5 stars

Breathless (1960)

André Crous

Sixty years after its release and after inspiring generations of aspring directors, Breathless continues to dazzle with its gentle undermining of conventions and wonderful central performances.

BreathlessFrance
5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: À bout de souffle

Jean, Jean-Paul and Jean-Luc comprised the coolest trio of 1960, and their lively shenanigans demolished post-war French cinema in one fell swoop. But we shouldn’t discount the influence of another Jean – documentary filmmaker Jean Rouch – whose cinematic grammar ended up marking a turning point in the global motion picture industry. 

Above all, Breathless is remembered for introducing the world to the jump cut. By cutting out the silence in a scene of dialogue, or pretending like one steady stream of dialogue is happening even as we can see the setting change, Jean-Luc Godard infused his début feature with a dynamism that was revolutionary. Rouch had used the jump cut a few months earlier during a long dialogue scene in I, a Negro (Moi, un noir), but it was Godard who used it to unforgettable effect.

Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo star as Patricia and Michel, a young couple still trying to figure out how they feel about each other after three weeks together. The former is an American journalist who walks up and down the Champs-Elysées selling the New York Herald Tribune; the latter is a young Frenchman involved in a vague criminal enterprise – when we meet him in the opening scene, he has just stolen a car in Marseille. Later, on his way to Paris, he kills a policeman on the highway. The film is dedicated to Monogram Pictures, a Hollywood film studio that had gone under a few years earlier but used to produce very low-budget films, including several with detective Charlie Chan (always played by a white actor in yellowface).

But while the romance is front and centre, thanks in large part to a stunningly choreographed 20-minute scene in a hotel bedroom, all the talk is about the film’s subtle undermining of conventions. Its anti-establishment gimmicks, including the jump cuts and the breaking of the fourth wall, are all very subtle but set the film apart from anything else while fully maintaining its accessibility. Some scenes are dynamic while fully realised in an unbroken take; others maintain their verbal coherence despite multiple cuts. Amazingly for a Godard film, Breathless even contains a few pretty helicopter shots of the sights in Paris.

Michel, who uses the pseudonym László Kovács (one of many cinematic references: Belmondo had played a character by this name the year before in Claude Chabrol’s suspense production, Web of Passion), spends the whole film trying to evade capture by the police. In an early scene, he walks past a poster for Robert Aldrich’s Ten Seconds to Hell, which urges the reader to “Live dangerously to the very end”. Moments later, a young girl hawking copies of the Cahiers du cinéma (specifically, the July 1959 issue with a still from Hiroshima mon amour on the cover) asks him whether he has anything against the youth, to which he replies that he likes the older ones, presumably also referring to movies.

But the girl he is interested in is Seberg’s Patricia, who is beautiful and has a confidence that belies her age – both the actress and her character were only 20 at the time. Her American accent may be appalling (among other cringeworthy inflections, she keeps pronouncing Paris as “Perree”), but he is so smitten with her, he only corrects her once. She also yearns for a “Romeo and Juliet” relationship, blissfully unaware of how the play ends.

Michel, presumably a vessel for Godard who grew up in Switzerland, sometimes pronounces numbers in the Swiss way and gushes about the beauty of girls all along Lake Geneva. Despite his chain smoking, despite the annoying affectation he has of stroking his lips with his finger and despite his criminality, we are drawn to him because in times of crisis he is cool as a cucumber. And after he spends 20 minutes in Patricia’s bed, most of it shirtless, it’s difficult to find him anything except irresistible.

Setting nearly a quarter of one’s story in the bedroom is a bold but very risky move. The number of possible shots seems limited, and without any major action, the viewer could easily get bored or frustrated. Two years earlier, in his short film Charlotte and Her Boyfriend, Godard had put Belmondo in a shoebox-sized studio apartment and let his character vent for 10 minutes at a mostly silent ex-girlfriend. The result was tedious in form and substance, and it was only half the length of the bedroom scene in Breathless. But here the director finds multiple points of interest to keep us enthralled, seemingly with the greatest of ease.

It is worth noting that, despite its air of improvisation and free-spirited nature, the film clearly had a screenplay. For example, the word “dégueulasse”, which is so critical to boosting the ambiguity of the final scene, appears here and there throughout the film. In that final scene, Godard brilliantly captures the confusion of the moment by having Belmondo pronounce a mixture of “tu es dégueulasse” (you’re disgusting) and “c’est dégueulasse” (this is terrible). There are no clear answers, and our efforts to understand what is happening neatly dovetail with Patricia’s own bewilderment (“What is ‘dégueulasse’?”).

What makes Breathless so appealing to so many people is that it simultaneously makes us think we can make a film like that and is almost transcendental in its coolness. It openly cops to being a film, and to being a film influenced by other films. But the combination of energy and introspection, of long takes and jump cuts and of shooting on the street while being very well thought out (see a stunningly framed shot taken from a taxi here) makes for an unforgettably visceral experience. Having the spectre of death hang over such lively proceedings only adds to the film’s enigma. It is no surprise that Patricia looks directly at us when a writer she interviews (played by French director-producer Jean-Pierre Melville) tells her about his greatest ambition: “To become immortal, and then, die.” 

Allegedly miffed at the film’s global success, Godard would never again make anything else that comes even close to being this thrilling.

Denali (2015)

André Crous

Denali is a love letter that conveys a lifetime with a wave of feeling but without ever reaching for emotion.

Denali

USA
5*

Director:
Ben Knight
Screenwriter:
Ben Knight
Director of Photography:
Skip Armstrong

Running time: 8 minutes

It is rare for voice-overs to be deployed successfully. But Ben Knight’s Denali is rare in many ways.

It may be the most beautiful eulogy that has ever been written on film. All of 8 minutes in length, including credits, it looks back over a lifetime filled with comedy and tragedy. But in large part, it’s an adventure, a shared experience of a bond that is as strong as anything we can imagine. When the identity of the narrator was unexpectedly revealed about a minute into the film, tears started streaming down my face and didn’t stop until the closing credits rolled, at which point I was literally gasping for breath. The voice-over narration belongs to the title character, Denali, who (not which) is a 14-year-old mutt.

