To Alfonso Cuarón, the story of Mexico’s political turbulence at the end of the twentieth century is not best understood through a historical epic or biopic. Y tu mamá también is far more interested in capturing its cultural and class tensions through the friendship of two teenage boys, completely indifferent to the dwindling power of the Industrial Revolutionary Party which held onto the presidency for the past 70 years, as well as the nation’s increasingly globalised economy. The world may be changing around them with wide-reaching implications, but they would much rather spend their time chasing women and upholding that self-devised, fraternal manifesto they claim is sacred, and yet so frequently stray from.
Despite their ignorance, Mexico’s modern politics are intimately intertwined with their personal relationships. After all, Tenoch’s upper-class background brings with it an air of superiority, seeing him use his foot to lift the toilet in Julio’s working-class home in much the same way he does at a shabby motel. Conversely, Julio is self-conscious at his friend’s more impressive house, lighting a match after using the bathroom. These adolescents may be hormonally aligned in their love for masturbation, sex, and all things masculine, but Y tu mamá también is acutely attentive to those differences that surface over the course of their beachbound road trip, specifically motivated by the prospect of charming their newest companion – the beautiful, 28-year-old Luisa.
Character detail in the tiniest actions, seeing Tenoch lift the toilet seat in the motel with his foot much the same way he does at Julio’s home. The framing of Julio in the mirror captures both boys in the shot too, drawing a division between them.Many marvellous long shots pushing the horizon to the bottom of the frame, revealing Mexico’s character through its landscapes.
By 2001, Cuarón had already established a solid filmmaking career moving from Mexico into Hollywood, and yet his greatest success to date comes here with a modest $5 million budget. In place of highly curated studio sets, beautiful long shots of rural Mexican countrysides, roads, and beaches connect us to the nation’s natural terrains and infrastructure, often placing the horizon towards the bottom of the frame while dusty blue skies and soft orange sunsets stretch out over detailed landscapes. His usual palette of murky greens is still occasionally present in his lighting and production design too, but Y tu mamá también is far more naturalistic than his previous films, opting for handheld camerawork that freely navigates scenes in long takes.
This is a specific sort of world-building that Cuarón would further explore in the smooth tracking shots of Children of Men and the steady pans of Roma, disengaging from his central characters to examine the details of their surrounding environments. In this instance, frivolous conversations remain audible even while our eyes wander elsewhere, drifting several times past family photos hanging on walls during phone calls, and elsewhere swinging inside a car to glance back at a pulled-over vehicle. Cuarón is sure to never quite sit long enough on these distractions to give us anything more than a vague glimpse – after all, Tenoch, Julio, or Luisa would much rather keep their heads down than consider their implications, though we are still left to wonder whether this traffic stop is a drug bust, an abuse of police power, or both.
Even with his turn to realism, Cuarón still finds the right moments to bring in his trademark green lighting and decor to brilliant effect.
Our travellers will encounter many more fragments of Mexico’s sprawling culture on their journey, some steeped in tradition with villagers stopping passing cars to pay a toll to their “little queen” dressed in bridal white, while others hint at widespread corruption. In a stroke of formal genius, Cuarón matches these diversions to the narration as well, frequently muting his diegetic sound before dropping in its commentary. These annotations are often as trivial as the camera’s fleeting observations too, offering brief cultural insights which mean little on their own, yet which together weave a textured landscape of poverty, celebration, and profound torment.
“If they had passed this spot 10 years earlier, they would have seen a couple of cages in the middle of the road… and then driven through a cloud of white feathers. Shortly after, more crushed cages, filled with bleeding chickens flapping their wings. Later on, an overturned truck, surrounded with smoke. Then they’d have seen two bodies on the road, one smaller than the other, barely covered by a jacket. And next to them, a woman crying inconsolably.”
Cuarón’s camera floats freely alongside the car during their road trip, listening in on their menial conversations. Every so often though, diegetic audio drops out to let the narration interrupt, making for a series of brilliant formal breaks.
On one level this narration positions us like readers of a novel, expanding the world through an omniscient literary voice, though this subversion of the narrative’s first-person continuity also bears great resemblance to Francois Truffaut’s formal experimentations during the French New Wave. The similarities to Jules and Jim especially are numerous, right down to the story of two friends being in love with one woman, and so it is also through Cuarón’s narration that we gain deeper insights into those thoughts they would rather keep hidden.
Y Tu Mamá También owes a lot of Truffaut’s carefree, rebellious style, but also lifts a lot from the love triangle of Jules and Jim with the two lovesick friends pining over one girl.
For the secretive Luisa, this is a particularly crucial conceit. As a funeral procession passes by, the narrator notes the existential concerns rising in her mind of how long she will be remembered after dying. We don’t know it at the time, but this is more relevant to her psychological state than we can imagine – she is suffering from terminal cancer, and this entire trip is one last hurrah to embrace life before it slips away. She may be more mature than her male companions, but she is just as adrift, and so it seems are many others they encounter. At one point, the narrator adopts future tense to reveal what is in store for a friendly fisherman who takes them in, and given the changing economic landscape, it does not look bright for him either.
“At the end of the year, Chuy and his family will have to leave their home, because a new luxury hotel will rise in San Bernabé. They will relocate to the outskirts of Santa María Colotepec. Chuy will attempt to give boat tours, but a collective of Acapulco boatmen supported by the local Tourism Board will block him. Two years later, he’ll end up as a janitor at the hotel. He will never fish again.”
It is evident that Luisa is facing her own secret tragedy in these brief asides, though the full context does not arrive until the end, bringing rich depths to a character that our protagonists initially view as a sexual conquest.Cuarón offers a glimpse into the future of a fisherman and his family, whose lives tangentially intersect with our protagonists. Their problems amount to very little in the broad scheme of things, but a tapestry is formally weaved from these tiny stories informing our view of an increasingly globalised, modern Mexico.A masterful use of natural lighting as the sun sets over this beachside paradise.
Tenoch and Julio might not see the point in contemplating the future, and yet Cuarón realises that their attempt at escapism is a political act in itself, refusing to acknowledge the complexities of the real world. As such, they are ill-equipped to face up to their own vulnerabilities and flaws as well. Their manifesto may forbid sleeping with each other’s girlfriends, and yet they do so anyway. They may openly share feelings for Luisa, but her first sexual encounter with Tenoch stings Julio all the same. Luisa might comfort Tenoch over his poor performance in bed, but he still takes it as a shameful weakness in his masculinity. In fact, almost any time some wedge is driven between these friends, sex is involved. Given the amount of it going on too, there is good reason for the constant conflict.
Only when these immature boys reach a point of self-acceptance and honesty does sex become pure, and perhaps the only straightforward thing in an incredibly complicated world. As they speak about their affairs for the first time without inhibition, Cuarón’s camera basks in the green glow of the seaside retreat, eventually following Luisa to the jukebox where she selects a song at random – the soft-rock ballad ‘Si No Te Hubieras Ido.’ Suddenly, she fixes her gaze right on the camera, intimately inviting us into their shared space as she begins to dance, with the boys soon joining her in a passionate embrace.
Luisa stares into the camera as she dances towards us, and is soon joined by Tenoch and Julio. Cuarón’s refusal to cut is remarkably effective, and key to the comfortable intimacy and love each character is feeling in this significant moment, wishing that it could last forever.This orgy momentarily erases the insecurity, ignorance, and masculine pretence that emotionally inhibits Julio and Tenoch, and for once sex is the least complicated thing in their lives.
There is no insecurity, ignorance, or masculine pretence in the orgy that soon consumes them. It won’t be long after this trip that Tenoch and Julio will go their separate ways, and Luisa will tragically pass away from cancer. So too will Mexican politics, culture, and economics continue to shift as the 21st century dawns, subtly contributing to this widening distance between old friends. Within this moment though, the ecstasy of the present is rightfully all that matters. Finally, there arises an equal affection in Y tu mamá también that neither insecurity, hierarchy, nor the uneasy advance of an early grave can suppress. The story of modern-day Mexico may vast, but this tiny coming-of-age chapter is just as formative to its identity as all those other lives caught in Cuarón’s expansive periphery.
The emotional intimacy of the past is once again repressed when Julio and Tenoch meet up in the future, having moved on with their lives. The memory of the past is both nostalgic and shameful, falling away to the pressures of modern day living, but it has still irrevocably changed them for the better.
Y Tu Mamá También can currently be bought on Amazon.
There might not be any reliable historical record that the ritual of ‘obasute’ was practiced anywhere outside of Japanese folklore, and yet it is exactly in that heightened, mythical realm where The Ballad of Narayama dwells. In the small valley where the 69-year-old Orin lives with her grandson Tatsuhei, it is tradition for elders to be carried to a mountaintop when they turn 70, and then left alone to perish. This form of customary senicide is not something to be feared, just as the natural course of ageing is not to be shied away from. In fact, Orin’s 33 intact teeth are even a point of shame for her, becoming the subject of a mocking song that is quickly spread between neighbours, cruelly suggesting that she struck a deal with the devil.
“In a corner in the back room
My granny found herself a set of 33 demon teeth.”
The other implication here is that Orin’s appetite is unusually large for a woman of her age, and in this starving village, a gluttony like hers is worthy of public humiliation. Whether for celebration or punishment, singing is the medium through which ideas are shared among the locals, turning rumours into stories, and stories into lyrics. As implied by the title The Ballad of Narayama, narrative and music are strongly intertwined in the film’s very form, paying homage to the traditions of kabuki theatre with a singer introducing scenes and offering poetic commentary. “The harvest in autumn brings sorrow, Even as the rice ripens to a golden hue,” his wavering voice croons to the twanging of his three-stringed shamisen, evoking colourful images of workers labouring away in yellow rice fields that are only outdone by the bright, saturated visuals Keisuke Kinoshita matches to the lyrics.
