after another expressing variations on how there’s not much to be positive about but they nevertheless hope for the best; just a few months later, virtually everyone on the show is either already or heading into exile. Loktev generates a visceral sense of sadness and frustration, sometimes masked by dark humour or escapism (I lost count of how many times the Harry Potter universe is referenced), using titles in measured but astute fashion to provide foreshadowing or context, her shifting focus (the friend who’s initially most prominent is out of the country on vacation when the invasion happens, and ends up not coming back, entailing that others take centre stage in the final stretch) reflecting the prevailing sense of utter unknowability, of living in a country where one might summarily be declared a “foreign agent,” where livelihoods and basic aspects of everyday infrastructure might suddenly be snatched away, where one of the more poignantly vulnerable participants faces a wretched choice between remaining in a country that’s imprisoned her fiancée for over a year without bringing charges, or leaving in the undefined hope that she can do more for him by maintaining her own freedom, even if it’s the precarious freedom of the exile (to be explored further in Part 2).

Together (Michael Shanks, 2025)

 

It was recently reported that a professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, preparing to teach a course on “Contemporary Moral Issues,” was instructed from above to “mitigate your course content to remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these.” Perhaps the most fear-inducing aspect of those readings: a notion of humans as having originally consisted of three sexes, male and female and a union of the two, the latter split in two for their transgressions and now yearning to be reunited, a premise which accommodates (or ”explains”) same- as well as opposite-sex attraction. Michael Shanks’ Together explicitly cites that aspect of Plato as an input into its enjoyably gonzo premise, and the film’s finale, indeed its very last shot, could be seen as representing its realization, and thus as an embodiment of a red-state’s worst nightmare (or one of them anyway). Reason alone then, to celebrate Shanks’ film, even if it weren’t otherwise any good. Happily, it’s an enjoyable contrivance, surprisingly straight-faced even at moments of maximum comic potential, especially given its two stars, Alison Brie and Dave Franco: they play a romantically challenged couple that moves from the big city to a small town, incurring injuries during a hiking accident, and thereafter experiencing an array of physical and psychological trouble (Brie and Franco make the couple’s sputtering chemistry all too believable, such that the uninformed viewer likely wouldn’t remotely suspect that they’re married in real life). One’s heart momentarily sinks when the movie attempts to place their travails in over-determined context, citing an extinguished religious cult with an idiosyncratic approach to marriage, and predictably revealing a congenial neighbour’s sinister side; overall though, the film’s central dynamic, especially when boosted by those helpfully grim real-world resonances, easily maintains one’s (possibly rather stunned) interest.

The Pied Piper (Jacques Demy, 1972)

 

Jacques Demy’s underrated The Pied Piper could be viewed as lacking focus, the title narrative almost crowded out by an emphasis on the conniving of church and state; for a children’s film (of sorts anyway -  I recall it being shown on daytime British TV back in the day) there’s a persistent emphasis on death, bigotry and venality. As such, it provides yet more evidence of Demy’s mischievously perverse streak: the casting of an amiably diffident Donovan as the piper might suggest a somewhat fluffy approach, but any such impression would be highly offset by the estimable (and very British, for a film set in Germany) presence of John Hurt, Donald Pleasence, even Diana Dors! (there’s also Oliver Twist’s Jack Wild, his prematurely worn appearance in itself rather poignantly resonant). The film is bookended by the arrival and departure of a family of traveling performers, but Demy hardly bothers to develop them as characters, his attention shifting between the financial strains caused both by the construction of a cathedral and by pending wars, a Jewish alchemist persecuted by the religious establishment, a lovelessly strategic marriage (all the creepier for the casting of a 13-year-old actress), and the core plague/piper narrative, at times seeming here almost like an afterthought, but perhaps all the more persuasive for that, rendering the piper’s discomfiting revenge almost an inevitable consequence of wrong-headed governing decisions (he leaves behind the children of the kind and tolerant itinerant family). And then the closing scroll highlights the numbers who died of the plague and the persistent religious persecution, causing us to wonder whether we’ve all along been watching a more conventional historical epic than we realized (especially, perhaps, as the closing credits reveal the film to be an early production of David Puttnam, a decade or so before providing British cinema with its big night at the Oscars).