Of course, it’s a human being reading the lines. But that is also the point. Most people have animals as pets, but few have them as part of an active life in which they serve as loving companions, fellow adventurers and compassionate co-survivors. Denali’s friend and owner is adventure photographer Ben Moon, who got the dog in his mid-20s and has spent his entire adult life with Denali by his side.

This life includes a great deal of time spent on the beach but also in hospital as Moon struggled with but ultimately survived a bout of cancer, a period during which his insurance company kicked him off his plan (after all, the story takes place in the USA). Denali’s emotional intelligence lies in its knowledge that we want to see what we believe to be true. We believe that our pets – especially our dogs – can sense how we feel, that they understand us without us needing to tell them and that they care for us no matter what happens.

“When someone you love walks through the door, even if it happens five times a day, you should go totally insane with joy”, the narrator tells us. It serves as a reminder that many of us already have this kind of love in our lives and should recognise it more often. It may seem like the act of a simpleton – of someone who cannot remember the past and does not consider a future in which the affection is not returned. But it is as pure an expression as one can imagine of life-giving love that soars the heights of Denali’s namesake, the highest mountain in North America.

Unsurprisingly, given the title and the fact that one of the world’s best-known outdoor clothing brands provided half the budget, every single image looks like a crisp painting and offers a direct link to nature. The voice-over is delivered nearly monotonously and yet, it is deeply moving. Human but different, it stands in perfectly for the quasi-human thoughts of a dog.

Denali is not just a film for those who have lost pets they loved. Nor is it even for those who have ever had pets. It is a film for anyone who has ever had an intimate relationship with anyone or anything. If you have lost that person or that animal, this is for you; if you have ever been scared of losing him or her or it or them, this is for you; if you are human, this film is for you.

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

André Crous

Getting up close and personal with Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 film about drugs and other addictions, is both an immersive and a repulsive ordeal.

Requiem for a DreamUSA
5*

Director:
Darren Aronofsky
Screenwriter:
Darren Aronofsky
Director of Photography:
Matthew Libatique

Running time: 100 minutes

François Truffaut famously said that any anti-war film nearly always turns into a pro-war film. He was among those who had lived through the trauma of the Second World War and wanted to consign all of the war’s evils to the dustbin of history, not project them onto a giant screen. But many directors, anxious to prove themselves, have other ideas and often relish in showing us epic, gory spectacles that are entertaining, not nauseating.

The same tends to be true of films that deal with drug use: All too frequently, the feeling of immersion created by the sounds and the images is a warm cocoon rather than a frightening shroud.

Nearly two decades after its 2000 release, Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, the exception that proves the rule, remains a nightmarish vision of addiction – one that excels at bringing us so close to the drugs we can practically feel our gorge rising with revulsion. The film uses rapid-fire editing to signal its characters’ broken attention spans, fish-eye lenses to distort their already warped perspectives on life around them and a devastating score by Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet to bring the titular requiem vividly to life.

In the story, adapted from Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel of the same name, the 20-something Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) regularly pawns his mother Sara’s (Ellen Burstyn) television set for money to buy hard drugs. Sara, an elderly widow living in an apartment in Coney Island, is spending more and more of her time in front of the TV, watching game shows. Her favourite has a studio audience roaring with unbridled passion every time Tappy Tibbons, the charismatic host, energetically intones, “We-e-e-e-e got a winner!” But she is growing lonely from seeing her son so seldom. Out of the blue, she receives a phone call informing her she has been selected as a contestant on one of her favourite shows. She decides to go on a diet, but when the results are too slow in coming, she starts taking questionable diet pills that steadily drive her to the edge of psychosis.

Along the way, Harry’s girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connelly), dreams of opening her own clothing store, and his best friend, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), wants to make his mother proud by living up to his promise that one day he’d do everything he can to “make it”.

But Requiem for a Dream has no patience for the dreams of people whose focus is diluted by their weakness for drugs of various kinds. The three “chapters” in the story are titled as three seasons, but it is telling that it starts with summer and ends with winter: There is no spring, no blossoming of new life; there is only an agonising, seemingly ineluctable downward spiral. By the time the closing credits roll, everyone’s dreams have not only come crashing down but shattered into a million pieces, with the shards cutting the dreamers to the bone.

What makes this particular film rise above its innumerable counterparts that have been made about drugs and addiction? It is full of colour, yet grim as hell. The camera is free as a bird, even when it depicts characters who cannot escape their fates. And oddly enough, instead of pulling us closer, the close-ups end up alienating us from the objects of their focus. Aronofsky’s stroke of genius is to use the cinema’s tools of intimacy against us and redefine the potential of old conventions.

The close-ups are repulsive, and the alienation we experience is antithetical to the intimacy we usually expect from this visual approach, which yields a crippled euphoria – a synthesis that is far superior to its constituent parts.

Although best summarised by the simultaneous presence of light and darkness in the title, this dialectical triad is most prominently on display in the climactic sequence: As the music’s rhythm builds to a crescendo, the pace of the cuts quickens and shots from all four storylines (one of which includes an orgy) alternate faster and faster until breaking point, when various liquids are released and the screen suddenly fades to white. The insinuation is that the film itself is having an orgasm, but instead of lust and desire, the entire sequence is filled with despair and dismay.

What we see is repulsive, and yet, because we are so close to the action, we cannot disconnect from it, which sends us into a state of vertigo that also hints at the characters’ mental turmoil. Aronofsky’s kaleidoscope of visual approaches suits the material perfectly and even includes an implicit religious component. Many of the images, particularly those that show us someone curled up in the foetal position, are overhead shots, and at the bleakest of moments, the camera pulls back even farther. It’s not a stretch to interpret these images as God’s point of view. However, there is no intervention, and the implication is that divine indifference gradually turns to divine disregard. The emotional impact on the viewer, who is always open to empathising with the characters, is absolutely devastating.