Kinoshita’s frames are paintings rendered through theatrical staging and autumnal colours, visualising the lyrics of the sung narration with an incredibly saturated aesthetic.Each scene is given its own distinct colour palette, cloaking these characters here in vibrant red leaves.
While his Japanese contemporaries Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu were still working in black-and-white around this time, the lesser-known Kinoshita was boldly venturing into the realm of colour cinematography – still a relatively new technology in late 1950s Asia, yet one which has rarely been put to better use than it is here. Within the widescreen Shochiku GrandScope, the earthy yellows and oranges of autumnal landscapes are detailed in vast, painterly compositions, while the colour palette’s eventual shift to greys and whites as snow starts to fall visually ushers in a dreary seasonal change.
Kinoshita eventually drains his mise-en-scène of colour as winter replaces autumn, shedding a light grey snow across spectacular sets.
Michael Powell’s Technicolor visuals no doubt influenced Kinoshita here, especially with matte backdrops of expansive mountain ranges heavily evoking Black Narcissus, and yet the village’s fluorescent green wash at night and its striking contrast against a bright pink sky makes for an electric contrast that was still quite novel in 1958. The potential of neon lighting was established from there, paving a path for Seijun Suzuki and Mario Bava’s stylistic genre experiments in the 1960s, though it wouldn’t be until Peter Greenaway’s brightly coloured satires in the 80s that we would see another filmmaker adopt and even match Kinoshita’s grand, theatrical artifice.
The Ballad of Narayama features some of the first neon lighting in cinema, striking a jarring visual contrast in the deep greens and pinks.
Because as a visual and formal statement, that is what The Ballad of Narayama is – a heavily curated representation of traditional Japanese storytelling, adapted to a modern medium. Kinoshita never hides the fact that these sets are built on highly controlled soundstages, but also never lets its limitations impose on his vibrant worldbuilding. The lighting dramatically shifts with the sentiment of each scene, at one point dimming to a spotlight on two characters consumed by darkness, and later casting an angry red wash over Orin’s disturbing arrival at a festival with several of her teeth smashed out.
A two shot contained within a spotlight, emphasising their connection through the negative space around them.An angry red wash is cast over the scene of Orin’s arrival at the festival, revealing that she has smashed several of her own teeth out.
Of course, all of this is entirely in line with kabuki theatre conventions as well, maintaining that invisible fourth wall between the scenery and the viewer as Kinoshita’s camera tracks parallel to the action, and frames interiors in wide shots like dioramas. These sets are incredibly dynamic, often moving walls and props to transition between scenes where one might expect to find a cut, and thereby manipulating our perception of time through theatrical rather than cinematic conventions.
This is not to say that Kinoshita’s direction is stagebound though, as there remains a very sharp attention to detail in his depth of field, mimicking the look of multiplane animations by dividing his frame into separate layers that move at different speeds when the camera drifts past. It is especially the final act of the film following Tatsuhei’s journey up the mountain with Orin on his back that Kinoshita delivers some of his most immaculate cinematic scenery, largely excising dialogue as grandmother and grandson traverse great mossy boulders, cascading waterfalls, and trees that grow more withered with the rising altitude.
Excellent visual storytelling in the editing and camera movement, journeying up the mountain through perilous terrains. The soundstages make for some incredibly rich compositions, obstructed by trees in the foreground while mountain ranges are painted out in matte backdrops.
Atop the craggy peak, the only sign of life are black crows standing over a number of skeletons – foreboding imagery for sure, and yet this pilgrimage is nevertheless one of serene acceptance. Through the ritual of obasute, generations are united in a cycle of life as enduring as the seasons themselves, which just so happen to shift at the exact point Tatsuhei begins his journey back down. Snow begins to fall, and again we move through the same shots as before, though this time in reverse order and with a soft, white powder concealing the vibrant colours.
Fog and death hangs in the air, littering the mountaintop with the skeletons of elders who have perished here before.
Though there may be peaceful closure within Tatsuhei’s family, the burst of violence that disrupts his descent is a culmination of several disputes we have witnessed up to now. His neighbour Matayan is at a similar age as Orin, and yet he does not embrace his encroaching death with such grace. Conversely, his son couldn’t be more ready to rid himself of the old man, finally resorting to dragging his fearful father up the mountain against his will. The brutality and selfishness of these villagers was also firmly established earlier with their lynching of a starving man who tried to steal food, and now as we watch Matayan and his son struggle on a cliff’s edge, we witness another cold-blooded murder. The son’s patricide is an unadulterated perversion of tradition, demonstrating an eagerness to escape the burden of the past rather than let it go with dignity as the conventions of obasute dictate. Grasping for some sort of justice as a bystander, Tatsuhei unleashes his fury upon his neighbour, and eventually succeeds in sending him plunging to his death too.
The village’s disrespect of elders pays off in this terrible struggle between father and son, sending the senior tumbling over the clifftop.
As if sectioning this entire tale off into a sad, distant dream of Japanese folklore, Kinoshita’s epilogue removes us completely from the vibrant sets and theatrical storytelling that have dominated The Ballad of Narayama up until now. Colours are desaturated into a miserable black-and-white, and for the first time the mountain scenery is entirely authentic, seeing a train pull into a modern-day station. The only indication of the region’s history is etched on a sign, giving the station its name – “Obasute”, or the “abandonment of old people.” A term that once carried great pride has become one of mourning, implying a desertion that is not merely symbolic, but loaded with cruel dispassion. Perhaps we can at least find some solace in the preservation of Japan’s forgotten legends through this cinematic ballad of lush, vibrant colours, healing that division between past and present with a painterly reinvention of theatrical and film conventions as we know them.
The epilogue is a powerful formal shift to black-and-white location shooting, returning us to the modern day where trains run through the old village.
The Ballad of Narayama is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the DVD is available to buy on Amazon.
If there is one thing that Paul King’s whimsically spirited prequel understands about the world of Wonka, it is that chocolate is not merely a treat – it is a meal, a drug, an entire system of currency, and the source of all meaning in life. In the urban winter wonderland of 19th century Paris, every corner of society is controlled by those wealthy chocolate makers who feed the sweet-toothed church and state, using their extensive powers to shut out rival entrepreneurs. For what is essentially an origin story covering the young adulthood of Roald Dahl’s famous chocolatier, the stakes are ludicrously high, hilariously blending conventions of crime, heist, prison break, comedy, and musical genres into a delicately crafted piece of cinematic confectionary.
Though delightfully entertaining on its own terms, the decision to connect Wonka’s story directly to the 1971 adaptation Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is ultimately double-edged. Had it been framed as an original spin on the novel, perhaps King might have put a more unique stamp on Dahl’s work, but he still clearly relishes the camp designs of the orange-skinned Oompa Loompas and nostalgic musical cues. Almost every original number here seems like filler between reprises of ‘Pure Imagination’ and ‘The Oompa Loompa Song’, both of which wistfully hint at the future Wonka will set up for himself at his chocolate factory.
For the most part at least, Wonka largely avoids being weighed down by its intellectual property, letting Timothee Chalamet put his own refreshing spin on the role previously played by Gene Wilder. Given that they are essentially playing the same character at separate points in his life, the differences between both performances are notable. Where Wilder’s Wonka was a mischievous cynic who had grown disillusioned with the world, Chalamet’s is a woefully naïve optimist, overly trusting of strangers and romantically hopeful that he can make his fortune within a day of moving to Paris. This Wonka does not confine himself to a factory, but effortlessly builds a network of allies and joyfully dances atop the glass ceiling of the Grand Palais with his closest friend, street urchin Noodle. Armed with nothing but a small case of enchanted items and chocolates, he proves his resourceful intellect from day one, even as he struggles against scheming competitors and greedy proprietors.
The cast that King gathers around Chalamet is similarly impressive, drawing on old collaborators from The Mighty Boosh like Rich Fulcher and Simon Farnaby, as well as Sally Hawkins and Hugh Grant from the Paddington movies. Joining his troupe for the first time as well are the comedic talents of Rowan Atkinson, Matt Lucas, Keegan Michael-Key, and Olivia Colman, the latter of whom particularly impresses as a greasy, Madame Thenardier-type con artist and innkeeper. There isn’t a weak link in this ensemble, each carrying through the eccentric wit, gentle slapstick, and charming sincerity that King has built into the fabric of his semi-magical world.
Next to these lively performances, King’s playful scene transitions and bouncy choreography similarly move the humour along at a rhythmic pace, though it is the production design which most crucially connects Wonka’s boundlessly creative ethos to his candy-coloured environment. The careful curation of pink, purple, and red palettes sets an air of warm festivity against the snow flurrying through Paris’ streets, while props and set pieces are as imaginatively bizarre in their visual conception as they are in their narrative functions. When Wonka finally sets up his shop at the Galeries Gourmet, these impossible visuals only continue to heighten with candy cotton clouds circling a giant, blossoming tree growing in the centre.
Given that Wonka’s candy also has physiological effects on consumers, from intoxicated overconfidence to spontaneous flying, it is no wonder the Chocolate Cartel see him as such a threat. The culmination of their sabotage arrives in a climactic display of remarkably economical storytelling, knitting about a dozen plot threads together into a tightly woven pay-off not unlike the final acts of the Paddington films. Giant questions such as the mystery of Noodle’s parentage are answered, but even more impressive is the intertwining of seemingly irrelevant plot points such as Slugworth’s extraordinarily firm handshake, Wonka’s illiteracy, and his friends’ incredibly niche skillsets. There are no loose ends to be found in this tidy bow of a resolution, save for those which lead directly into Dahl’s story. Wonka is so easily digestible, it might as well have been made by the chocolatier himself.
