Author: SceneByGreen

David Lynch | 2hr 27min

“No hay banda,” warns the emcee at Club Silencio. “There is no band.” Everything we hear there is an illusion, played as a tape recording while musicians and singers move their hands and mouths. It doesn’t really matter how many times we are told this, or in how many languages. Every time a new piece of music begins, we find ourselves entranced by the haunting melodies reverberating across the theatre, then equally caught off guard when the sounds persist even after their apparent sources are gone.

Most affecting of all in this scene is the heartrending cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish by one club performer, sung entirely acapella. In the audience, our two leading women, Betty and Rita, cling to each other with tears in their eyes, unable to look away. Though it is Rita whose amnesia has kept her character at a distance from us, Betty is just as much of an enigma in her façade of superficial idealism. Here though, there seems to be a break in their reality. What it is exactly we aren’t too sure, but there is a profound sorrow in both the music and their reactions to it, as if they are mourning the impending expiration of something beautiful and fleeting.

It is a skilful layering of illusions on top of illusions that David Lynch conducts in Mulholland Drive, removing us from reality by several levels until all we are left with is some primal, psychological rendition. This is the true power of cinema, according to him. It is only by studying the worlds that exist inside our minds that we can get close to understanding those feelings we bury deep into our subconscious, including the guilt, hope, love, and anger which aspiring Hollywood actress Diane Selwyn has let fester into putrid resentment. Mulholland Drive can be explained quite simply as a dark and occasionally whimsical nightmare conjured up in the final minutes before her suicide, but to seek hard logic in Lynch’s reason and plotting would be to defeat its purpose. It excels simply as a surreal melting pot of impressionistic images that translate the literal to the symbolic, asserting that such figurative representations are no less “real” than the places they come from.

More specifically, Mulholland Drive is Lynch’s own interrogation of the Hollywood dream as an empty, corrupt promise, drawing heavy parallels to Billy Wilder’s similarly street-titled film Sunset Boulevard. In Diane Selwyn and Norma Desmond, we see two women drawn in by the glamour of the movie industry, only to be left devastated when they are thoughtlessly discarded in favour of other more desirable women, forcing them to retreat into dream worlds of fame and glory. There are two key differences between these films though. Firstly, Diane has never had a taste of what it is like to be riding high on praise and adoration, unlike Norma. Secondly, we are not looking in at Diane’s dream from the outside. Instead, Lynch sinks us deep into this absurd labyrinth for two hours before he pulls back the curtain to reveal its source in the final act.

When we do eventually reach that point, we may at first barely even realise that this is what he is doing. But then tiny formal connections begin to arise. In the Winkies diner we have seen several times before, Diane singles in on the waitresses’ nametag, “Betty”, in an almost identical shot to one earlier in the film when Betty notices the name “Diane”. A hitman who amusingly bungled a murder in a standalone dream episode appears once again, meeting with Diane. He carries the blue key that Rita mysteriously kept in her purse, and tells Diane that when the job is done he will pass it on to her as a secret indicator. At that moment, she makes eye contact with another man in the diner. We have seen him before too in an isolated nightmare, confronting a horrific monster that lives behind Winkies. “I hope to never see that face outside a dream,” he fearfully expresses. Those iniquitous thoughts which linger beneath the surface of our consciousness are better kept out of sight, though this is a luxury that Diane can no longer afford.

Such an intricate web of parallels across dreamscapes and waking life makes for a wonderful piece of abstract formalism in Mulholland Drive, and one that only lulls us deeper into its soporific grip through hazy, wistful editing that slyly bridges one idea to the next. Long dissolves erode any sense of clear definition between scene transitions, blending them together to find striking collages in those indistinct, liminal spaces. Arguably the most iconic use of this technique in film history can be found here, imprinting a shot of Betty reclining backwards against a low angle of palm trees reaching up to the sky, delivering an illusion of idyllic serenity. Elsewhere, Lynch’s match cuts land on action beats, momentarily dispensing with the dreamy ambience to sharply leap through a broken timeline of incomplete memories.