It’s as if Sara, Harry, Marion and Tyrone are all screaming into a void, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” But no one answers, and they continue their plunge into the abyss. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, by the time he hits rock-bottom, Harry has a bloody hole in his arm. Every time he shoots up, we get the same extreme close-ups in almost identical sequences: among others, someone flicks a lighter, a syringe injects, a pupil dilates, and blood cells surge inside a vein. We hear a gasp of anticipation and then a sigh of ecstasy.

But the repetition, instead of providing comfort and security, is emblematic of a vicious circle from which the characters cannot escape. This sequence of hard drug use spills over into Sara’s life as well, as we see her popping pills in extreme close-ups, which ultimately leads to one of the most upsetting parts of the film: Sara’s hallucination of a rumbling refrigerator that seeks to tempt her into rejecting the purple, red, orange and green pills.

Sara, whose voice just about breaks with emotion every time she opens her mouth, is the central focus of the viewer’s empathy. The scene between her and Harry, in which she levels with her son about her obsession and her loneliness, is not just heartfelt but downright heart-breaking. She is vulnerable but determined to keep going, no matter what, and she keeps on smiling through the tears.

This interaction includes perhaps the best performance of Ellen Burstyn’s career. It becomes all the more poignant when we witness Harry realise that his mother’s situation is as sad and hopeless as his own. But despite his love for Sara, he is incapable of preventing her from going down the same path as him. It would take a miracle to escape from this desperation, but the world of this film is utterly devoid of miracles.

Requiem for a Dream is unrelentingly bleak, and none of the major characters manages to escape the calamities their addictions inflict on them. Artistically impeccable and deeply affecting, it is not only the most brutal of Aronofsky’s illustrious career but also easily one of the top movies of the past two decades and infinitely superior to the much more conventional Traffic, the other big drug production from 2000, which walked away with multiple Academy Awards that year.

This is an anti-drug film that never once runs the risk of showing the bright side of its sordid material. Many movies depict their action and spectacle on a scale that ends up stimulating the viewer on the level of the senses by rousing us instead of pulverising our emotions. But Requiem for a Dream starts with its heel already firmly planted on our skulls and keeps pressing down firmly until the very last moments, when our life just about flashes before our eyes.

And this is exactly as it should be.

“We-e-e-e-e got a winner!”

The Celluloid Closet (1995)

André Crous

The Celluloid Closet, a ground-breaking documentary released in 1995, reveals many of the queerest moments from the first 100 years of the cinematic art form.

The Celluloid ClosetUSA
5*

Directors:
Rob Epstein
Jeffrey Friedman
Screenwriters:
Rob Epstein
Jeffrey Friedman
Director of Photography:
Nancy Schreiber

Running time: 105 minutes

Just like the people they portray, films with LGBT characters have always been around. In 1995, at the 100-year mark of the birth of cinema, an expansive documentary rounded up a century of (mostly, but not always, implicitly) homosexual or queer characters and narrative trends to show how, even in the darkest days of the moralistic Hollywood Production “Hays” Code, the closet door was often ajar.

Based on the exhaustive overview provided by Vito Russo’s 1981 landmark book of the same name, The Celluloid Closet was made by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, two openly gay documentary filmmakers who had already won Academy Awards for tackling subjects close to LGBT viewers’ lives in The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.

Their 1995 documentary features a treasure trove of film clips, as well as interviews with numerous industry professionals who talk about how they perceived certain movies while they were growing up, how they had to work within and around the Code and what the challenges were in producing an authentic representation of gay life. Among the best-known interviewees are playwright Armistead Maupin, actor-director Harvey Fierstein and writer-provocateur Quentin Crisp, with mainstream actors like Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg and Susan Sarandon (all of whom portrayed gay characters during their careers) also contributing their impressions.

The opening clip crystallises the early years’ depiction of same-sex activity: In the 1934 film Wonder Bar, a man and woman are dancing at a ball when another man approaches to ask whether he can “cut in”. The woman moves towards him, assuming the request is directed towards her, only to be rebuffed when the two men grab each other’s hands and start dancing. A few steps behind them, singer Al Jolson’s eyes are big as plates. He throws a limp wrist into the air and exclaims, “Boys will be boys!”

But such tolerance, even if mocking or condescending in tone, was soon torpedoed by the Hays Code, which sought to clamp down on films’ generally permissive attitude with regard to sexuality – by then, big-name filmmakers like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille had already made blockbuster films showing full-fledged (heterosexual) orgies. Starting in the early 1930s, the Code curtailed depictions of rape, abortion, sex perversion (i.e. any positive representation of LGBT life), prostitution, nudity, white slavery and the use of profanity, among others.

Thus, gay characters were driven into the background, their stories were made to look straight, or it was made clear that their lifestyle was abominable. And they were almost always killed off by the final act. But while some viewers were happy to see characters similar to themselves, the representation was terribly one-sided, even tragic.

For most of the 20th century, films consistently presented gay characters as outcasts who were to be made fun of, judged as degenerates or pitied for the miserable lives they lead. Generally speaking, the characters were trapped and unable or unwilling to effect change, which made them powerless and frequently led to them committing suicide or dying in various ways. In one eye-opening sequence, The Celluloid Closet shows us one death after another of these films’ gay characters: by gunshot, by stabbing, by hanging, by fire, by crossbow… even by having a tree fall on them.

Narrator Lily Tomlin correctly points out that “Hollywood, that great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gay people, and gay people what to think about themselves.” When all you see of gay life is a one-dimensional depiction of melancholy ending in tragedy, there is inevitably an effect on all viewers irrespective of their sexuality. Of course, there are people identifying as one or more of the letters in LGBT who are sad or suicidal, just like their straight counterparts, but representations need to reflect the diversity of real life, which only comes from telling more stories and treating all characters as full human beings with real agency.

But even when characters, especially those based on real-life individuals, were mostly stripped of their sexuality, traces remained. Perhaps it is because many filmmakers remained committed to reflecting real life. Or perhaps the reason is that, throughout the filmmaking process, some screenwriters were gay, some directors were gay, some actors and actresses were gay, and so on, and they wanted to include part of themselves and what they knew in the product they were creating.