Given how deeply connected all Hayao Miyazaki’s films are to his sense of childhood wonder, trauma, and pantheistic spirituality, it may be useless singling out any one as his most personal. Still, the fact that The Boy and the Heron unusually captures the storyteller at two different points in his life through a pair of surrogate characters offers new, introspective dimensions to his body of work. For the first time in his decades-long career, his young hero is a boy, Mahito, clearly standing in for his younger self as he escapes into a fantasy world and tries to reconnect with his deceased mother. Fortunately, Miyazaki’s mother did not pass away until old age, and yet the time she spent in hospital during his formative years was clearly a point of reckoning with mortality for the young artist.
Next to Mahito, the mysterious Granduncle who constructed the whimsical realm of cursed oceans and anthropomorphic creatures also becomes a stand-in for Miyazaki, albeit one who is older, wiser, and full of regrets. Both are world builders with the power to shape imagined landscapes into either harmonious paradises or freakish nightmares, though given the innate human flaws of their creators, any setting is likely to be a mix of both. Now coming towards the end of their lives, they both seek out successors to carry their legacies, and yet the question of whether their work can or should be continued looms large. At some point in life, fantasy has run its course, and one must return to reality armed with the new perspectives that have been gained from their dreams.
For Mahito, this is a reality he would much rather forget – the Pacific War has not only killed his mother, but has forced him to evacuate Tokyo with his father, thereby staining his childhood with wartime trauma. His complicated feelings around moving to the countryside and his father remarrying his aunt Natsuko drive him to act out, while the presence of a mysterious grey heron that lives on the estate and an abandoned tower in the yard also tease the possibility of adventurous escape. It only takes Natsuko’s strange disappearance for Mahito to start connecting the dots between each of these, eventually journeying into the tower that was built by her eccentric Granduncle many years ago to discover the surreal universe which lies beneath its foundations.
The whimsical similarities to Alice in Wonderland are evident in this setup, betraying Miyazaki’s adoration of Disney’s animated classics, though the allusions don’t end here either. The influence of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs can similarly be traced right down to the seven eccentric grannies occupying Mahito’s countryside home, as well as the unconscious heroine who lies helpless inside a glass coffin late in the story. Much like his pioneering American counterpart, Miyazaki’s storytelling strengths lie in his manipulation of recognisable archetypes, even as he develops his narrative and symbolism in far more elusive directions.
Most prominent among the allegorical icons in The Boy and the Heron are the human-like birds who commonly bear some sort of malicious intent, whether it is the pelicans who eat the souls of unborn babies, or the legion of parakeets who strictly adhere to an authoritarian rule. The raspy-voiced heron in particular becomes a devious twist on Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit too, luring Mahito into his world with cruel illusions and grotesquely hiding his true form of a stumpy, caricaturish man in his toothy beak. Though Mahito learns that all herons are liars, he also finds this particular birdman reluctantly becoming one of his closest allies, and incidentally learns from him along the way that not all fabrications are necessarily evil. When the possibility of bringing back his deceased mother is dangled in front of him, he no doubt sees the sham, and yet it is his open-minded curiosity which leads him into a journey of emotional healing through his ancestor’s dreamlike creation.
“I know it is a lie, but I have to see it.”
Miyazaki delights in using hand-drawn animation to construct these layers of verisimilitude, heavily evoking a Salvador Dali-style surrealism when a duplicate of Mahito’s mother eerily melts away, and elsewhere when a dropped rose unexpectedly shatters into tiny pieces. This world operates on a dream logic that distorts the very structure of space and time, leading our young hero down an endless corridor of doors opening to different points in the past, and moulding his deepest fears into life-saving superpowers.
Lady Himi proves to be incredibly significant here, wielding control over the fire that killed Mahito’s mother, and thus turning that destructive force which haunted his nightmares into a force for good. Elemental imagery of air, water, and earth is woven through much of Miyazaki’s fantasy world, and yet it is her whirlwinds of blazing orange flames which consistently provide the most security to Mahito, as well as a maternal guidance that he has sorely missed in his grief.
Conversely, the direction that the Granduncle provides his young descendant is not one of nurture, but rather a burden of responsibility which may not even be worth the continuous effort. Life and fiction must both come to an end, Miyazaki recognises, and yet meaning persists in the wake of both. If The Boy and theHeron truly is his last film, then it is poetic that such a grand adventure into escapist fantasy and back again should be the one to conclude his decades of marvellous, animated world building.
The Boy and the Heron is currently playing in theatres.
When we initially land in the bizarre modern landscape of Weekend, it appears as if civilisation is standing on a precipice, tentatively waiting to tip over into absurdist anarchy. When cheating lovers Corinne and Roland eventually hit the road, it quickly becomes clear though that this is not the case – as far as Jean-Luc Godard is concerned, society is already there, consumed by its own avarice and hubris. Together, both spouses intend to claim their inheritance from Corinne’s parents, though privately they also plant to murder each other afterwards and greedily take more than what is rightfully theirs. By every economic, political, and social metric, they are the most standard definition of twentieth century bourgeoisie, self-absorbed in their materialistic mindsets while naively unaffected by the disaster unfolding around them. It is only a matter of time before they too are brought down to the grotesque level of squalor that those below them have been suffering through for their entire lives.
Coming out at the tail-end of Godard’s magnificent run of postmodern films in the 1960s, Weekend also signals a more politically-inclined direction for the French auteur that would last several more decades, yet would never reach anywhere near the heights of his early career. For now though, his Marxist-Leninist ideals that had previously only touched the surface in films like La Chinoise emerge fully formed here, coalescing almost flawlessly with his radical formal artistry.
Godard’s satire is more political than ever, eviscerating the clueless bourgeoisie who journey through modern hellscapes without acknowledging the downfall of civilisation.
As it is, Weekend marks the last true masterpiece of the French New Wave, subversively making as much a target out of the socioeconomic conventions of 1960s France as the medium of film itself. The two cannot be separated in Godard’s post-ironic deconstructions, purposefully muddling his love of cinema with his impulse to pull us from its emotional grip, rip it apart, and expose it as little more than a two-dimensional illusion of light flickering on a screen. The sporadic intertitles that interrupt its narrative and rhythmic flow are an integral part of this, romantically describing this work of cinema early on as “A film adrift in the cosmos”,before almost immediately eviscerating itself with a far more self-deprecating reproach – “A film found on a dump.” When civilisation comes crashing down as it has in Weekend, art holds very little significance, and yet even within these contradictions Godard still can’t help cherishing the creative expression it grants him.
A classic self-reflexive device from Godard – interrupting intertitles commenting on the film itself, sardonically undercutting whatever significance we place in it as a piece of art.
He is evidently not the only one trivially obsessed with pop culture in the midst of an apocalypse either, with a faction of rebels taking the titles of classic films as their code names – “Battleship Potemkin calling The Searchers” – while writer Emily Brontë and French revolutionary Louis Antoine de Saint-Just surreally wander through anachronistic vignettes. Like all of Godard’s greatest films, Weekend is an eclectic pastiche of both recognisable and obscure icons, embracing the inevitability of artistic theft while demonstrating the possibility of still creating something valuable and original. Incredible artistic feats such as this are all too scarce in an era of dull cliches, refusing to see the potential of pre-existing material to build anything other than soulless nostalgia, and it is this stubborn passiveness on a more universal scale which damns the French society of Weekend to its dystopian grave. These citizens who seem to be driving nowhere in particular would much rather tear each other down with violent, petty road rage than continue towards their destination.
Figures of English and French history make appearances at the end of human civilisation, building something new out of familiar references to European culture.
When motorists aren’t furiously wielding tennis racquets and rifles over their crashed cars, it is more than likely that we will instead find them stuck in endless traffic jams, thus forming another visual metaphor that Godard saturates with Kafkaesque insanity. In one of the defining shots of his career, the camera tracks from left to right along a string of cars on an open country road while Corinne and Roland roll comfortably down an empty lane, skipping the inconveniences that lower classes must suffer through. A cacophony of perpetual beeps screams through the air, doing little to ease the congestion which grows progressively stranger the further along we travel.
A man and a boy throwing a ball between cars, a vehicle turned completely upside down, a truck of monkeys making an escape, a horse and wagon standing atop a pile of faeces, an elderly couple playing chess on the road – for eight minutes, Godard drags us through tableaux of trivial nonsense, revealing the time-wasting frivolity that grows from a lack of forward movement. In case we become too comfortable in the offbeat rhythms of this long take, he cuts in a couple of timestamps indicating the minutes that pass from 1.40pm to 2.10pm, and he also irrationally loops back on the same cars a couple of times as well. We shouldn’t be surprised to find what is causing the holdup at the end of the traffic, but it is shocking nonetheless. A bloody, violent collision has streaked the road with blood, and left the corpses of adults and children lying on the roadside.
Weekend’s brilliant cinematic high arrives in the tracking shot following the absurdly long line of traffic, growing steadily more ridiculous bit by bit. At the end of the tracking shot, a spattering of blood and violence – dead bodies from the car collision are little more than time-consuming inconveniences in the grand scheme of things.
These cars may have once been proud emblems of modern industry and progress, and yet in Weekend they prove to be nothing more than pathetically inept status symbols, superficially signifying one’s wealth before perishing and potentially destroying their owners along with them. What starts as a biting gag in the film’s opening minutes gradually evolves into a dark formal motif, as well as a colourfully derelict part of Godard’s daunting wastelands bizarrely littered with burning vehicles. When his characters aren’t stealing clothes from dead bodies, they rarely give these a second look.
Godard’s mise-en-scène is littered with cars, forming a creative dystopian landscape out of these icons of technological progress.Godard’s violence is always drenched in artifice, sending up the action of Hollywood movies.
The only time we even see a collision in action rather than just the aftermath is when Corinne and Roland eventually lose their car in one, and yet even here Godard does not seek to capitalise on salacious thrills, instead wishing to remind his audience of the hollow artifice in such gratuitous spectacle. As our central couple lose control of their car, the film reel and projector appear to malfunction as well, chaotically slipping the image offscreen before stabilising on the image of the subsequent fiery wreck. At first, we might think that the bloodcurdling scream coming from the debris might finally offer us sincere, personal stakes, until we hear the shrieking woman cry out the source of her horror.