The lack of defining boundaries in Mulholland Drive even extends to Lynch’s characterisations of all four main women – or at least, the two women whose identities are as malleable as anything else in Diane’s dream. In the material world, she and Camilla are a pair of ex-lovers looking for fame in Hollywood. Where Diane is struggling to be noticed, Camilla’s star is on the rise, thanks to her winning a role that she may or may not have rightfully deserved.

The construct that Diane builds in her mind from guilt and idealism might as well be some sort of regret-driven wish fulfillment, playing out a fantasy where both women can start afresh under new circumstances, though with a considerable power imbalance in her favour. Diane thus becomes Betty, a bright-eyed actress with genuine talent, and Camilla becomes Rita, an amnesiac taking her name from Golden Age Hollywood star Rita Hayworth. To muddy the waters even further, other characters named Diane and Camilla exist in this intangible nightmare, though only as vague representations – one as a corpse foreshadowing Diane’s eventual suicide, the other taking the appearance of Camilla’s current girlfriend, and stealing movie roles she never earned. With identity-swapping as purposefully confounding as this, drawing parallels to Persona is inevitable, especially when Lynch lines up the faces of both women to appear as two halves of a whole in a Bergman-esque composition.

It is a complex pair of performances that Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring put in here, as the pair of them come to represent both the glossy artifice and insidious darkness that underlies the American entertainment industry. The cheesy dubbing of their overdone line readings borders on unsettling, with both acting as if they are being forced into some conventional mystery movie about two girl detectives tracking down hidden truths about their pasts. Watts particularly shines as the duplicate versions of Diane, constantly breaking her identity up into pieces and choosing to play each as if they were individual characters. This also means that we are frequently taken unaware by sudden shifts in her performance, as we witness in the audition scene that sees her read badly written dialogue as a whispery, sensual seduction – an extreme contrast to the overwrought anger with she had previously rehearsed it.

Given the way Lynch often shoots Los Angeles like some sort of bizarre, alien environment crowded by towering palm trees, it isn’t hard to see why an outsider like Diane might psychologically disintegrate so easily. Though she imagines rooms cloaked with red curtains where nefarious men eavesdrop and pull strings, this is merely something to fill in the blank space of the unknown. In the grand scheme of things, they are nothing more than catalysts. The awful truth of Mulholland Drive’s existentialism rather comes from within, where Diane introspectively carves out new realities from the fragments of old ones, only to find herself arriving back at the same shame and self-loathing that she has tried so fruitlessly to escape.

Mulholland Drive is currently streaming on Stan, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Douglas Sirk | 2hr 5min

It is an unusual family portrait which Douglas Sirk paints in Imitation of Life, at least in the context of 1950s America. Half of its members are white, the other half Black, and there are no men to be found within it at all. Love interests skirt around the edges, but otherwise the film’s feminine sensitivities flourish across boundaries of age, class, and race, emerging in delicate cinematic paintings of privilege and social adversity.

On one side of the family we have Lora, an aspiring white actress and single mother, raising her daughter, Susie. A chance encounter at the beach one day leads to her meeting Annie, a Black single mother, and her fair-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane, who Susie takes to right away. These four women become inseparable, and Lora soon offers Annie and Sarah Jane a place in their home while she gets her acting career off the ground.

Along Lora and Susie’s narrative thread, we find a mother growing more distant from her daughter due to her fame and demanding schedule. The cosy green drapes and patterned wallpaper of Susie’s childhood home wrap around the small family in a soothing embrace, its décor of ceiling fans and light fixtures hanging in the foreground of gorgeously composed frames. As Lora finds greater success though, Sirk’s production design takes a turn to opulence. The open spaces of the mansion they move into are adorned with bright flowers and candles rising up in the foreground, while decorative mirrors in backgrounds make rooms feel even larger than they physically are. Such exquisite furnishing allows for beautifully elegant imagery, though it is certainly at least colder than before, setting the scene for a burgeoning gap between Susie and Lora as both develop feelings for the same man.