This is a documentary that adds depth and nuance to characters and narratives we thought we knew. We see how affection between men – approached with surprising sensitivity – was often there if we looked a little more closely. An excerpt from Their First Mistake, in which Laurel and Hardy share a bed, help each other take care of a baby and confess their bond to each other, makes this plain for all to see. So, too, does a scene from Wings, the first-ever Best Picture Oscar winner, which features two men stroking each other’s hair, with one planting a kiss on the other’s lips.

Cabaret scribe Jay Presson Allen laments the fact that the 1950s were an era of such “towering dullness” because the stories being told were all terribly safe and uninspiring, but the ever-irreverent Gore Vidal lets us in on a juicy gay angle in the biblical epic Ben-Hur, released in 1959, which he had a hand in writing.

It is said that sunlight is the best of disinfectants. Films with LGBT characters or storylines provide sunlight by highlighting people and plots that are not as well-established as the decades of straight storylines, thus washing away the veneer of grime that had built up over decades of misrepresentation. And while this documentary certainly does not pretend that every classic film falls somewhere on the Kinsey scale, it does encourage us to examine them more critically and potentially to discover the rainbow in the black and white.

Although its focus is squarely on the U.S. film industry, The Celluloid Closet makes little mention of the broader historical context, namely that the advent of the modern gay rights movement (the 1969 Stonewall riots) coincided with the downfall of the dreadful Code, and that the subsequent AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s pushed LGBT stories out of the metaphorical closet and into the limelight.

It would be fascinating to see an updated account of LGBT representation in film, as a great deal has changed since 1995. The number of films built around gay characters who do not fold under pressure but stand up for themselves or, better yet, are simply part of a story other than their sexuality, has risen sharply over the past few years.

As witty and entertaining as it is informative, The Celluloid Closet remains the gold standard for information about and insight into the traces of homosexuality in films during the first 100 years of cinematic history. Over the ensuing quarter of a century, films like Brokeback Mountain, Milk, Blue is the Warmest Colour and Moonlight would all make a big splash on the global circuit. Myriad more, from those of Sebastián Lelio, João Pedro Rodrigues, Marco Berger and Kimberly Peirce to the ones of Dee Rees, Todd Haynes, Xavier Dolan and Pedro Almodóvar, have already given a firm indication that the next 100 years will produce an infinitely greater variety of movies than before – in whatever way their storytellers choose.

The Arrival of a Train (1897)

André Crous

The 50-second recording of a train’s arrival at La Ciotat Station was neither one of the first films ever made nor a reason for filmgoers to run in terror from the theatre.

train-ciotatFrance
5*

Directors:
Auguste Lumière
Louis Lumière
Screenwriters:
Auguste Lumière
Louis Lumière
Directors of Photography:
Auguste Lumière
Louis Lumière

Running time: 50 seconds

Original title: L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat
Alternate title: L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat

The Arrival of a Train, while so often credited with being “the first”, was actually anything but. It was not the first film to be recorded, nor the first to be shown, nor even the first “arriving train” film that its makers, the two fathers of the cinematic art form, ever produced. But for good reason, it has become a symbol of the power of movement and verisimilitude that rapidly propelled this monochrome curiosity into the pantheon of art forms.

The story goes that this 50-second shot showing an oncoming train created such terror among the room full of cinematic neophytes that it sent them scattering for their lives. The incident allegedly took place in January 1896, that is in the weeks that followed the very first screening of brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière’s first 10 “views”, each roughly 1 minute in length, at the Salon indien du Grand Café in Paris on 28 December 1895.

Did they or did they not flee from their seats when they saw the train approach? Although the story above has become one of the foundational myths of the cinema and has been recounted in countless film studies books and classes over the years, it no longer holds much sway.

In theory, the story makes absolute sense, not only because of the novelty of seeing almost life-sized movements from up close but also because Paris, where the first screenings of the Auguste and Louis Lumière’s one-minute films were held, was the setting for a famous train derailment just weeks earlier: On 22 October 1895, a locomotive like the one in the film sped towards Montparnasse Station, but when its brakes failed, it crashed through the barriers, careened across the station concourse and plummeted into the street below.

But here’s the rub: The famous Arrival of a Train that has become such an icon of the early days of cinema was actually shot a full 18 months after the inaugural screening at the Salon indien. And it was the Lumières’ second attempt at capturing this scene. Of this first film, which might or might not have had the same title and was projected in multiple venues starting in Lyon on 26 January 1896, only the copies of 32 representative frames remain, published as part of an article on the working of the cinematograph in the journal La Science française (no. 59, 13 March 1896, p. 89). These images, whose quality is just good enough to confirm they belong to a very different scene than the one in Arrival of a Train, may be viewed by clicking here.

As with most of the Lumières’ works, which fit into what film historian Siegfried Kracauer dubbed the “absolute realism” camp, this particular “view” is exceedingly straightforward: In the opening frame, a man on a station platform is hauling an empty luggage cart behind him before disappearing off-screen. But blink and you’ll miss him looking straight into the camera, which is likely why the film was cut in such a way as to prevent the viewer from noticing this breaking of the fourth wall (it is conspicuous that no one else appears to notice the Lumières’ giant camera/cinematograph and hand-crank operator/director of photography on the platform).

The man’s departure from the frame reveals behind him a crowd of people waiting in line for a train to arrive, which happens almost immediately. One of the people in the crowd is a woman holding hands with her child, dressed in white; walking briskly alongside the train, in the direction of the viewer, they pass by and exit the frame moments before the train comes to a complete stop.

This woman is Marguerite Lumière (née Winckler), the wife of Antoine, and the child is their three-year-old son, Andrée, who starred as the lead (and titular) character in Feeding the Baby (Repas de bébé), directed in February 1896. And the appearance of Andrée, born on 22 June 1894, is proof that the film could not have been shot in 1895, because the child onscreen is clearly much older than 12 months. In fact, Arrival of a Train was shot in the summer of 1897 at the train station in the seaside town of La Ciotat, along the Côte d’Azur, just southeast of Marseille. 