“My Hermès handbag!”
The first time we almost see an actual collision unfold, Godard runs the film off its tracks and the projector malfunctions, rendering the salacious thrills offscreen.
Even when the world is crashing and burning, the bourgeoisie will only begin to panic when those material luxuries that dull the existential pain are lost. When they’re the ones hitchhiking on an open road and begging for help, they also find out very quickly how hypocritical their own kind are. “Are you in a film or in reality?” one woman stops to ask. “In a film,” Roland responds, clearly giving the incorrect answer as the would-be good Samaritan drives off. Two more drivers also pull over to check the superficial political alliances of this stranded couple. “Would you rather be screwed by Mao or Johnson?” one of them inquires, before decisively making up their prejudiced mind when Roland chooses Johnson.
“Drive on, Jean. He’s a fascist.”
These petty political divisions may be even more insidious than those instances of road rage we witness elsewhere, elevating a shallow commitment to political ideals above moral goodness and survival. For as long as Godard is delivering commentary such as this with his usual creativity and wit, Weekend continues to move along to its own unpredictable rhythmic dissonance, and yet the point at which he stops the film in its tracks to linger on a political speech is far too plain to be considered inspired on any cinematic level. The highlight reel of previous scenes that he intermittently cuts in over the top does little to offset the dryness as well, marking a serious blemish on what is otherwise a masterpiece of post-classical filmmaking.
A bizarre jump cut deliberately breaking the immersion of the scene, as a field of ruined cars humorously turns into a field of sheep.
On one hand, it is tough to imagine a slightly younger Godard from the early 1960s carelessly falling back on a scene like this, though by nature of his dynamic, ever-changing style, such variation also comes with the territory of artistic innovation. After all, the long takes that appear throughout Weekend are not something we had seen from him before either, and yet they are constantly used to much more brilliant effect here as we wander environments in tracking shots and 360-degree pans. They are superbly controlled in their execution, pushing in and out on Corinne and Roland’s silhouettes early on as she erotically describes an affair, and elsewhere holding an air of constant surprise as Godard slowly reveals a mishmash of incongruent vignettes – a man playing drums off to the side in a forest, for instance, or the bored spectators watching a farmer play Mozart. Like the director himself, he too is holding onto his own irrelevant form of artistic expression while an indifferent society collapses around him.
A long take pushing in and out of these silhouettes early on, freezing the couple in darkness as they discuss their erotic affairs.The long takes and movements of Weekend are unusual for Godard who has always relied far more on his editing, and yet their use here still feels true to his Brechtian irony as the camera wanders off in the middle of scenes.
On an even broader level, it is also thanks to these long camera movements that Godard’s apocalyptic world feels so expansive, not so much aiming to establish any rigorous internal logic within it than to create the impression of a giant, meaningless odyssey. After all, was this catastrophic journey really worth the money at the end? Our two spoiled adventurers might think so at first, even going so far as to kill Corinne’s mother when she refuses to hand it over, though their success is cut short when this anarchic wasteland rears its ugly head one last time, landing them in the hands of violently radical hippies. Roland is gruesomely disembowelled – “The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome by more horror,” they explain – and Corinne doesn’t think twice to join in cannibalising her husband when she gets hungry. It is an amusingly out-of-left-field move from Godard to end this absurdist critique of consumer society by watching it ultimately devour itself, but if there is any consistency to be found at all within the sprawling chaos of Weekend, then we can at least reliably expect these vain, pampered materialists to be the source of their own inexorable ruin.
‘Eating the rich’ depicted with gruesome irony – a capitalist’s dystopia is an anarchist’s paradise.
Weekend is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the Blu-ray or DVD can be purchased on Amazon.
There are very few filmmakers who can accurately be called one of cinema’s great minimalists while detailing compositions with such organised clutter, revealing intimate details of an apartment building’s residents through the placement of a tricycle in a hallway, or the neat rows of white laundry hanging on a clothesline. For Yasujirō Ozu, it virtually came as second nature by the time he reached the pinnacle of his craftsmanship in Tokyo Story. There is a clean, precise order to the lives of the Hiryama family, precariously balancing traditional ideals valued by grandparents Shūkichi and Tomi against their children and grandchildren’s desire to keep striving towards a more independent future, and binding all three generations together through the meditative routines of everyday life. As the centrepiece of this narrative, they form a delicate microcosm of post-war Japanese culture, gently tugging further apart over time yet never reaching any sort of breaking point.
Bodies are staggered from foreground to background with care, here blocking each actor in a separate layer of the frame. This is a family drama, but there is division even among the children.Ozu is on the short list of cinema’s greatest masters of mise-en-scène, composing his shots with the sort of detail that turns settings into extensions of characters. Here, it is the tricycle in the foreground, the sake bottles off to the right, and the hanging laundry in the background which tells us about the residents of this apartment building.
For Shūkichi and Tomi, negative emotions are sealed tightly behind beaming smiles and quiet hums, only ever expressing difficult sentiments in private conversations. “We have children of our own, yet you’ve done the most for us,” Shūkichi warmly thanks his widowed daughter-in-law Noriko, expressing gratitude for providing the hospitality during his visit that Shige and Kōichi were too busy to offer. They too are polite in their outward mannerisms, but are far less adept at concealing their frustration over the burden of their parents’ visit. “Crackers would have been good enough for them,” Shige scolds her husband when he buys them expensive cakes, and she can barely hide her disappointment when they return early from a spa vacation organised to get them out of the house.
Indeed, tension is rife in Ozu’s family drama, though comparing it to the bitter dynamics of an Ingmar Bergman film or the overflowing Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk reveals few similarities. Ozu’s friction does not beg for urgent resolution, but would much rather dwell in silent acceptance, evoking a Zen state that finds harmony in the paradoxes of the modern world. Smokestacks, powerlines, and train tracks impose their harsh edges on the curves of natural formations and traditional architecture, becoming the conflicting subjects of Ozu’s characteristic pillow shots. Where a more conventional director might use a simple establishing shot to transition from one scene to the next, we instead slip through elegiac clusters of exterior views, lifting us outside the narrative flow and into a state of transient suspension. Perhaps just as uncommon as a talented minimalist with crowded mise-en-scène is an all-time great editor who does not push their pacing beyond an easy, measured rhythm, and with roughly ten or so seconds dividing each cut in these montages, Ozu claims this rarified space as well.
Smoke stacks reach for the sky, and powerlines intersect them at corresponding angles, imposing a geometric rigidity on the scenery of modern Japan.Compare those harsh edges and angles to the elegant curves of traditional Japanese architecture and sculptures – a huge visual contrast between the country’s past and present is represented in Ozu’s pillow shots.Perhaps the single greatest image of industrial progress, disrupting a peaceful seaside village with a steam train running right through its middle.
Even beyond his pillow shots though, he remains averse to the idea of only staying in a scene for its drama, frequently cutting to an empty room before it is filled with people, and lingering there for a short time after their conversations have ceased. This is not quite the tragic neorealism of Vittorio de Sica or Roberto Rossellini, but rather a naturalism that elevates mundane, everyday living to a level of spiritual transcendence, stripping away obtrusive distractions to encompass us in a contemplative stillness. Besides one deliberate tracking shot when Shūkichi and Tomi sorrowfully head back home from Tokyo, the camera never moves, consistently sitting low to the ground at roughly the same height as the characters in their traditional kneeling position. As if following the rigorous consistency of the family’s routines, he selects a handful of these compositions to repeat throughout the film too, connecting us back to established visual beats. This does not only synchronise us with Shūkichi and Tomi’s symmetrical ‘there and back’ journey across Japan, but it also transforms the act of dutiful repetition into a formal, contemplative poetry that stretches through the entire film.
Ozu will return to a select few compositions throughout Tokyo Story to create a formal rhythm, underscoring the repetition of his characters’ routines and physical journeys.These two shots demonstrate another use of repetition. They appear roughly ten minutes apart and capture the exact same location in the house, but Ozu pushes the camera slightly further forward the second time round to study the movements of his characters more closely.
Ozu’s delicate timing and framing of these shots are also far more unified with his settings than his characters, often only observing family members from a passive distance as they drift through corridors and rooms. Just like the parallel lines and intersecting curves of the outside world, there is a geometric logic to his careful arrangement of each household item as they fill in negative space, obstruct compositions, and layer hallways with a vivid depth of field. Even when characters are not present, these homes carry the spirit of their day-to-day lives, carving out an unassuming beauty from each sake bottle, pot plant, and umbrella that sits in stasis between uses, yet which makes these spaces feel truly lived in.
Ozu wisely sits in rooms for slightly longer than his characters are actually present, letting us study the incredible detail of his compositions – the pot plant in the foreground, the frames within frames further down, the storage packed close to the ceiling. He uses every part of his shot to beautiful effect.Another intricately composed shot, revealing the life that persists in domestic settings even while his characters are absent – the hanging decorations, the cabinets along the right side of the frame, the low table slightly obstructing the shot in the foreground.
As we rest in the soothing passage of these still images, time very gradually becomes visible in Tokyo Story, delicately tracing Japan’s shift away from its complicated past and into an equally complex future. As innocent as Shūkichi and Tomi are in their old-fashioned nostalgia, their disappointment in their children at times seems firmly out-of-touch with modern demands, and Shige also recalls with disdain how her father would often come home drunk late at night when she was a child. Her desire to keep moving forward is not out of place among her generation, particularly given the recent traumas of World War II and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Shōji is rarely discussed in Tokyo Story, but his absence silently carries the trauma of World War II, driving home a point of tension between those clinging to the past and those moving into the future.