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

 

If Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is any kind of tour de force, the viewer may assess it primarily as one of research and organization rather than of artistic imagination, and yet it holds up remarkably well when viewed with the hindsight knowledge of how our subsequent real-world pandemic played out. In particular, the social media agitator played by Jude Law, who seemed rather shoehorned into the film at the time, snappily foresees a future deluge of false information, of supposed miracle cures pushed by financial self-interest; the character’s remark about not knowing that the vaccine won’t cause autism in ten years eerily anticipating a whole administration’s worth of regression. Inevitably, Soderbergh’s choice to survey such a wide landscape within an almost overly concise running time involves much elision: for example, we see Matt Damon’s everyman character lining up in a food line which turns violent when supplies run out, and apparently witnessing a shooting in a nearby house, but we never gain a broader sense of the scale of economic and social chaos (which we understand to be considerable, the cited infection and mortality rates being much worse than those of Covid), and at the end normality seems to have reasserted itself with improbable ease. And the use of so many stars (including no less than three best actress Oscar winners) in small roles can be an impediment to sinking into the narrative, giving the project the feel instead of a displaced, quasi-celebratory caper movie. Soderbergh chooses to end the otherwise linear chronicle by circling back to the start, to track the virus’s (in this case entirely natural) origins; by then the information’s importance seems supplanted by what we know of the subsequent global upheaval, and yet it’s a pointed reminder of the inherent fallibility of global supply chains and infrastructure (and that’s without even getting into the lab leak theories).

Sur un air de Charleston (Jean Renoir, 1927)

 

It’s tempting to write off Jean Renoir’s silent short Sur un air de Charleston as unworthy of attention: Renoir apparently made it in just a few days, and some of its key elements are frankly painful to observe now. Still, a little background reading, and one’s deep regard for Renoir’s later work, suggests not so much that there’s more there than meets the eye, as the phrase goes, as that a modern-day eye may find it hard across a hundred-year distance to distinguish the mildly subversive from the cringeworthy. The use of an African-American protagonist (Johnny Hudgins) is fairly remarkable for the time, undermined by the use of minstrel get-up and blackface; learning that this was at Hudgins’ initiation rather than Renoir’s makes that aspect of the film more complex and perhaps knowingly provocative, but not enough so to neutralize one’s basic antipathy. Still, accusations of condescension are somewhat tempered by the fact of the film being set in a post-apocalyptic future where Africa is the new hub of civilization, the protagonist traveling in his futuristic craft to a decimated Europe seemingly occupied only by a scantily clad woman and her companion ape; the woman shows off her dancing skills, in scenes that were reportedly once considered erotic (the actress, Catherine Hessling, was Renoir’s wife at the time) but now seem largely grotesque. Much about the film is puzzling and contradictory: the premise sounds visionary, but the use to which it’s put feels static and imaginatively limited; it uses slow motion to deepen our engagement with Hessling’s dancing, but in other respects (like the ape suit) feels wantonly shoddy; Renoir includes a couple of inventions which suggest magical powers on the part of the woman, but it’s hard to see how that relates to the broader scheme. Still, one may find it oddly lingering in the mind, albeit in a way that’s not necessarily all welcome…

Megadoc (Mike Figgis, 2025)

 

About halfway through his record of the making of Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis, Mike Figgis comments that the best such documentaries all record disasters, and that as such there’s part of him that celebrates when something goes wrong on Coppola’s project. It’s a sign though of Figgis’s ultimate reticence, if not of his outright passivity, that one wouldn’t know from his own film that Megalopolis was indeed a failure by most measures, losing at least $75 million of Coppola’s own money, the critical response at best mixed: Megadoc leaps from the end of shooting to the Cannes premiere with the obligatory standing ovation and then abruptly ends without further comment. Among other omissions, it also gives little sense of what Megalopolis is actually about (albeit that even many of those who worked on the film seem unsure on that score), and due to varying cooperation from the actors, gives a rather skewed impression of the experience of watching the film (one might think it’s mainly a chamber drama starring Shia LaBoeuf and Jon Voight, with Adam Driver hovering on the sidelines). But for all of that, Figgis’s film barely has a dull moment, fascinating in the portrayal of the immaculately turned-out Coppola (a different suit and tie ensemble every day) often at odds with the monster he’s unleashed, mystified that everything involves so many people and takes so long, as if he were a mere hired hand himself; budgetary numbers occasionally flash up on the screen, all of them staggering. Perhaps it’s fitting that one of the most charming passages is an improvised conversation between Dustin Hoffman and Aubrey Plaza as they arm-wrestle, Hoffman doing his (edge-of-creepy) best to push things in a flirtatious direction; it’s a moment that shows up the paucity of such spontaneous engagement amid so much care and diligence, even if it relates to nothing in the finished movie.