The story of the terrified filmgoers may be nothing more than marketing, but the film itself is one of the crowning achievements of the Lumière brothers. With a single, fixed shot, they make the train the central character entering the scene with a flair that almost certainly evoked a (measured) reaction in the viewer thanks to the movement inside the frame. This was the beginning of something big.

Gravity (2013)

André Crous

At once intimate and epic, Alfonso Cuarón’s space drama does things differently than its counterparts – and way better.

gravityUSA
5*

Director:
Alfonso Cuarón
Screenwriters:
Alfonso Cuarón
Jonás Cuarón
Director of Photography:
Emmanuel Lubezki

Running time: 90 minutes

Films like Gravity are one in a million. Besides reminding everyone of the incredible visual talents he has that never overwhelm the story he tells, Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, who has honed his skills at directing long but dynamic scenes with a single take, ambitiously faced the challenge of a minimal cast and has delivered a film for the ages.

Although an opening title card informs those viewers who have never seen Alien or read its famous tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream,” that there is no sound out in space, and that life for humans is impossible in such a void, the silence throughout the film is truly deafening.

Drifting high above the blue marble, NASA scientists Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) are leisurely at work on the exterior of their spacecraft. The experienced Kowalsky is listening to some music, propelling himself from side to side with his jetpack and having a lot of fun. Stone is a little more tense. She’s young, and until recently her familiarity with space had been limited to time spent in a simulator, always with disastrous results.

NASA’s mission control, on the other end of the line, patiently listens to Kowalsky tell his stories for the umpteenth time, and all the while we are immersed in the beauty of Planet Earth’s blues and greens in the background. This may be the first feature film that actually warrants the IMAX ticket.

But even while we are awestruck by the beauty of the scene, shot in a seemingly unbroken take for several minutes, there is a gentle shift toward exceptional danger. First, Stone asks Kowalsky to switch off the music, which is being pumped through her headset as well, so that she can concentrate. The silence, only disrupted by the duo’s breathing, suddenly makes for a much more dramatic soundtrack. Stone is struggling to finish her work, and Houston is not picking up whatever she is doing. And then, suddenly, chaos envelops the scene.

Debris from the destruction of a Russian satellite hurtles their way, causing a chain reaction with far-reaching effects that will last until the end of the film. It’s mostly small bits of material, but at the velocity they’re travelling they are miniature mobiles of death, and when the spacecraft starts to break up, we realise how quickly this can turn catastrophic.

What makes Gravity so exhilarating is not only the very obvious technical mastery of its director, but the combination of elements that are perfectly controlled yet never feel like they are calculated to elicit a particular response from the viewer. The minimalism of the cast, the setting and the action may well lull us into a false sense of comfort, but every so often we get another jolt to the system because we are reminded how perilous the vast emptiness of space can be to an earthling. 

As Stanley Kubrick knew all too well when he made his landmark science-fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, silence is not only necessary because it faithfully recreates the conditions in space but also because its effect on the viewer can be devastating. Whereas Kubrick’s film had an astronaut’s oxygen supply cut during a spacewalk by a disgruntled computer, and a soundtrack that cut all sound as we saw the poor man drifting out into space, Gravity has scenes of large-scale destruction in complete silence, which is absolutely chilling to watch.

Stone and Kowalsky survive the first incident, but as the story progresses, their oxygen tanks running empty and them having to face recurring disasters, all the result of that Russian satellite exploding offscreen, we see how small things can lead to heavy damage.

Cuarón, whose director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki already did some terrific visual work with single takes in the director’s Children of Men, here again uses special effects in ways that bring us closer to the story. At one point, the camera is right up against Sandra Bullock as she tumbles farther and farther away from Earth. Every time she breathes, we edge closer, until the camera seems to penetrate the helmet of her spacesuit. It continues, until it turns around (inside the helmet!) and shows us her point of view.

The only misstep takes place late in the film when the camera becomes an invisible presence pointing out a potential hazard that the character in the scene fails to notice.

But Gravity is not only about the visuals. While mostly focusing on the drama to survive the constant ordeal and steer clear of flying debris that only accumulates, it also has some beautiful moments that create a connection between us and them. To reveal the content of these moments would be to give away too much, but one particularly effective gem comes in the form of a radio conversation in which neither speaker can see or understand the other but ends with us emotionally wrecked.

Gravity does not stand in awe at the mystery of space that made 2001: A Space Odyssey such a hit and still fuels discussions about its meaning. It does not try to reinvent the wheel; it is a story about staying alive in the most desolate place imaginable, and Cuarón’s handling of the space-fiction material is epic but never self-important and takes our breath away.

Fruitvale Station (2013)

André Crous

Real-life story about family and forgiveness is brilliantly told in Fruitvale Station, one of the best feature-film débuts of all time.

Fruitvale Station

USA
5*

Director:
Ryan Coogler
Screenwriter:
Ryan Coogler
Director of Photography:
Rachel Morrison

Running time: 85 minutes

The story of Fruitvale Station captures the beauty, the frustration, the dreams, the indecision, the memories and the love embedded in one man’s last day on earth. With mesmerising performances, an intimacy that is utterly compelling and a main character who is far from perfect but does his best until his past catches up with him in the most tragic way imaginable, this is one of the best débuts I have ever seen.

The director is Ryan Coogler, who shot the film in 20 days only a few weeks after his 26th birthday. The story he tells is small enough to focus on the details of Oscar Grant’s last day, based on the real events that took place New Year’s Eve 2008 and early on New Year’s Day 2009 at the Bay Area Rapid Transit station of Fruitvale in Oakland, San Francisco. Its more ambitious moments, namely a handful of unbroken takes, don’t draw attention in a way one would have expected from an inexperienced filmmaker. They never stand out from the rest of the production, and perhaps the reason is the dynamite performance of the actor who plays Oscar, Michael B. Jordan.

The film is bookended by the events of New Year’s Day, and the opening scene is clearly shot with a cellphone camera or some other handheld device with low-quality images. We only learn the reason at the end of the film, although the documentary quality accurately indicates the origins of the story with actual events. What we get during the film, then, is New Year’s Eve, which not only builds towards the evening’s midnight celebrations in San Francisco but also the birthday dinner of Oscar’s mother, Wanda (Octavia Spencer).