Having lost their beloved Shōji in the Pacific War, the Hiryamas should understand this all too well, and yet the pain of his memory hurts differently for each family member. Noriko hangs on dearly to the memory of her deceased husband, but when Shūkichi and Tomi notice their son’s framed photo still up in her house, she can barely address it without making a convenient excuse to exit. Later when Shūkichi gently encourages her to let Shōji go and remarry, she accepts her new path with tender grief, finally taking on the lesson that her father-in-law has spent weeks learning the hard way.
For that older generation, the realisation of their fading relevance and mortality has trickled in very slowly. As Tomi sits atop a hill and watches her grandson play, she quietly wonders what he will be when he grows up, before pausing on a sad, poignant question – “By the time you’re a doctor, I wonder if I’ll still be here.” Later during their getaway at the hot springs, Ozu foreshadows her eventual death further with a brief dizzy spell, and at least partially suggests that the commotion of modern Japan is somewhat responsible for her ailing health. The noisy city nightlife certainly doesn’t help either, as there is a subtle restlessness in Ozu’s cutting between Shūkichi and Tomi trying to sleep, the rowdy patrons down below, and those empty, perfectly aligned slippers sitting just outside their room.
Excellent editing at the spa as Shūkichi and Tomi struggle to sleep, conveying a restlessness as Ozu cuts to noisy nightlife below and the slippers just outside their room waiting to be worn.Even when he isn’t filling his frame, Ozu still uses lines and figures to create these gorgeous minimalist compositions.
Not one to let life-changing events break through his emotional restraint, Ozu refuses to even show Tomi suddenly falling sick on the train home from Tokyo, nor her eventual death back home in Onomichi. This information is instead shared second-hand through other family members who are finally united under a single roof in grief. Ozu’s rigorous blocking of mourners at the funeral holds together a modicum of tradition that survives Tomi’s passing, and her children even contemplate their regrets over not being around more – “No one can serve his parents beyond the grave.” Unfortunately, their empathy is short-lived. Out of her father’s earshot and barely noting his loneliness, Shige tactlessly expresses her wish that he was the one to go first, and not long after she and her siblings have once again disappeared back to their lives in other far-flung cities.
A rigorous arrangement of bodies at the funeral – structure and tradition represented visually.Outside, Ozu cuts to the cemetery of clustered gravestones, mirroring his blocking of living people – cycles of life and death are embodied in this formal connection.
As flawed as the Hiryama children may be, Ozu’s meditation on generational changes is far from a condemnation of their modern values, and much more an elegiac reflection upon the natural course of life. Following his wife’s passing, a solitary Shūkichi gradually grows more isolated in Ozu’s mise-en-scène, mirroring the upright stature of two old stone pillars as he gazes out at the rising sun, and later sitting alone among his furniture as his home’s sole remaining occupant. These settings are visual extensions of their occupants, but so too are these characters equally consumed by their dynamic environments, drifting along a steady, one-way stream into a fading past. Few directors have found such an eloquent formal match between their aesthetic and their profound contemplations, yet even by Ozu’s standards Tokyo Story stands as his most carefully composed expression of melancholy acceptance, creatively distilling the experience of time’s unyielding passage down to the transient distance between one lingering instant and the next.
A solitary Shūkichi grows more isolated and one with his environment, with his posture reflected in the vertical sculptures around him.A melancholy final shot framing Shūkichi off to the left of the shot, leaving negative space where Tomi once sat.
Tokyo Story is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the DVD is available to buy on Amazon.
The god’s-eye view of humanity that Wim Wenders grants us in Wings of Desire is refreshingly distant, flying high above the streets, flats, and offices of 1980s West Berlin, before swooping down to tune into the thoughts of its citizens. Like radio waves with a transmitter but no receiver, these streams-of-consciousness aimlessly echo out into chaotic universe. They appear frivolously trivial when taken on their own, and yet they serve an integral purpose in grasping humanity’s mosaic totality.
Still, it is not always fulfilling to be as omniscient as those two angels who up until now have embraced their God-given purpose to “Look, gather, testify, verify, preserve” those hidden thoughts that reveal our truest selves. Damiel and Cassiel are purely observers, standing atop buildings and statues with their white, feathery wings spread out behind them, and only ever interacting with mortals when one vaguely senses their spiritual presence. In these moments, fleeting eye contact is made with Wender’s invisible, floating camera, and some intangible expression of hope or wonder crosses their faces. For the angels though, this is the full extent of their correspondence, while Wenders renders more physical attempts at interacting through ghostly double exposures. “To watch is not to look from above, but at eye level,” Damiel contemplates, desperately longing to make the permanent journey from the heavens to a world where one can taste, feel, and love within the limitations of an earthly body.
Wenders flies his camera around this radio tower early on, simultaneously introducing us to the setting of Berlin and setting up each of its inhabitants as their own transmitter of psychic radio waves.Creative use of double exposure to reveal the angels’ ethereal separation from the physical world.
Like The Wizard of Oz and Stalker before it, Wings of Desire employs a similar formal device of alternating between colour and monochrome cinematography as we switch from fantasy to reality, though perhaps Michael Powell’s deeply philosophical romance A Matter of Life and Death bears closer resemblance to Wender’s take here. From the angels’ foreign perspective, everything appears in an ethereal greyscale – certainly beautiful in its own right, yet failing to capture the broad spectrum of colours that can only be seen when grounded on Earth, where humans relish the subtle shades and hues which come with the knowledge of their eventual passing. Up close, these tiny joys are felt even more viscerally, but only when the melancholy transience of life has also been accepted.
Superb helicopter shots flying above Berlin, taking a distant bird’s-eye perspective before swooping down low.A brilliant use of Berlin’s infrastructure to compose an avant-garde city symphony, drawing out its character.Diving deep into the minds of Berlin’s citizens and projecting their inner thoughts as voiceovers, each weaving together into a rich tapestry of everyday life.
The innocent hope that Wenders draws from these urban landscapes is shaped even further through the social and historical context embedded in virtually every shot as well, infusing his grainy location shooting with an air of poignant whimsy. Unknowingly set right before the fall of the Berlin Wall and bearing the leftover traumas of the Holocaust, Wings of Desire dwells in a space of bleak uncertainty between two world-changing events. Modernist architecture lines derelict streets, disused flats of churned-up mud stretch out for acres, and the Potsdamer Platz that one elderly man recalls from his youth is now spoiled by a graffitied section of the wall dividing Berlin, transforming this once-proud cultural icon of commerce into nothing more than a political partition.
Wenders firmly grounds this fantasy in the reality of late-twentieth century Germany, feeling the effects of the Cold War and the division it has wreaked by way of the Berlin Wall.
In a brief The Tree of Life-style flashback too, Wenders continues to expand our view of this setting with the creation of its land, when “history had not yet begun.” A single, withered tree stands alone in a rippling lake, imprinting its black shape against a foggy backdrop with no visible horizon, and yet somehow from this total scarcity humanity incredibly evolves into advanced, intelligent lifeforms. The angels have been there since the start to witness it all, and more than anything else in the world, they are rightfully astonished by this incredible miracle of persevering life.
Immaculate greyscale minimalism in this glimpse of the land’s creation, poignantly observing the world before the dawn of humanity.
Today, these mortal beings are living testimonies to the city’s complicated past and present, despite very few of them explicitly reflecting on anything beyond the day-to-day minutia. Each one of these minor figures are integral to the silent cinema homage that Wenders is conducting here, building a character out of a metropolis as he thoughtfully calls back to those avant-garde city symphonies of the 1920s like Man With a Movie Camera, lyrically teasing out a visual and aural poetry for lengthy, plotless passages of time. The abstract rhythms of his long dissolves merge with an eerie, polyphonic choir here, running multiple vocal lines up against each other in discordant harmonies, and thereby mirroring the disjointed voiceovers that continue to murmur away in the background.
An inspired use of long dissolves in the editing, fading in glimpses of eyes and angel wings.
Like a disembodied spirit, Wenders circles his camera around the heads that project these thoughts outwards before latching onto another, while every so often an unusual exception stands out among the cacophony of whispers that sways these angels to try and forge a connection. Tragically, these attempts are too often in complete vain, as Cassiel’s affectionate contact with a suicidal man in one instance goes entirely unnoticed, leaving the angel deep in tormented grief as he helplessly watches the bearer of messy, jumbled feelings jump to his death.
“The sun in my back, on the left the star. That’s good: sun and a star. Her little feet. Hopping from one foot to the other. She danced so sweetly. We were all alone. Has she got my letter? I don’t want her to read it. Berlin means nothing to me… Havel? Is that a lake? Over there, wedding, or what? The East is everywhere, really. Strange people, they’re shouting. I don’t care. All these thoughts. I’d really rather not think any more. I’m going, why?”
The heartbreak that comes with the omniscience of an angel, seeing the thoughts of a suicidal man yet being unable to help.Marion is a bridge between the Earth and heavens, wearing angel wings in her trapeze act where she flies high off the ground.
Damiel’s eye is also caught by a disillusioned human who wishes to cast off ties to Earth and fly free, though in a very different manner. In a struggling circus, a French trapeze artist named Marion swings through the air wearing angel wings, and laments her loneliness in a foreign city. Emotionally, she lives in a space halfway between the worlds of humans and angels, unknowingly beckoning Damiel down from the sky as she privately reflects on the strange comfort she feels from some invisible companion.
“I know so little. Maybe because I am too curious. Often my thoughts are all wrong, because it’s like I’m talking to someone else at the same time.”
It is with this line that she turns to the camera and looks us right in the eye – not the first time a character has done this, but certainly the most intimate. Damiel feels truly seen, and that fondness that he previously felt for all humans begins to blossom into singular romantic attraction, directed towards a specific individual.
As Damiel falls in love with Marion, so do we, locking eyes with her when she sense an invisible presence and breaks the fourth wall.