Dracula (Radu Jude, 2025)

 

Toward the end of his Dracula, Radu Jude cites Wittgenstein (who was himself quoting from another source): the thing about progress is that it always seems greater than it really is. In the context of a film that draws so heavily and explicitly on artificial intelligence, it might be taken as a warning about unintended consequences, that’s if the film in question wasn’t so unbowed by the new technology, if it didn’t in fact treat it mainly as a big joke, allowing the creation of fearsome monsters worthy of a blockbuster, but dropping them almost at random into a movie which at other times could hardly look cheaper or superficially sloppier, for example staging historical dramas with no regard as to whether the present-day world intrudes (in fact, inviting it in; there are numerous glimpses of bemused passers-by, clearly not tutored extras, responding to the action). The film isn’t far short of three hours long, inevitably often dragging a bit, and yet spawning new narratives and technological deployments right to the very end, establishing Jude’s immense capacity partly through the variety and relentlessness of how it suppresses it, the number of times we’re forced to ask whether what we’re watching shouldn’t by various measures be “better.” The Dracula myth provides a canny basis for such a project: there’s hardly a piece of material that’s been so regularly reworked and revisited, while seldom getting anywhere excitingly new (Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, for all its strengths, hardly broke major cinematic ground; Luc Besson’s Dracula by all accounts does so even less). Jude’s primary angle on Dracula, to make him old and ridiculous, might not be the most sophisticated of available approaches, but again, that fits the film’s scrappily unbound mood. The biggest surprise may come at the very end, in extreme contrast to much of what precedes it, suggesting the endurance of simpler cultural pleasures (and, for better or worse, attached human pettiness).

Turn in the Wound (Abel Ferrara, 2024)

 

At its core, there’s something rather touchingly idealistic about Abel Ferrara’s Turn in the Wound (and how often does one think to describe Ferrara’s work in such terms?): a belief that Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine might have been avoided if Putin’s worldview weren’t so small, and in the expansive capacity of seasoned, evocative artistry. That’s embodied here by Patti Smith, seen rehearsing and backstage and in performance; one might initially assume she’s performing in Ukraine, but it’s actually at the French Pompidou Centre, an assertion of the cultural heritage that persists far from the battlefront (even as Smith’s darkly evocative lyrics and storm-damaged presence and the swirling accompanying visuals seem in productive conversation with Ferrara’s documenting of wartime atrocities and dislocations). The film includes a brief meeting with President Zelensky, commenting on Putin’s inability to perceive or value the rights and desires of Ukrainians, and some piercing battlefield footage, a devastating tumble of mud and blood and fire and chaos; that aside though, it often feels somewhat random in its content and assembly, seeming that Ferrara may have talked to whomever happened to step before his camera (he includes a passage of himself being interviewed on Ukrainian TV, disclaiming any particular agenda). It all contributes to an overwhelming sense of almost unprocessable wrongness, with multiple anecdotes of torture and deprivation at Russian hands, of their soldiers' savagery and recklessness: the film makes no claim to balance, whatever that would mean in this context. One of its last interviewees, a man who lost an arm in combat, comments on how his experiences have helped him mold a better attitude, an awareness that things could always be worse than they are: it’s hardly a complex life lesson, but Ferrara’s film is a penetrating counterpoint to a world that often seems intent on smothering any such reflectiveness.