It is by nature of their unequal social standings that Susie’s problems seem a little insignificant when played out next to Sarah Jane’s, who chooses to shun her Black heritage so that she may pass as white. She has seen the ugliness of America’s intolerance in its pre-civil rights era, and yet the bitterness that has been bred from that is not directed at its perpetrators, but rather her own mother. Annie, meanwhile, recognises that anguish in her young daughter, and can’t quite figure out how to reconcile her innocence with the future she faces.

“How do you explain to your child she was born to be hurt?”

Sarah Jane’s disdain for her mother is crushing, in one scene even driving her to go so far as to put on a mocking show of servitude to a guest, as if that were all there is to her ethnicity. Above all else she wants to be looked at with desire, so when she finally comes of age, she runs away to join a club where she can blend in with a troupe of white chorus girls. Though she claims she doesn’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with being Black, she clearly does not possess the empathy to see how similar her actions are to the strains of racism she is familiar with.

Perhaps we wouldn’t feel the same compassion for Sarah Jane if Sirk didn’t treat her suffering with such tenderness in his staging of this melodrama. When her white boyfriend confronts her about her true ethnicity, she is diminished off to the side of the frame as nothing but a reflection in a window, and the moment he grows incensed Sirk quickly pans his camera to the right to reveal him unnervingly towering over her. When she returns home after being beaten, he shoots all four women standing on separate levels of a staircase, their standing evident in where they are situated – Lora on top, Annie further down with her back to the camera, Susie concealed behind a plant, and Sarah Jane caught in the middle, all lines in the shot pointing to her. Even as characters deliberately pursue contemptuous lines of attack against each other, Sirk never loses sight of the raw pain which motivates them, all four women being destined to struggle in a patriarchal society to different degrees.

With such an interconnected relationship between Sirk’s vibrant mise-en-scène and his emotionally rich characters, it isn’t difficult to trace his influences back through the decades of cinematic expressionism. Stylish sentimentalism flows all through his dialogue and cinematography, outlining parallel paths of generational conflict as set out by two pairs of mothers and daughters. Unlike other Sirkian melodramas of this era though, there are few happy endings to be found in Imitation of Life. Instead, it is in the separation of children from their parents where we find hope that they might mature into adults, blooming like those floral icons of delicate growth scattered all through the film.

Imitation of Life is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

Robert Eggers | 2hr 17min

The primal, pounding rhythms of The Northman are infused into its cinematic construction on almost every level. They are there in Amleth’s insistent chants, his prophetic words pointing him towards a destiny of vengeance. They are present in the ominous score of throaty vocalisations and percussive beats, hypnotising us into a state of submission. On a structural level, Robert Eggers even weaves them into his division of this narrative into segments, landing each chapter break on black frames with titles written in Scandinavian runes. Even as it embraces the spectacle of mythological storytelling, The Northman is as deeply researched as any of Eggers’ other films, and as such it is this historical authenticity which allows the tempo of his narrative to progress with such organic tactility.

It doesn’t take long into this story to recognise the Hamlet parallels written into the archetypes of murdered kings, evil uncles, and avenging sons, and yet Shakespeare is not the primary source of inspiration for Eggers here. It is rather the other way round – the Scandinavian legend of Amleth the Viking prince is in fact the basis of the Shakespeare play, its origins stretching far back into Medieval mythology. Aside from the emotional depth that Eggers allows both male and female characters equally, there are no major narrative subversions playing out here. Instead, it is in the textured, muddy world which he builds around traditional conventions that the raw essence of this Norse folktale comes alive, seeping through the detailed design of every crude wooden village and animal-skin costume.

Cinematically speaking, Eggers carries on the epic ambition of classical filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Werner Herzog, both of whom spent months shooting in unforgiving wildernesses to capture equally unrelenting directorial visions in Apocalypse Now and Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Just as those films tell tales of men coming to terms with their own humanity while on legendary quests through cruel environments, so too does The Northman set Amleth on a path of self-realisation, shrinking him against rocky Scandinavian mountains and heavy, overcast skies that weigh down upon low horizons. It is amid these fierce landscapes that he discovers an innate connection to the land, adopting the instincts of wolves and ravens through which he learns to survive.