Over time, we learn a great deal about Oscar’s life through his interactions with those closest to him: his girlfriend, his daughter, his mother and his tight-knit group of friends. One of them is Cato, played by Coogler’s brother, Keenan. Cato works at the Farmer Joe’s Marketplace supermarket in Oakland, where Oscar recently lost his job for turning up late to work once too often. The two are friends, but when Oscar’s attempts to get rehired by the otherwise affable manager are unsuccessful, he doesn’t mention this to Cato. Instead, he tells him he will start again the following week.

It’s an incredibly meaningful detail when best friends withhold information from each other because of pride. (Alfonso Cuarón used this tactic to great effect in Y tu mamá también.)

We soon learn that Oscar, whose tattoo spells out “Palma Ceia” (one of the gangs in the neighbourhood of Hayward) and who was recently caught cheating on his girlfriend, is actually a very vulnerable individual, and Coogler reveals his character with details that are short but impressive.

Such moments include a flashback to a year earlier when his mother had visited him in prison, and another very intelligent add-on when he sees an ownerless dog, strokes it, before seconds later hearing a yelp from the highway, where he picks up the dog and carries its bloodied body back to the side of the road. Of course, this anticipates the events at the end of the film by showing us how quickly a creature can go from smiling and energetic to still and lifeless. But it is nonetheless (perhaps therefore) intensely poignant and may even move us to tears.

Within the context of a single day and because we know that all of this is leading up to something terrible, the seemingly mundane takes on extraordinary meaning. Coogler should receive all credit for imbuing his story with both energy and affection that always come across as entirely believable. Even Oscar’s daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal), is a natural in front of the camera and does not make a single false move.

Fruitvale Station shows us the story of one man who has his faults but is totally likeable throughout and whose life is filled with some of the experiences and feelings we all share, conveyed with the utmost sincerity. His beautiful smile, his love for his daughter, his aggression in the face of injustice and desire to change his life for the better are all attributes we admire. This is not the story of someone up against the system, but rather about someone up against himself and especially his past.

It is difficult to believe this was Coogler’s first feature film. Especially the slightly risky move of presenting one of the final scenes without showing us the face of its central or focal character is simply astounding, bringing with it the necessary uncertainty that the scene calls for. I for one cannot wait to see what Coogler does next.

American Graffiti (1973)

André Crous

American GraffitiUSA
5*

Director:
George Lucas
Screenwriters:
George Lucas
Gloria Katz
Willard Huyck
Directors of Photography:
Ron Eveslage
Jan D’Alquen

Running time: 112 minutes

What a difference a night makes. The entertainment value of George Lucas’ second feature film, American Graffiti, does not depend on special effects or easy laughs from pratfalls or whatever childish behaviour we have come to behave from film teenagers. The action takes place over the course of a single night, from sunset to sunrise, when everyone’s lives will inevitably change forever as some of the individuals go off to college while others stay behind to either stagnate or begin their lives as adults.

It doesn’t matter that this film was made many decades ago, at the beginning of the 1970s, and took as its central characters a group of friends in 1962, the seriousness of their decisions is timeless and still relevant to viewers in the present day.

Set in California in the last year of innocence in the United States, before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the soundtrack to the lives of the handful of friends we follow is a compilation of music from the 1950s and the early 1960s so lively that the only viewers who don’t feel like dancing along are those who don’t have a pulse. The music is not just extra-diegetic but also produced in the world of the film itself, be it on the radio or by a band at the high-school dance.

At the brightly illuminated Mels (sic) drive-in, where cars pull up to order meals that are delivered to their open windows by waitresses on roller-skates, four friends barely out of high school gather to spend their night together. Steve (Ron Howard) is waiting for his longtime girlfriend, Laurie, whom he will be separated from for months at a time once he is away at college. She is expecting him to ask her to marry him, but when he suggests, instead, that they see other people to test the strength of their relationship, she is understandably rattled and after giving him the cold shoulder, she gives him a proper tongue lashing (and not the kind he was expecting) at a dance. More on that dance later.

Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) is conflicted over his imminent departure to the north-east for college. He has received a scholarship from a local diner, but he doesn’t know whether he is the kind of person who is “competitive” to survive the college environment. At the beginning of the film, a blond “goddess” drives past him and seems to mouth “I love you” in his direction, but he will spend the whole film looking for her, further rooting himself to the town and his hopes there. He also becomes involved in the activities of the local gang, the Pharaohs, and seems to have a hidden talent for criminality.

Terry “The Toad” (Charles Martin Smith) is an awkward boy with glasses whose life is made when Steve bequeaths his 1958  Chevy Impala to him for the night. This car gives him the self-confidence he never had, and he ends up with a platinum blonde girl named Debbie with whom he has adventures no one could have imagined when evening fell, or just how right he was when he predicted at the beginning of the film that “Tonight, things are gonna be different.”

And then there is John Milner (Paul Le Mat), the boy who never grew up, who drives his pimped-up car up (with license plate THX 138, the title of Lucas’ very different previous film) and down the streets to race anyone who dares challenge his superiority on the road. John, who is also looking forward to spending the night with a girl, ends up babysitting his potential prey’s teenage sister, and what this does to his character development and our empathy for him is truly stunning.

The writing as a whole is equally “boss,” and while the songs on the soundtrack — ranging from “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” and “The Great Pretender” to “Johnny B Goode,” “A Thousand Miles Away” and “Get a Job” — are as appropriate and relevant as they are full of rhythm, they never overwhelm nor amateurishly overemphasize the scenes they accompany.

One of the highlights of the film sneaks up on us totally unexpectedly. A rare crane shot swoops down on a parked car, where Steve and Laurie are discussing their relationship while Five Satins’ “To the Aisle” softly plays on the soundtrack. Their short conversation is followed by Steve’s pathetic attempt at seduction that borders on assault, before he is thrown from the car. Laurie, far from being hysterical or made a victim, is in the driver’s seat.