Mon oncle d'Amerique (Alain Resnais, 1980)

 

A viewer might feel obliged to take Alain Resnais’ Mon oncle d’Amerique highly seriously, to assume that the juxtaposition of the film’s narrative (which follows three very different but eventually intertwined lives from childhood to middle age) and the wall-to-wall commentary by behavioural scientist Henri Laborit generates a work of unusual analytical acuity. Resnais disclaimed any such intention though, and from today’s perspective, in part informed by the director’s often singularly whimsical subsequent work, the film plays primarily as a sly, deliberately unsolvable puzzle, encouraging us to find correspondences and echoes and explanations while fully knowing that the exercise will lead only to frustration (like gifting a jigsaw puzzle in which some of the key pieces are missing, or imported from another puzzle altogether). Even if it could be demonstrated that the story the film tells was in some kind of perfect conjunction with Laborit’s theories and explanations, that story would still be (however superficially enjoyable) a pumped-up melodrama (including such elements as a lie about being mortally ill and a desperate suicide attempt) of limited inherent interest, the exercise providing little or no insight into how to conduct or what to expect from our own lives (the lab-grown aspects partly evidenced in how removed and unmoving it all feels). But any allegations of pumped-up self-importance should be adequately punctured by Resnais’ occasional use of rat-headed people in illustrating our conditioned nature (years before David Lynch and his rabbits!). And the film’s very title provides a warning against overly literal viewing; all three principals refer at different points to an American uncle, but as someone whose biography is unclear, or who may not exist at all, America itself absent from the film until its final sequence, and then used mainly to illustrate the desolation that may result from mankind going off track (and in this respect, at least, the film has a point…)

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Alexander Hall, 1941)

 

Officially, Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan is only seven minutes shorter than Warren Beatty and Buck Henry’s 1978 remake Heaven Can Wait, but feels much tighter than the later film, sometimes to the point of seeming to rush: for example it sets-up the dimension-crossing romance at its centre in a mere few minutes of screen time, whereas the later version productively lingered at least a little longer. Notwithstanding that broad impression though, and leaving aside Beatty/Henry’s main tweak of making the protagonist Joe Pendleton a football player rather than a boxer, the two follow very similar trajectories, with an almost identical arrival point, both in tone and content. In both versions, Pendleton is killed in an accident (a plane in the original, a bike in the remake), denying him a chance at an upcoming sporting triumph. The administration of the afterlife concedes an error and sends him back, but into the body of a rich industrialist murdered by his wife and secretary; Pendleton rapidly overhauls the man’s cold-hearted public image, along the way turning a bitter young adversary into a star-crossed love. As the change of title may herald, the otherworldly Mr. Jordan is a more prominent presence in the original than the remake, its impact more fully conditioned on the interplay of Robert Montgonery’s pugnacious Pendleton and Claude Rains’ unflappably genial Jordan. Although further point-to-point relative evaluations of the two are largely subjective, the remake certainly does more with the murderous duo by casting Charles Grodin and Dyan Cannon, albeit both under-utilized – the characters in the original barely register as more than plot devices. Pendleton’s friend and trainer Max Korkle is a highlight of both, James Gleason snappy and short-fused in the original, Jack Warden in the remake more slow-burn befuddled (and benefiting from additional time spent on establishing the Pendleton/Korkle relationship).

Youth (Hard Times) (Wang Bing, 2024)

 

As the title indicates, Wang Bing’s documentary Youth (Hard Times) paints a gloomier picture than the preceding Youth (Spring), notwithstanding that both films run over three and a half hours and are set almost entirely in the dingy textile workshops and living quarters of Zhili (the closing captions tell us the city contains some 18,000 such businesses, employing 300,000 mostly young migrant workers); in each case, the great length serves to release us from normal expectations of pace and narrative, allowing at least a somewhat heightened sense of the claustrophobic repetition of such lives. The first film is hardly light viewing by any measure, but contains much camaraderie and joshing and flirting among the workers, the constant preoccupation with hourly rates and productivity offset with conspicuous consumption of the kind whereby one individual notes that another is still using last year’s iPhone. Hard Times feels both literally and figuratively darker, more deeply characterized by anxiety, by recurring resentment that the rates are insufficient, that they’re lower than those paid last year or in other shops; a greater number of its subjects are somewhat older, with families, working to pay off debts. But despite their efforts to act collectively, the workers have inherently little power, particularly embodied by a group whose crooked boss takes off, his obligations unpaid, leaving them to scurry around salvaging what they can. Like its predecessor, Hard Times ends by showing some of its people back in their home villages, the explosion of light and space almost dizzying in contrast to the compressed dinginess of what’s gone before, partly celebratory but also underlining the strangeness of such far-flung economic structures; the basic decency of the final note, one of respect for a neighbor’s crops, underlines (if it were necessary) the scant evidence of generosity in what precedes it.