Alexander Skarsgård absorbs this animalistic behaviour into his performance on a viciously carnal level. Even when he isn’t running on all fours, howling, and biting his enemies, he menacingly saunters through muddy battlefields with tightly hunched shoulders, standing out in crowds with his furrowed brow and dark, unsmiling eyes. “You are dogs who wish to become men,” growls Willem Dafoe’s court fool, and in Skarsgård’s ferocious transformation we believe every word of it. So too does he evoke Leonardo DiCaprio’s acting masterclass in The Revenant, as survival and revenge become all-consuming ideals for a man bearing the brunt of his mission psychologically just as much as he is physically.

The Revenant’s influence continues to make itself known in Eggers’ long tracking shots through astoundingly choreographed battles of flying arrows and swinging axes, crafting a visceral authenticity consistent with the painstaking sensory details that pervade his rugged production design. Whether softly illuminating desaturated exteriors or casting silhouettes of naked bodies against blazing fires, Eggers’ natural lighting brings an awe-inspiring majesty to both action and drama. Additionally, there is an even greater transcendence to those scenes which take place beneath the pale moonlight and Northern Lights, where fantasy doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility.

The Northman flourishes in such depictions of magical realism, manifesting the ambiguous potential of Amleth’s destiny to be either a self-determined mission or a genuine prophecy. A cameo appearance from Björk as the mysterious soothsayer who foretells his fate makes for an especially brilliant piece of casting, emphasising her ethereal presence in her first role since Dancer in the Dark 22 years ago. It is her words which stick with us through Amleth’s journey, and which motivate further introspection on his part to reckon with his spirituality. It is left deliberately obstruse as to whether a haunting battle with a draugr, an undead Scandinavian creature, takes place in reality or simply in the mind of a man seeking religious purpose to his quest, and divine cutaways to a Valkyrie riding up into the Northern Lights similarly serve to underscore the glory which may lie on the other side of his quest.

Conversely, there is also the threat of Hel as the afterlife to which Amleth may be damned should he fail to avenge his father. Literalised as an erupting volcano upon which the final battle takes place, the set piece is a wonder to behold, filling the air with orange smoke and lava. Eggers knows when to hold a shot, and once again he brings great weight to the climactic moment by simply basking in its heated violence, refusing to cut until necessary. This aspect of his filmmaking may as well belong among those others mentioned above which pulse with fervent adrenaline, as these characters clash swords and let out guttural roars like primal orchestrations. The Northman may only reference horror cinema tangentially, and yet its thick, overpowering atmosphere is as potent as anything Eggers has directed before, delivering an awe-inspiring, sensory venture into Norse mythology.

The Northman is currently playing in theatres.

Frank Capra | 2hr 12min

Even as Lost Horizon’s narrative travels to distant fantasy lands of the East and centres a group of British expats, it still isn’t that far outside Frank Capra’s usual idealistic ruminations over the American Dream. The utopian city Shangri-La and the surrounding Himalayan mountains make for epic cinematic canvases, as he builds set pieces around crowds and unusual architectural structures that could seemingly only exist in this mystical, untouched paradise. Just as the snake brought corruption into the Garden of Eden though, so too do the Brits of Lost Horizon bring cynicism to Shangri-La, tainting its purity with colonial sensibilities that struggle to reconcile its simple, blissful happiness with the western world they are used to.

The xenophobia of these characters is evident right from the opening titles where we learn of diplomat Robert Conway’s mission to rescue the last 90 white people from the fictional city of Baskul amid a revolution, while crowds of locals clambering to board the private plane are callously pushed aside without a second thought. Their privilege is clearly one they take for granted, as when their plane is hijacked and crashed in the Himalayas, they quickly find themselves far removed from their comfort zone. “What a kick I’m going to get watching you squirm for a change,” bites one of the stranded passengers, the terminally ill Gloria. She is evidently no stranger to hardship, and is ready to embrace her demise if it means seeing those haughty men go down with her.