This follows an earlier altercation between the couple, once again perfectly captured by Lucas, who uses an unbroken take of some 92 seconds that comprises a backward tracking shot and a nearly 360-degree pan as the camera focuses in close-up on Steve and Laurie dancing while she makes it clear she knows his secrets and has made her peace with them.

In terms of the strength of the screenplay, one need look no farther than the opening sequence, in which the dashing of Laurie’s expectations to get married is followed by Steve giving Terry the keys to his car, and Terry promising to “love and protect this car till death do us part.” But it is the combination of the dialogue, the soundtrack and the acting that make the film so compelling and ensure all the stories continue to grab us, even as four different trajectories are woven through the night. Perhaps it is because the camera doesn’t look down on its characters: Even when they sit on the curb or slide underneath a car, the camera goes where they go.

Whether it is credible for the whole town to seemingly keep driving up and down and around throughout the night is a little beside the point, as the experience is so thoroughly immersive we follow the characters wherever they choose to go, even if they wander without much of a goal except to have fun.

This is what a coming-of-age film is supposed to look and feel like. Never treating the children like infants, never abusing the expected anguish over the transitional nature of things but highlighting the beauty of experiences when we (and they) know these may never be repeated again. American Graffiti remains the most enjoyable, heartfelt film George Lucas ever directed and one of the best films about the bittersweet end of childhood.

Chungking Express (1994)

André Crous

Chungking Express 2Hong Kong

5*
Director:
Wong Kar-wai
Screenwriter:
Wong Kar-wai
Director of Photography:
Christopher Doyle

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: 重慶森林
Transliterated title: Chung Hing sam lam

Chungking Express has boundless energy, revels in repetition and is quite simply one of the most absorbing films ever made. This may be the only film made by director Wong Kar-wai that I have ever enjoyed (with the possible exception of Fallen Angels, released in 1995), and it is because whatever stylisation takes place always serves to propel the story forward. There is never a dull moment. The repetition is aural, not visual, and although often slightly manipulated, the images are infused with a gritty Hong Kong realism and feature two of the most likeable cops you’re ever likely to see.

These two cops are #223 and #663, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, respectively, and they both suffer from broken hearts. Their tales are told in two separate storylines, with the Midnight Express fast-food stall serving as the only solid connecting thread between the two. 

The film has one of the most exhilarating opening scenes I have seen in my life. The images jump off the screen, and for a while we are blinded, not by the visuals, but by the music. Michael Galasso’s “Baroque” cranks the action forward with rhythms and sounds that immerse you in a world that is audibly — and then, you notice, visibly, too — in motion. Coming after about 1 minute of opening credits (simple white text on a black screen) in complete silence, the score hits a nerve.

The pictures we get are also different from what we’re used to. A step-printed sequence of images (which means the 24 frames per second shot by the camera were altered in post-production to unspool at the same speed, but every second frame has been duplicated, and every other frame discarded) makes for dizzying action, captured with a mobile camera that seems to move both more quickly and more slowly than we are used to from the world around us — or, for that matter, the worlds we know on film. The step-printing process is used again at various points in the film, and it continually succeeds in adding another layer of frenzy to a film that positively throbs with adrenaline in the stiflingly humid, concrete jungle that is Hong Kong.

The action in this first scene, and elsewhere in the first story, takes place at Chungking Mansions, a marketplace where everything can be found because every colour and creed on the face of the earth seems to be hawking their wares here.

In the first story, Cop #223 — whose name, He Qiwu, is only mentioned at rare intervals — has just broken up with his girlfriend, May, whom we never see. He hangs out at Midnight Express, a fast-food joint, almost every night, where the manager (played by “Piggy” Chan Kam-Chuen, who was the film’s still photographer) tries to set him up with girls who are waitresses in his employment. But #223 is not interested. He has decided to grieve for one month, until the 1st of May (yes, the name of his ex), when it will also be his birthday, before seriously pursuing any girl again.

The film’s joyous opening scene ends with #223 brushing past a woman in a blonde wig and is accompanied by a voice-over in which the cop tells us he would soon fall in love with her. At the same time as we follow his melancholy-laden trips to grocery stores where he buys canned pineapples set to expire May 1, we also see snippets of this mysterious blonde’s life. She is dealing with a group of drug smugglers but when she delivers them to the airport and turns around, they’ve suddenly absconded with copious amounts of cocaine.

Honestly, there are parts of this film that do not gel together all that smoothly. The blonde’s working relationship with the owner of a nightclub, who is also deeply involved in the drug business, takes a few viewings to piece together, and even then it’s not entirely clear, because we are asked to infer meaning and function from mere glances. But thanks to the rapid editing that also accelerates the pace at which the stories are told, small jumps are effortlessly papered over, as it were, by the colourful neon.

The first time around, the viewer may be disoriented by the first part, as there are a few very brief shots (lasting no more than a few seconds) with the three main characters from the second part, whom we don’t know yet. But first, a word about the second story.

Cop #663 meets Faye at Midnight Express, where she starts working at the end of the first story, just as #223 disappears from the film (something else that is never explained). He has a sometime girlfriend, an air hostess, but she gives up on their relationship and hands the key with the “Dear John” letter to Faye, who hangs on to the letter for a while, and on to the key to #663’s apartment for much longer. Meanwhile, she becomes fascinated by this man and even starts going to his place (these scenes were shot in DOP Christopher Doyle’s apartment) to clean and reinvigorate his home (some may think of Amélie here). Here, there are questions of credibility, as she replaces certain items, which #663 notices but doesn’t question.

Faye, the air hostess and the cop all make surprise appearances in the first part. First, the air hostess appears outside the airport when the woman with a blonde wig escorts her Indians with their drugs to the departure gate. While the woman in the blonde wig waits outside a toy store, Faye exits with a massive Garfield toy, which we will see again in #663’s flat later on. Moments later, when #223 leaves Midnight Express, there is a short take on #663 looking down from a raised platform, seemingly at #223, but since geography is rarely established in this film, we cannot be certain.

These are very minor points, but they suggest a film that is slightly experimental and strives to make it clear all the buzzing belongs to the same world yet tells its story at full speed in an almost kaleidoscopic fashion, producing a vibrant combination of narrative, sound and colour that stays with you.