The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024)

 

The critical response to David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds was heavily informed by the styling of star Vincent Cassel to evoke Cronenberg himself, and by the knowledge of Cronenberg having been widowed after a long marriage; although those data points aren’t irrelevant, they may lead one to expect a more morosely introspective film than the director actually delivers here. On the contrary, it’s in some respects among his most playful works (even as the customarily frosty tone discourages such a reading), a construct in which almost nothing can be taken at face value, even (or perhaps especially) the facts attaching to the dead. The shrouds of the title are designed by Cassel’s Karsh to be wrapped around bodies (including that of his own wife, dead from cancer) before burial, allowing the family to view their decomposition, or whatever else may transpire underground; the technology is hacked and the graves vandalized, kicking off a chain of events including both Chinese and Russian interests, and transgressions including suggestions of extreme medical malpractice. But it’s all mostly talked about rather than dramatized, and further, talked about in terms that are either speculative or unreliable; for example, the narrative culminates in an unexplained burial, for which it offers at least four different explanations, with Karsh declining to take the obvious action that would narrow those down. The overall effect is certainly somewhat rarified and cerebral, but also uncommonly destabilizing and invasive, its ending providing only the most superficial closure (at best). Cronenberg allows his protagonist two sexual partners in the course of the narrative, one his wife’s twin sister, and the other the blind wife of an important prospective client, providing even ecstatic release an enmeshed and over-loaded quality (although again not without a streak of wry amusement – the sister, for example, gets turned on by conspiracy theories, seemingly the more outlandish the better…)

Une femme douce (Robert Bresson, 1969)

 

Much of Robert Bresson’s Une femme douce is devoted to spectatorship, emphasizing the “gentle woman’s” passivity and lack of agency: the film includes an extended scene from Michel Deville’s Benjamin (when she and her husband go to the movies), another from Hamlet (a trip to the theatre), exhibits at a natural history museum and art gallery, shows watched on TV, even animals at the zoo. Further, the film begins by establishing her death, her body laid out on a bed as her husband narrates the story of their relationship, a story in which he all but harassed her into marrying him, and in which one senses that even his acts of generosity and openness are oppressive to her (for example, he praises an incident he observed in which another man tried to pick her up and she seemingly turned the man down, but it’s already been established that her actions were ambiguous, and the husband’s words serve to make him rather than her the owner of the narrative). The (pointedly unnamed) woman is far from a blank slate - she’s sufficiently educated to recall a passage that’s been omitted from the production of Hamlet, and on their wedding night she appears to be the sexual instigator – but when married to a less intuitive man, this may impede rather than facilitate happiness; as played by Dominique Sanda, the film has a recurring sense of sadly thwarted inquiry and possibility, and when she says near the end that she’ll be a faithful wife, it rings with defeat more than commitment. The film anticipates Bresson’s later L’argent in the recurring focus on money changing hands: after getting married she goes to work in her husband’s pawnshop business, one of her main attempts at rebellion embodied in paying needy people more than the items are worth (another action later appropriated by the husband when trying to prove himself to her).

New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998)

 