By a stroke of good fortune though, these survivors unexpectedly encounter a mysterious man in these freezing mountains, who leads them to a temperate valley shielded on all sides from the harsh weather. Some continue to hold onto their frustration throughout their stay, refusing to move past their mistrust even when Shangri-La’s magical properties are revealed. Others who do integrate into this society manage to do so happily, letting go of connections to their old life, while others still cannot help bringing in pieces of western infrastructure and education. The irony of them feeling the need to alter perfection to suit their own familiar sensibilities even borders on satirical.

It is Capra’s gorgeous construction of an entire fantastical city and the snowy, craggy peaks which surround it which mark Lost Horizon as a particularly marvellous visual achievement though. Splendid matte paintings blend seamlessly with his practical sets of towering mountains through which small, black figures hike, but once we enter Shangri-La’s great halls it is the cluttered décor that dominates the mise-en-scène in a Sternbergian manner, framing shots with candles and fruit bowls standing in foregrounds. The promised abundance of Shangri-La is virtually always on show, even as we escape into the outdoors where, through hanging branches and leaves, we watch one local woman, Sondra, bathe in a hidden waterhole, drawing heavenly comparisons to Eve in the Garden of Eden.

The giant, central palace of Shangri-La is Capra’s most resourceful set piece here, the structure being a giant, blank façade with a vertical strip running down the middle where an ornate gate opens to the inside. Down the front of the building, a flight of stone stairs leads to a pond where Capra delights in capturing picturesque reflections and symmetrical compositions, crafting an awe-inspiring majesty around the city. As the finale draws near, he goes on to stage a ceremony around this dazzling piece of architecture that sees hundreds of extras trail across the garden and steps carrying fire torches, lighting up the darkness in tight formations.

Just as there is deep reverence in these large set pieces, so too is it there in the stylistic minimalism of scenes spent with the mysterious High Lama, the centuries-old founder of Shangri-La who dispenses wisdom from his small, bare room. Where copious displays of wealth crowds out Capra’s sets elsewhere, here the space is simply lit by a single candle standing between him and Conway, who visits the elder to learn more of Shangri-La’s history and principled philosophy.

There is a fragility to the precision of Capra’s visual and narrative creations in Lost Horizon, establishing an order that we realise will be breached by the end of the film by nature of its own archetypal setup. The innocence and magic of Shangri-La cannot survive in the real world where all things naturally deteriorate and perish, and as these horrific consequences set in, he also pays off on this grand fable of virtue and impiety. For every moral transgression in Lost Horizon, there is also some dark manifestation of justice that sets things right, powerfully backing up Capra’s storytelling with potent mythological archetypes of paradise, innocence, and soul-corrupting sin.

Lost Horizon is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, and Amazon Prime Video.

Douglas Sirk | 1hr 39min

All the money and oil in Texas can’t save the Hadley family from its own self-sabotage. The daughter of business magnate Jasper Hadley, Marylee, is a spoiled socialite, and her playboy brother, Kyle, isn’t much better, splurging his inherited wealth on alcohol and women. The unofficial third child of the family, Mitch Wayne, comes from a much poorer background, though his childhood friendship with the Hadleys is one which remains strong right up until the arrival of Lucy into their lives. We can’t blame her for the turmoil that follows though. Lauren Bacall is a steady, grounded force playing Kyle’s new love interest, as is Rock Hudson in the role of Mitch. Both actors provide a stability that attract the volatile Hadley children like magnets, wrapping them all up in a messy love of jealousy, insecurity, and selfishness.

The first scene of Written on the Wind opens at its climax, when a drunk, angry Kyle drives to a large suburban home, swings the door open, and marches in, accompanied by a powerful gust blowing in leaves across the luxurious entrance hall. The titular metaphor is set up early in this prologue, announcing itself as a delicate but powerful force tainting the neat interiors of the Hadley manor. A gun shot is heard, but before we learn who was on the receiving end of the bullet Sirk whisks us back in time, letting the wind blow the pages of a calendar to Monday 24^th October, 1955, a full year earlier when Kyle first met Lucy and set this unfortunate sequence of events in motion.