In a strangely funny diversion from these stories, Wenders spends some time following American actor Peter Falk as he shoots a film in Berlin, before revealing that he too was once an angel who ultimately gave up his wings to be human. Falk plays himself here, expressing an immense gratitude for his rebirth into a body that allows him to smoke, drink coffee, and create art. Wenders’ dedication at the end of the film briefly hints along these lines too, expressing gratitude for his three biggest directorial inspirations – Yasujirō Ozu, François Truffaut, and Andrei Tarkovsky, who he thanks among “all the former angels.”
To humbly bring oneself down to the level of the lowest human and then share its joy through love or art is a truly noble calling, and one that Damiel embraces the moment he wakes up as a human when a slab of metal falls on his head. He bleeds profusely and feels great pain, yet he couldn’t be happier in this moment – any sort of sensation at all is proof of his regeneration into a mortal body, and he can’t help sharing his sudden ability to perceive colours with passing strangers. In essence, his newfound wonder is a tangible extension of the nostalgic poetry formally weaved into the film’s structure, each passage prefacing lyrical ruminations on childhood with the same six words.
“When the child was a child, it was the time of these questions: why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? Isn’t life under the sun just a dream? Isn’t what I see, hear, and smell just the mirage of a world before the world? Does evil actually exist, and are there people who are really evil? How can it be that I, who am I, wasn’t before I was, and that sometime I, the one I am, no longer will be the one I am?”
The angels’ view of the world is limited, unable to perceive the colourful graffiti and apartments which brings vibrant excitement to the life of humans.
Cassiel is not wrong to feel that he has more to accomplish as an angel, thus choosing instead to remain behind, but of the two Damiel is clearly the one with the least regrets as begins his new life. When he finally approaches Marion, she once again looks straight at the camera, but this time Wenders’ colour photography captures the blazing red tones of her outfit, and the target of her gaze is fully visible. “I am together,” Damiel’s voiceover whispers as they kiss, uniting both the heavens and the Earth in a fleeting expression of devotion that stretches far beyond the transcendent, into the infinite.
A deeply romantic and sentimental finale, bathing Damiel and Marion in a passionate red as the realms of heaven and Earth meet with a tender kiss.
The first time we encounter housewife Laura Jesson in the local railway tearoom of Brief Encounter, it is impossible to fathom the depths of her heartache. Her eyes are wide but uncfocused, concealing a complex mix of emotions from her endlessly chatty friend Dolly and the man sitting with them, Dr. Alec Harvey, who abruptly leaves to catch his train. The vague unease that hangs in the air cannot quite be pinpointed to any specific kind of sadness, though by the time the extended flashback which dominates most of the film leads us back to this moment, we are given the context to fully empathise with her. There wasn’t any way for us to know it before, but these are her last few minutes with the man she has secretly spent several weeks falling deeply in love with, and yet who can now only bid a final farewell with a discreet squeeze on her shoulder before disappearing forever.
In the absence of any giant romantic gesture or swooning kiss, this anticlimax brought about by Dolly’s unwelcome interruption is quietly shattering, forcing Laura to retreat into her mind and away from the onward march of an oblivious world. Time is a precious resource in Brief Encounter, particularly at the railway station where her and Alec’s schedules fleetingly align every Thursday where a giant clock imposes on their tiny figures, and through which the echoes of hours and minutes announce each new arrival.
The railway station is an embodiment of time’s constant passage, hanging a giant clock over Laura as a cruel reminder.
In essence, this setting is an icon of persistent transience, bringing strangers together every day by a common need to travel before separating them the moment they board a train. The ticket inspector and tearoom owner whose small talk frequently diverts our attention perfectly typify this, teasing a potential romance which never has the time to grow into anything fruitful. Together, they also form a more innocent reflection of Laura and Alec’s covert affair, with all four love interests trying to explore relationships confined to a fleeting moment in time. The romance is intoxicating, but the demands of life never go away, consistently drawing Laura and Alec back to their families at home.
At least within her subjective recollections of the past, Laura is able to exert some control over the flow of time and carry pieces of it into the future. As she returns home and sits down with her husband Fred, she begins to confess her infidelity, though not aloud. Instead, her voiceover pours out what she might have said if the stability of their family unit wasn’t at stake. David Lean starts to leap back into the memories of her affair with Alec here, from their innocent first meeting in the tearoom, through their first kiss, and eventually to that final decision to part ways. Laura’s narration drips with sentimental lyricism, and yet equally infused with it is the heavy guilt that slowly erodes her dignity.
“It’s awfully easy to lie when you know that you’re trusted implicitly. So very easy, and so very degrading.”
Touches of Jean Renoir in the romantic dates by the river, only barely keeping the melancholy at bay.
Love and shame are closely intertwined here, both being deeply internal emotions that cannot be openly expressed to the world, and which thus lead to greater repression. Lean’s elegant camera movements and deep focus capture this tension with immense aesthetic beauty, especially drawing on the poetic realism of French auteurs Jean Renoir and Marcel Carne which inevitably leads such romances to tragically fated ends. Clouds of smoke and shadow obscure scenes of blooming passion at the railway station, while the whistle and rattling of passing trains intermittently drown out speech altogether, absorbing Laura into a dreamy reverie that offers an escape from ordinary life. When her relationship with Alex progresses to the point of meeting up elsewhere, lush gardens and babbling rivers begin to host their secret dates, calling back to the nostalgic vacation of A Day in the Country. Meanwhile, the piano concertos of Sergei Rachmaninoff delicately climb and descend scales in romantic accompaniment, though never quite losing track of the sorrow shared between these guilty lovers.
Expressionism at the train station with the smoke and shadows, making a shady character out of London’s urban districts.
That this is the same director who would later craft some of Britain’s greatest historical epics in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia is somewhat surprising given the profound introspection of the piece, though if anything Lean is simply proving the versatility of his immense talent. His inspired development of characters may be the strongest similarity between these films, here seeing Laura shrivel into a guilt-ridden shadow of herself as she takes up smoking to calm her nerves, and quietly interprets an accident involving her son as the universe’s punishment.
Lean portrays guilt with visible unease, forcing Laura to gaze at her own reflection as she tells her first lie, and elsewhere backlighting her sweaty profile.
Perhaps even stronger though are those moments which visualise Laura’s interiority, imagining an impossible future through double exposure effects which see her and Alec cruise, dance, and wander tropical beaches, and later hanging on her face as she tells Fred her first lie and ashamedly stares into a mirror. The deeper she sinks into her guilt, the darker Lean’s lighting becomes too, as a much greater deception further along sees her silhouetted at a payphone, with only the profile of her sweaty, anguished face vaguely illuminated.
More reflections, though this time with the fantasy of an impossible future is captured in double exposure.
Being shot right before the end of World War II in 1945, the hope for some restored order to the nuclear family unit looms large in Brief Encounter, and so there is no disagreement here between Laura and Alec when the shared guilt becomes insurmountable. A job opportunity for Alec in Johannesburg provides the perfect opportunity to make a clean break, but not before a quick journey back through all those locations that they had previously visited together.
For a short second after his train finally departs, a suicidal impulse crosses Laura’s mind. Lean’s camera tilts to the side in a dramatically canted angle as she rushes out to the platform, though panic quickly dissipates into mournful regret, and the rest of her life fades back into view. The dream ends, as does her internal confession, and although Fred has not heard a single word of it there is a quizzical look on his face. “You’ve been a long way away. Thank you for coming back to me,” he gently acknowledges with absolute sincerity. Perhaps Laura will may never find the resolution she seeks with Alec, or the same excitement which lifted her out of the monotony of being a 1940s housewife. But if there is any solace to be found, then it is in the love that is still very much present in this modest home, never even requiring such complex sentiments to be spoken aloud in order to be mutually understood.
A canted angle and strip of light across Laura’s eyes as she faces a bleak future, and her mind disappears into hopeless despair.
Brief Encounter is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, and the DVD or Blu-ray can be bought on Amazon.
It is a horrifying enough realisation on its own that Polish immigrant Trelkovsky is slowly transforming into Simone, the previous occupant of his Parisian apartment who jumped from its window. Even more disturbing is the creeping feeling that his condescending neighbours are erasing all traces of his real identity, leaving the ambiguous question by the end of The Tenant as to whether it is even worth distinguishing between the two residents. From the moment he goes to visit a barely alive Simone in her hospital bed with her face wrapped in bandages, he feels strangely drawn to her, though he is abruptly interrupted from investigating further when she locks eyes with him and lets out a monstrous scream. Sometime later, she dies from her injuries, though one thing at least has been made clear – she too sensed the presence of that mysterious, frightening connection between them.
All that is left of the previous tenant Simone is this bandaged, dehumanised mummy, letting out a monstrous as she locks eyes with Trelkovsky.
In the eyes of Monsieur Zy and the other inhabitants of their building, that bond is superficially obvious. Both the foreigner Trelkovsky and the queer-coded Simone are troublemakers with little regard for those social conventions that keep a tenuous peace – no loud noises, no visitors, fall in line with the majority opinion. They are as bad as that mother and her disabled daughter being viciously evicted from their apartment via a petition that Trelkovsky refuses to sign, which incidentally alienates him even further. The unifying thread binding him together with these similarly ostracised strangers is never explicitly labelled, but it doesn’t need to be. Whether one diverges from the mainstream through their sexuality, ethnicity, or physical condition, there is little room to be made for outsiders in these flats.
With a setting this absurdly oppressive, one could easily imagine some alternate version of The Tenant as a Kafkaesque comedy, or a drama aimed at confronting social issues. As the final piece of Roman Polanski’s Apartment trilogy though following Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion, Trelkovsky’s disintegrating psyche is complete submerged in paranoid horror, creeping into those safe spaces one would hope to savour as their last sanctuary in a treacherous world.
German expressionism in this manipulation of shadows, angles, and sets – there is a lineage from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari to this shot.