You’ll never hear The Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin'” again without thinking of Tony Leung and Faye Wong. Few other directors — Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terrence Malick with Badlands and A Thin Red Line, and Oliver Stone with Platoon — have managed to pull off such an exquisite audiovisual melding using music that had been around for a long time.

Oddly enough, the repetition of the music holds the unconventional storytelling together: Not only is the film divided into two parts, and do the characters from the one turn up unannounced in the other, but like the sequence in Citizen Kane that telegraphs the dissolution of a marriage, a quick succession of scenes involving an array of fast food for the girlfriend precedes the actual introduction of the girlfriend — in a flashback, no less! But Wong Kar-wai breezily ignores the convention of narrative linearity, and yet the viewer stays riveted because these are all such wonderful people.

We love the movies we love despite their faults, not because we think they lack any. Chungking Express, with its numerous awkward plot transitions, is as good an example as any of this, but because I trusted the film from the very first moment and let myself be carried along the stream of images of audio and was never let down by the story or its gentle characters, this remains a truly dazzling film.

8½ (1963)

André Crous

otto e mezzo Italy
5*

Director:
Federico Fellini
Screenwriters:
Federico Fellini
Tullio Pinelli
Ennio Flaiano
Brunello Rondi
Director of Photography:
Gianni Di Venanzo

Running time: 137 minutes

Original title: Otto e mezzo

The splendour of Fellini’s eight-and-a-halfth film lies in its ability to entertain us so effortlessly while simultaneously being incessantly creative; weaving together dream, fantasy, recollection and present reality; commenting on the struggles of an artist, and doing all of the above completely coherently.

After all these years, just like Citizen Kane, the film it is often compared to, it is still a gorgeous piece of work. It is funny and sad and sexy and naughty and breathtaking, and there is nothing out there quite like it. This was made before postmodern cinema was à la mode, and it is all the better for it. The focus is not on connected texts in film or literature. Instead, the film looks inward, at its main character, a director named Guido Anselmi, played by Marcello Mastroianni, and by extension at Fellini, who treats the ennui of his character with droll asides yet evokes real empathy in the viewer.

We first meet Guido in a dream immediately after the opening credits. He is sitting in a car in a traffic jam in Rome and tries to escape from his vehicle, but can’t. Everyone around him is staring at him in stony silence. His deep breathing becomes more and more pronounced, anxious. In one car, a man is stroking the exposed arm of a voluptuous woman as she purrs. Suddenly, Guido is seen flying out of the car and along the cars stuck in traffic. He flies up towards the clouds, past an unfinished construction that we would later learn is part of the set for his film, before he is pulled down by a piece of rope, or string, that is attached to his leg and falls into the sea.

There is much to analyse here, from the setting of the beach and the excited woman in the car to the smoke that fills his car as he tries to escape and all the people passively looking at him in silence. But it is the images themselves that catch our attention. The stark black and white and the surreal visual of Guido flying along the road, into the sky, before crashing down into the sea when someone pulls the rope and another commands it by reading from a screenplay, “Down, for good!” suggest Icarus but also the fragility of his own position, a prisoner of strangers’ looks.

The first time we see Guido’s face in close-up, he is looking in a mirror. Perhaps sooner than us, he realises he has to face himself, and much of the film will be devoted to this enterprise, and although the things he finds are not discoveries and don’t necessarily lead to some kind of catharsis, it helps the viewer accept the final moments of the film, one that does not offer closure but that simply extends the merry-go-round of Guido’s life one has been presented all through the film.

Guido has checked into a spa to relax and work in peace on his latest screenplay, but he is at his wits’ end, and very playfully, but intentionally ominously, we share his point of view when he arrives outside, people greeting him with a nod of the head and a smiling, all the while looking straight into the camera, and Rota’s rendition of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries takes over the soundtrack.

The only bit of self-reference that comes into play is from the mouth of Carini Daumier, the script consultant who very likely represents the worst of the worst self-involved and terribly opinionated film critics out there, who discusses Guido’s screenplay with him and tells him bluntly:

You see, what stands out at a first reading is the lack of a central issue or a philosophical stance. … That makes the film a chain of gratuitous episodes which may even be amusing in their ambivalent realism. You wonder, what is the director trying to do?

These words refer, of course, to the film itself, and while Guido plays the main part in the flashbacks of Fellini’s film, it might not be Guido but rather the main character in Guido’s own film, and in this way, the two overlap significantly, though it is irrelevant to our entertainment what scenes belongs to which film. In the final scene, for example, a character from Guido’s childhood, Saraghina, appears, though this scene is suddenly set in the present, and she hasn’t aged. Was that scene not a memory but rather a scene Guido had in mind for his own film? At another point, early in the film, Guido’s walks down his hotel corridor singing Rota’s music we’ve been hearing on the soundtrack. How is this possible? Was the music actually playing in his world? Where, and who played it?

These are the kinds of questions that demonstrate the film’s clever interplay between different fictions in the story, and the fact we don’t mind so much signals the skill and success of Fellini with this film.

The film is packed with scenes that can be either memories or potential events (most likely autobiographical in some way) in Guido’s own film. But far from being “gratuitous episodes” as Daumier fears, they are absolute marvels of storytelling, often with either a great deal of dialogue or a complete lack of dialogue. One is spoilt for choice for examples, but among the most talked-about scenes is the one that takes place in a bathhouse, or more accurately Guido’s harem. 

Fellini’s 8½ is daring and adventurous and eschews an intellectualisation of its subject while making us wholly aware of the trials and tribulations of the central character and not undermining the severity of his situation. The theme is not overwhelming and the actions themselves are often staged in restricted spaces, but the film is as monumental as anything the cinema has produced. After so many years, the film still delivers a powerful blow to the system, because it shows what can be done with the medium. Like the enigmatic formula, “Asa nisi masa”, that Guido, as a young boy, is told to repeat to protect him at night, there is a formula to this film. But the power of the director is such that it takes on a magical quality only he knows how to wield.

This is one of the finest films ever made.