This is the sort of melodramatic material that Douglas Sirk thrives in crafting, drawing out each of Written on the Wind’s four main characters in the sort of expressive detail that can only be stylistically matched by décor and costuming as equally lavish. Kyle’s grand romantic gesture of buying a full wardrobe of clothing for Lucy and decorating her room with red and white bouquets is met with a mildly suspicious reception, as it is exceedingly evident in these extravagant visuals just how much he is compensating for his lack of substance. Likewise, Marylee is rarely seen without being swathed in pink, whether in her dresses, bedroom curtains, or expensive sportscar. In contrast, we find Sirk dressing Mitch and Lucy in soothing natural hues and lighting them up with a melancholy blue day-for-night wash, suggesting through the subtle language of colour that it is perhaps these two we should be getting behind as a romantic couple.

With each character clearly defined, Sirk follows up by staging their romantic entanglements in tightly blocked formations, especially letting Mitch linger in reflections and backgrounds between Kyle and Lucy like an ever-present third wheel. Sirk’s remarkable depth of field only highlights this further, articulately drawing together and separating these characters across layers and segments of his frame. It is simply Mitch’s being there in otherwise private shots which eats away at Kyle’s mind like a corrosive acid, feeding a self-doubt that clearly has roots far deeper in his psyche than anything Mitch is actually responsible for. On top of his father’s massive legacy that he is expected to carry on, there is also his diagnosis of impotence, meaning he will be unable to pass it onto any children and thus fail to fulfil his most important duty.

To remove ourselves from Kyle’s perspective though, it is evident that his failures already extended far beyond his infertility. If patriarch Jasper Hadley represents the Old South, then his children are twisted, modern representations of that, disconnected from its cultural values yet taking for granted the prosperity it provides. When Jasper passes away on the staircase of his manor, Sirk simultaneously intercuts the scene with Marylee’s boisterous, blissfully ignorant dance up in her bedroom, the loud music distracting from the tragedy that is unfolding just outside her door. Instead, it is Lucy and Mitch who rush to his body. Without so much as a line of dialogue, Sirk points directly to where the future of this culture lies.

Even when the Hadley family hits an all-time low, somehow Marylee still finds it in her to keep pulling strings and manipulating the system out of some sort of vindictive bitterness towards Mitch and Lucy. At this point though, there is no re-establishing the success and dignity that her family once held. Sirk’s penultimate shot of the film says it all – hanging on the wall, a touching portrait of Jasper shows him proudly holding a model oil tower, and sitting directly beneath, a distraught Marylee holds the same figurine. Perhaps she will manage to keep her wealth, but as the only surviving member of the Hadley dynasty, the name will soon perish along with its cultural presence. As Sirk so thoughtfully demonstrates in his eloquent storytelling and mise-en-scène, when a legacy like this is built on as weak foundations as Kyle and Marylee, then it might as well be written on the wind.

Written on the Wind is currently available to stream on The Criterion Channel and Foxtel Now.

Douglas Sirk | 1hr 48min

The melodrama of Magnificent Obsession is set in motion by a stroke of bad fortune. The moment that reckless playboy Bob Merrick loses control of his speedboat, badly injures himself, and uses up the nearest resuscitator, his neighbour Dr Phillips suffers a heart attack and, without access to the device, dies. The tragedy worsens when the doctor’s wife, Helen, is blinded in a car accident, indirectly caused by Merrick’s attempt to apologise. Though he feels guilty, it is evident that his priority is to merely clear his conscience rather than to make real restitution. Ironically, it is the philosophy of the late Dr Phillips which sparks a change of heart within him, inspiring him to spread generosity and good will without expectation of repayment. From there, Douglas Sirk leads Merrick down a path of moral rehabilitation and redemption, transforming him into the very man whose death he is at least partially responsible for.

Though Sirk was not yet at his full powers in 1954, still being a year away from his breakthrough, All That Heaven Allows, he nevertheless paves the way in Magnificent Obsession for the beautifully luscious displays of mise-en-scene and sensitive characterisations he would become known for. He isn’t afraid of sentimentality, but this is no barrier to his acute social critiques of class privilege. In fact, it is exactly because of Sirk’s great empathy that he can so skilfully identify Merrick’s weaknesses, understanding his ego not as a fatal flaw, but rather a fault upon which he can improve.