Cinematographer Sven Nykvist strays far from his usual close-up heavy work with Ingmar Bergman here, using wide-angle lenses that claustrophobically warp the dimensions of building hallways around Trelkovsky, and tracking his camera through dark rooms with measured precision. The Hitchcockian influence is apparent too, mounting an intrusive suspense in the opening shot as we float outside the dreary grey establishment and peer through its windows, and later when the central stairwell is framed at dizzying angles that almost look to be straight out of Vertigo. Like James Stewart’s private detective Scottie, he too is destined for a great fall.
Overhead shots looking down stairwells call back to Vertigo, leading our protagonist to an inevitable fall from a great height.The Alfred Hitchcock references continue in abundance – Rear Window here as Trelkovsky spies on his neighbours through binoculars, suspicious of their odd behaviour.
With an inquisitive Trelkovsky being pulled deeper into a mystery that won’t let him go, the comparisons don’t end there either. His observations of suspicious behaviours through binoculars frame him like Stewart in Rear Window, as he amasses a collection of bizarre clues pointing back to Simone in long, patient stretches of purely visual storytelling. So too does Psycho’s influence rear its head as her identity begins to take over, cutting a feminine silhouette of his body in the apartment that has steadily grown darker and messier over time, and which reverberates disarray across a wintery lakeside chaotically littered with fold-up chairs. Though Polanski often uses wide shots to frame his deteriorating mise-en-scène, his compositions frequently carry a psychologically invasive effect, isolating him at the centre of a conspiracy that follows him wherever he goes.
Polanski hits the trifecta of Hitchcock allusions with Psycho, putting Trelkovsky under a microscope as his identity and gender come into question.The chaos of Polanski’s mise-en-scène is astonishingly composed, littering a wintery lakeside with green fold-up chairs – a visual representation of Trelkovsky’s disintegrating psyche.
As for how much of this plot is merely in his head, Polanski consistently underscores Trelkovsky’s loose grip on reality, but otherwise remains purposefully ambiguous. “The former tenant always wore slippers after ten o’clock. It was always more comfortable for her – and for the neighbours,” he is first advised when he moves in, though what starts as simple pointers soon becomes a cloud of ridiculously strict expectations hanging over his head, making him anxious to even turn on a tap. Though lingering deep in the subtext, Polanski’s past as a Holocaust survivor and victim of prejudice after the war is embedded in Trelkovsky’s experiences with this community of authoritarian neighbours, and the allegory is only emphasised in his bold but ultimately misguided choice to cast himself as the lead. When he begins to realise the influence coming from servers at a local café trying to offer him Simone’s regular orders and cigarette brands, Polanski’s acting simply cannot sustain the intensity of his own direction.
Still, this imperfect performance does not keep The Tenant from excelling in its psychosexual study of alienation and guilt, leading us along a string of bizarre motifs disassociating Trelkovsky from his physical body. When he finally investigates the bathroom where he has spied neighbours standing motionless for hours on end, he finds a wall of hieroglyphs, leading him back to Simone and her academic studies in Egyptology. Looking out the window, he sees another figure watching him through binoculars from the reverse angle – only to realise with horror that it is himself in his own apartment. An effectively unnerving score of trembling and plucked strings accompany these unearthly discoveries, many of which are never so much explained outright as they are weaved together into an occult of urban conformity and ostracisation, until that sacred sense of selfhood comes into question.
“At what precise moment does an individual stop being who he thinks he is?”
Conspiracies, connections, and delusions emerge. Hieroglyphs in the bathroom call back to Simone’s interest in Egyptology, and Trelkovsky even witnesses his own double spying on him from across the courtyard.
In the midst of his madness, this is the question Trelkovsky is driven to one drunken night as he feels himself slowly slipping away. “If you cut off my head – would I say, ‘Me and my head’ or ‘Me and my body’? What right has my head to call itself me?” he slurs to his new friend Stella – a woman who of course used to be Simone’s friend too. Like the Ship of Theseus that had all its original components replaced over time in the famous thought experiment, we too are left to question how long he can still call himself Trelkovsky while all those pieces that once defined him are being swapped out. In the end, he is only becoming what everyone else already sees him as – just another outsider, trying and failing to play by an impossible set of rules.
Of course, the more Trelkovsky tries to placate his neighbours’ demands, the more he loses control of his own mind, leaving us to wonder with this recent emergence of Simone is really the manifestation of a more authentic, transgressive self he has tried to repress for the sake of the status quo. His courtship with Stella often feels more like a social obligation than anything else, hinting at a part of his sexuality that he has never properly sought to understand, and which has only fuelled his fear of being exposed.
Transgressive and controversial characterisations, situating characters as outsiders from the status quo due to their queerness, ethnicity, and disability.Trelkovsky’s fate is written out from the beginning with Simone’s attempted suicide, revealing the broken glass that she fell through, and which Trelkovsky will soon shatter again in the exact same way.
In effect, Trelkovsky is caught in a destructive loop of self-loathing, finally throwing himself out of his apartment window as Simone did before him, and then almost immediately repeating the act a second time. So too does Polanski recall the opening tracking shot at this moment as well, floating the camera around the outside of the building, but this time seeing Trelkovsky’s hallucination of all those who had conspired against him cheering and clapping his attempted suicide.
It isn’t until Trelkovsky finds himself waking up under layers of bandages that The Tenant finally comes full circle though. Now at his lowest point, he is more identical to Simone than ever, bearing a perfect resemblance to the maimed, faceless woman he met back in the hospital ward that he now occupies. As his eyes meet those of the visitor standing above him, all he can do is let out a monstrous scream – not just in recognition of his own face, naively peering down at his disfigured body, but also of that infinite loop which will once again take him down the same deranged path of stolen individuality and mutilated personhood.
A haunting closure of the narrative loop, bringing us back to the start with the reveal of Trelkovsky and Simone’s merged identity – a path of mutilated individuality and dehumanisation.
The Tenant is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play, or YouTube, and the Blu-ray or DVD can be bought on Amazon.
With The Lord of the Rings dominating so much of 21st century pop culture, it is easy to take for granted just how subversive J.R.R. Tolkien’s story was in the 1950s, even as he borrowed pieces of Greek, Nordic, and Germanic mythology. Our central hero is not some predestined Chosen One like Achilles, a legendary wizard such as Merlin, and does not possess the extraordinary physical strength of Beowulf, though these ancient archetypes certainly populate the narrative’s sidelines. Should any of these alternate characters attempt to fulfil the main quest at hand, they would be guaranteed almost certain failure. Humility and loyalty are far more important qualities here, neither of which are so easily corrupted by the One Ring that reaches into the minds of those with altruistic ambitions and twists them into selfish megalomaniacs.
As a result, Frodo Baggins the hobbit stands among the few figures uniquely capable of carrying and destroying this cursed artefact, and is consequently driven to separate himself from his Fellowship of powerful companions who may fall to its temptation. The Lord of the Rings stretches across an enormous span of land and time, yet by framing this ordinary creature who has never stepped far outside his home as our primary protagonist, Tolkien offers a fresh perspective that Peter Jackson gladly capitalises on in his cinematic adaptation.
The Lord of the Rings is one of the key texts that cannot be missed when talking about world building in either literature or cinema, and specifically in the film adaptations Jackson imbues his imagery with fantastical awe.
Through Frodo’s inexperienced eyes, we appreciate Middle Earth as one of the richest fictional worlds of literary history, complete with fully developed languages, genealogies, and cultures. While this film trilogy only touches on a small portion of Tolkien’s original creation, there is a wonder here that emerges from Jackson’s rendering of its extraordinary, almost imperceptible details. With enormous respect to the astonishing work of literature that had been placed in his hands, Jackson went about faithfully translating the written descriptions of great civilisations, creatures, and weapons to a visual medium, imbuing the design of each with a level of cultural and historical detail that takes multiple viewings to properly comprehend. Jackson realises that we do not need close-ups on the runes of Orc armour nor the embroidered textures of an Elven mourning dress to note their significance. Simply by including them in the frame, he viscerally conveys the sprawling authenticity of his intricately constructed world with minimal exposition, while occasionally compromising on the compositional beauty they may have offered with more precise framing.
Peter Jackson proves his mastery of long shots in The Lord of the Rings, crafting a vast world of astonishing beauty with the use of miniature models, matte paintings, and digital effects.
A huge portion of this fantastical visual style of course comes down to his fine synthesis of digital and practical effects too, more frequently relying on the latter with his matte paintings and miniature city models built into the side of imposing mountain ranges. Along with deserved comparisons to D.W. Griffith’s historical standard of epic filmmaking, Jackson makes a name for himself next to Georges Méliès with his in-camera illusions, shrinking hobbits and dwarves next to taller creatures with forced perspective angles. Meanwhile, CGI is judiciously used to elevate these practical effects rather than replace them, allowing an expressive motion-captured performance from Andy Serkis as Gollum that may have otherwise been limited beneath layers of prosthetics. As evidenced a decade later with The Hobbit trilogy, technological innovation does not equal art, but much like James Cameron and Christopher Nolan at their peaks, Jackson is primarily using it here as a tool for his grand storytelling and world-building.
Jackson uses forced perspective where he can to shoot actors in the same scene together when their characters have different heights – Elijah Wood is actually seated several feet behind Ian McKellen here.Another use of forced perspective to emphasise the ring in the foreground, using a specific version of the prop that was the size of a dinner plate.Some of the greatest motion-capture of modern cinema can be found in Andy Serkis’ performance as Gollum, tracing each facial expression that might have otherwise been lost beneath layers of prosthetics.
Even with all that stripped away though, there is no doubt to be had regarding the raw power of Tolkien’s narrative. In this epic battle between good and evil, there is a very simple objective uniting the Free Peoples of Middle Earth against Sauron, though it is often the smaller battles and personal motives which give a complex weight to this twelve-hour saga. The ensemble is huge, but the nuances of every relationship are worth savouring, from Aragorn’s love for the immortal Arwen, to Gandalf’s grandfatherly affection towards the hobbits. Even on repeat viewings, it still lands as a shock that his death takes place so early, foreshadowing the inevitable breaking of the Fellowship that splits the story into further subplots and develops individual characters through their isolation.