Abel Ferrara’s singular (well, of course) New Rose Hotel is a fascinatingly displaced piece of work, a globe-spanning tale of conspiracy and manipulation and perhaps eventual catastrophe, built around a hundred million dollar transaction, that takes place almost entirely in hotel rooms, bars and the like, major events recounted to us third hand or else briefly glimpsed on blurry surveillance screens. Christopher Walken (dizzily idiosyncratic even by his standards) plays Fox, mastermind of a scheme to lure a brilliant sought-after Japanese scientist away from his corporate base, the plan consisting almost entirely of dangling a woman that the scientist won’t be able to resist (Asia Argento’s Sandy), complicated when Fox’s faithful lieutenant X (Willem Dafoe) also falls for Sandy, to the extent of the two talking about getting married. The plan works improbably well, and Fox collects his fee, but then things fall apart; Sandy vanishes, and the two men have to make a run for it. Ferrara’s astounding structural coup has the story essentially ending some twenty minutes before the end (and that’s with various momentous developments merely mentioned in passing), thereafter focusing on X as he goes to ground and mournfully runs through the events we’ve already seen, the film revisiting prior scenes with added details and shifted emphases that suggest the two men perhaps never fully grasped what they were involved in, Sandy increasingly taking on the contours of a classically unknowable noir-type woman. One is left with the sense of a movie that even if barely of this world in many of its particulars, taps a universal capacity for loss and regret (and, especially in the various songs we see performed, for fragile beauty); the ending constitutes no form of closure, provoking on the contrary a sense that Ferrara's film would as happily have circled back to continue picking obsessively at its own bones, and so on and so on indefinitely.

Spectateurs! (Arnaud Desplechin, 2024)

 

Arnaud Desplechin’s Spectateurs! would provide a most engaging introduction to the director’s oeuvre, despite (detractors might say because of) being a somewhat atypical project for him; it’s a largely academic observation though given that like all Desplechin’s recent work, it’s hardly been seen outside France. The film is a personal journey through cinema, including a few montages that wouldn’t be out of place in an Oscar broadcast (Die Hard!), but also spending extended time on memories of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, and most unexpectedly, the late Misty Upham (with whom Desplechin worked on Jimmy P). Desplechin intersperses sweet-natured recreations of key moments in his cinematic growth, including being taken by his grandmother to see a sixties remake of Fantomas but then having to leave when his sister got scared, and screening Vera Chytilova’s Daisies for a school film club and in the process having a girl develop a heightened interest in him. Despite some moments of gravity, the film’s prevailing sense is of lightness and openness to possibility; one feels that on another day Desplechin might have gone in this or that different direction (the film includes a montage of diverse people talking about memorable cinematic experiences, including such quirky choices as a woman recalling that she went to see Train to Busan, and didn’t like it). The film’s final moments are suitably and delectably diverse, contrasting a chance glimpsing of Desplechin stalwart Mathieu Amalric at a screening of 400 Blows, an aspiring director talking in awestruck terms about his transcendent experience of that film, and Desplechin himself, alone in a room, sitting and typing, muttering a final maxim in a manner that lovingly (and is it more self-deprecatingly or self-regardingly?) evokes Godard, an impression immediately cemented by playing Tom Waits’ Ruby’s Eyes under the final credits (just as in Godard did in Prenom Carmen).

Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, 2014)

 

David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars ranks in the lower half of his work, Hollywood’s empty materialism and drained humanity seeming basically like too narrow and obvious a topic to fully engage him. Julianne Moore plays Havana Segrand, a career-challenged actress who engages a new arrival in town, Agatha Weiss, as a personal assistant; Agatha’s teenage brother is the (wantonly unpleasant) star of a “Bad Babysitter” comedy franchise, their father a lifestyle guru who counsels Havana. The film has a broad vein of vicious satire, exemplified by how Havana giddily celebrates the death of another actress’s little boy (an event causing the actress to withdraw from a role that Havana covets), but that’s familiar territory, albeit more sharply executed than average. Of greater interest are its multiple instances of doubling: two (at least) quasi-incestuous relationships between siblings, two characters visited by visions of dead people, two name actors beset by career anxiety, two case histories involving fires, two instances of drowning, all of which contributes to a sense of proliferating stasis, a perception that Hollywood stories are essentially just all the same (of the two movies foregrounded in the narrative, one is a franchise sequel and the other a remake). At the same time, the gradual revelation of so many interconnections between characters creates an ultimately savagely implosive quality: Cronenberg goes relatively light here on the “body horror” (mostly displaced into conventional concerns about appearance, and to skin permanently marked by earlier calamities), but the film ultimately feels no less invasive and destabilizing (conspicuous by its absence of course is anything close to lush cinematic pleasure). Still, Hollywood mythmaking isn’t entirely absent: an early scene has Agatha bragging in seemingly transparently bogus manner to a driver she’s just met about her connections with Carrie Fisher, all of it turning out in short order to be true!