Jackson’s battle scenes are some of the greatest of cinema history for their clarity, editing, and geography, positioning The Lord of the Rings’ epic set pieces right next to D.W. Griffith’s.
Where Tolkien’s novels segmented each of these plotlines into individual parts, Jackson propels his narrative forward with brisk parallel editing, drawing heavily on the foundational rules of film language that D.W. Griffith developed in its earliest days. Much like the father of modern cinema, Jackson is both an artist and technician of staggeringly large set pieces, skilfully establishing the geography of fortresses and battlefields in sweeping long shots before cutting between the smaller conflicts within them. The orcs’ assault of Helm’s Deep with siege ladders and catapults is especially reminiscent of the fall of Babylon in Intolerance, while through the chaos Jackson continues tracing the movements of each key player, alleviating the tension with some friendly competition between Legolas and Gimli.
The helicopter shots are another brilliant variation on Jackson’s long shots, circling characters as they traverse New Zealand’s grand mountains and valleys.
Beyond the action as well, Jackson goes on to prove his mastery of epic visuals in the helicopter shots flying over New Zealand’s sprawling mountain ranges, while those static compositions overlooking lush panoramas and ancient cities often look like paintings in their spectacular beauty. Much like Griffith, there is also immense power in his expressive close-ups, framing Arwen like a stone statue beneath her mourning veil and teetering Frodo on the brink of obsessive madness at the Cracks of Doom.
Conversely, Jackson’s framing of faces in close-ups also bring an intimacy to this sprawling epic – a superb staggering of Aragorn and Legolas’ profiles here.An ethereal framing of Arwen beneath her mourning veil, posed like a stone statue.
This balance between the epic and the intimate is the foundation of not only The Lord of the Rings’ tremendous narrative, but also its core belief in the mighty influence of the tiniest creatures. This extends past our four central hobbits, as Gandalf wisely notes that Gollum may play a crucial part in determining the fate of Middle Earth too. This is true on two levels – not only is he incidentally responsible for the destruction of the One Ring at Mount Doom, but to Frodo he also serves as a reminder of the disaster in store should he similarly fall to its temptation. The two opposed voices that split Gollum right down the middle manifest as entirely different beings in Jackson’s editing, alternating the camera position between his left and right sides while they argue, and thereby revealing the quiet, fragile innocence that persists in the mind of this corrupted being. Though Frodo recognises how easily his sympathy for Gollum might be manipulated, he still hangs onto it as a tiny shred of hope for his own redemption.
“I have to believe he can come back.”
Gollum is a vision of Frodo’s future should he fail his mission, and Jackson composes our first glimpse of him beneath this beam of light with eerie beauty.
While Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are continuing their uphill struggle, Tolkien’s ‘David and Goliath’ metaphor also sees Merry ride into the Battle for Middle Earth and deliver a crippling blow to the Witch King, Pip save Faramir from certain death, and both spur the peaceful race of Ents to action through their words alone. Because of them, the forests of Middle Earth rise against the armies of the white wizard Saruman, recalling the primordial imagery of the Battle of Dunsinane from Macbeth. Not content that nature’s vengeance in Shakespeare’s play was merely an illusion though, Tolkien manifests it on a literal level in The Lord of the Rings, pitting the tree-like Ents against the Uruk-hai orcs that Jackson associates with modern forces of technology, industry, and the careless obliteration of life.
Nature itself joins the Free People of Middle Earth and rises up against evil, recalling the primordial imagery of Macbeth’s Battle of Dunsinane.
It takes more than just the fury of the natural world to save Middle Earth from Sauron’s terrible reign though, but also a righteous spiritual grace. Between our heroes of Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo, Tolkien essentially splits his Messiah into a trinity, each taking on key characteristics of Christ. After being constantly underestimated as a friend to the meek and lowly, Gandalf is resurrected with new powers, saving Theodon from his brainwashed servitude and vanquishing foes with a dazzling white light. By setting the souls of the suffering free, Aragorn saves Middle Earth from devastation and reigns as its new King, bringing in an age of peace and prosperity. Finally, left to carry the sins of the world around his neck, Frodo offers up the greatest sacrifice of them all, and heads towards what he can only assume will be certain death.
A trinity of Christ figures lead the ensemble of The Lord of the Rings, beginning with Gandalf facing off against a demonic beast, and then followed by his great sacrifice and divine resurrection.Aragorn is the prophesied King, destined to save the souls of the dead and usher in a new era of prosperity.Our final Christ figure is Frodo, bearing the sins of the world around his neck and prepared to give up everything he holds dear.
There is no doubt that Jackson recognises the biblical connotations of the flood washing away Saruman’s forces at Isengard too, or the original sin committed by Isildur that led to the fall of man, though he never underscores this theological symbolism so blatantly. These narrative archetypes largely speak for themselves, emerging organically in Jackson’s storytelling that finds new visual expressions for Tolkien’s mythology, and which continues to build on its classical influences through Howard Shore’s operatic film score. Just as Tolkien drew significant inspiration from the 19th century cycle of epic music dramas Der Ring des Nibelungen, so too does Shore borrow many of Richard Wagner’s classical instrumentations and techniques from that work, developing a rich assortment of leitmotifs that evolve with the narrative.
Saruman poses a mighty threat as he rallies the forces of industry and technology at Isengard, marked as the enemy of the modern world by Tolkien.
The very first of these we hear in the prologue is the Ring theme, played by a thin, double-reeded rhaita that slyly rises and falls along a harmonic minor scale, while Cate Blanchett’s deep, resonant voiceover informs us of its dark history. Because of this uneasy opening, we welcome the shift to the warm, sunny Shire with delight, and embrace the new motif led by a folksy tin whistle that, from this point on, will always remind us of home. Later when Frodo reunites with his uncle Bilbo at Rivendell, it matures with the elegant timbre of a clarinet, before breaking into destitute fragments when a partially corrupted Frodo pushes Sam away late in their quest. When the four hobbits do finally return to the Shire at the end of this colossal journey, the melody is mostly restored in its original form, and yet the flute which now takes over marks a melancholy evolution that keeps these four hobbits from recovering their lost innocence.
Picturesque visuals in the Shire pair sweetly with Howard Shore’s folksy tin whistle motif, which from this point will always remind us of home.
Shore’s music continues to reach even deeper into Middle Earth’s mythology as well, using Tolkien’s constructed languages in choral arrangements as the Fellowship descends into the dwarven Mines of Moria, and as they enter the elven woodland realm of Lothlórien. So too does it serve a crucial role in connecting these characters to their respective cultures and legends, transposing poems from the books into diegetic songs sung by characters in moments of celebration and reflection, most notably in Pippin’s lyrical lament ‘The Edge of Night’. As his soft voices echoes through the cavernous halls of Gondor, Jackson reverberates it across a devastating montage of Faramir and his men riding towards their massacre, intercut with his cowardly father vulgarly ripping into a meal that drips blood-red juices down his chin.
“Home is behind,
The world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread,
Through shadow,
To the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight,
Mist and shadow,
Cloud and shade,
All shall fade,
All shall fade.”
Jackson’s intercutting between Pippin’s rendition of ‘The Edge of Night’ and Faramir’s brutal defeat at Osgiliath makes for one of the finest pieces of editing in the entire saga, revealing the massacre and tragedy which comes at the hands of cruel leaders like Denethor.
Even on a structural level, Shore integrates the mystical numerology of Middle Earth into his rhythms and notations, particularly using the number 9. There were nine rings created for Men, and nine heroes tasked with carrying the One Ring to Mordor, and so the musical leitmotif used in the themes for both the One Ring and the Fellowship are similarly composed of nine distinct notes. Somewhat poetically, that number also binds together the fates of Sauron and Frodo, with both eventually losing the Ring by having a finger severed and leaving them with only nine.
Nine rings for nine men – this number is sacred in The Lord of the Rings, and so Shore even works it into the music of his prologue and Fellowship theme.
It is in this repetition of history that The Lord of the Rings unfolds its second great subversion of the archetypal quest narrative – even after an immense journey across Middle Earth that has seen many give up their lives, our hero fails his mission. As Frodo turns to Sam atop the Cracks of Doom and chillingly claims the Ring as his own, he strikes a mirror image of Isildur doing the exact same many millennia before, finally falling to its corruptive influence. It would appear that no living entity can destroy Sauron, no matter how large or small they may be. There is only one force powerful enough to defeat an evil this powerful, and that is the evil itself, incidentally turning two of its own corrupted beings against each other in a jealous struggle and thereby sending the Ring plummeting into the lava from which it was forged. Should those who fight for all that is right fail in their mission, Tolkien is resoundingly optimistic that wickedness will collapse under its own unsustainable power.
A mirror image of failure at two separate ages, with both Isildur and Frodo falling to the Ring’s temptation at the crucial moment upon the Cracks of Doom.Gollum encased within the boundaries of the Ring in this superb frame, both their fates entwined in self-destruction.
Like his fellow hobbits, Gollum’s purpose has been found, though there is no path to redemption for him as there is for Frodo. Jackson’s ending to the final film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy has often been accused of long-windedness, though such an expansive story necessitates a conclusion with weight and patience behind it. Even with Sauron defeated, Frodo’s arc is not yet complete, and continues to draw him towards a peaceful resolution in the Undying Lands with Gandalf, Bilbo, and the Elves. How fitting that Tolkien imagined the future of Middle Earth as our present reality where magic has died out and Men have lived on, because at the end of all things, Jackson’s fantasy epic stands as a monumental tribute to their greatest qualities of ambition, endurance, and pure, ingenious creativity.
The Lord of the Rings is currently streaming on Netflix, Prime Video, Binge, and Paramount Plus, can be rented or bought on Apple TV, Amazon Video, or Google Play, and the Blu-ray or DVD can be bought on Amazon.