Over time as Merrick cares for Helen, his pity for her disability gradually evolves into an authentic love, though one hindered by his decision to conceal his identity from her, still holding onto a bit of shame. It is a love which motivates him to study medicine, carrying the hope that he might one day cure her blindness. Even when all seems lost in their relationship though, we can see the legitimacy in his new lease on life. He continues striving to become a doctor not to win her heart, but out of a genuine desire to help others.

It is in Sirk’s delicate staging of these character interactions within elegant domestic settings where this drama lands with great emotional power, using mirrors to layer actors across the frame and obstructing compositions with plants hanging in the foreground. When both Helen and Merrick both reach their lowest points, their faces are almost entirely concealed behind lace curtains, and Sirk makes the rare move to dim his usually-soft lighting to starkly illuminate only half of their faces, or else only the edge of their profiles. In representing the affluent status of these characters on this visual level, he also lets it impose upon their presences, complicating their search for emotional truth by crowding it out with so much material wealth.

For this Sirkian melodrama though it is all about tonal balance, as immediately following this dark scene, Helen and Merrick open up about their romantic feelings for each other and go out on a date. As they sit and absorb their surroundings, he describes to her in detail the things he can see which she cannot – the blazing bonfire, the bursting fireworks, the communal folk dancing. Given the way he caters for her disability, it is evident that the relationship which emerges between them is not a direct copy of what she had with her late husband, and yet the parallels between the two are nonetheless apparent. Merrick’s moral reformation is made even more potent by the fact that Dr Phillip is only spoken of and never seen in person, turning him into an intangible ideal for the young playboy to aspire to, or perhaps an empty space for him to fill. Privilege may be a corrupting force in Magnificent Obsession, but any instance where pure goodness wins out over ego and insensitivity is infinitely precious to a soft-hearted empath like Sirk.

Magnificent Obsession is currently available to stream on The Criterion Channel.

Yimou Zhang | 1hr 39min

There is a scene early on in Hero in which our Nameless swordsman confronts the first of three assassins, Long Sky, at a chess house. As the two square up, prepared to fight to the death, an elderly man sits in the background with his violin, restrung with the silk strings of a traditional Chinese sanxian. Through the following combat, he plucks and strums it with as careful a precision as those graceful manoeuvres the warriors in front of him so elegantly perform. Nameless’ reasoning for playing the combat out in such a manner is simple.

“Martial arts and music share the same principles. Both wrestle with complex chords and rare melodies.”

These two schools of art are intertwined all through Hero in Tan Dun’s gorgeous score and Yimou Zhang’s deft choreography, but such refined virtuosity does not end there. Later we enter a calligraphy school where the two other assassins, Broken Sword and Flying Snow, have taken refuge, and where Sword in particular has spent many years of his life refining his craft in the sophisticated writing of Chinese characters. The undercurrent which runs beneath each of these skills is precision, grace, and beauty – the same ideals which Zhang infuses into the very fabric of Hero’s cinematic construction. After all, what is filmmaking if not an extension of those rich, artistic expressions of human achievement?

There is no overstatement in calling Hero one of the most breathtakingly handsome films of this century. Through Zhang’s meticulously detailed production design and staging, he crafts a legend of epic historical proportions framed entirely within one ancient Chinese swordsman’s meeting with the king of Qin. This is his reward for having killed three assassins who had previously made attempts on the monarch’s life, and within the palace’s cavernous great hall several stories unfold to explain how he accomplished this.

In recounting different variations of a single tale in Hero, Zhang adopts a Rashomon-like structure, keeping the truth of the matter elusive in favour of a more emotional appreciation of history. He also calls in Wong Kar-wai’s frequent collaborator, Christopher Doyle, to bring his own expressive sensibilities to the cinematography, curating dark shades of grey and black within the king’s great hall and notably emphasising the keen symmetry of the magnificent set piece. Even more impressive though is his skilful use of specific colours schemes to define each narrative strand that unfolds here, saturating every inch of Hero’s painstaking mise-en-scène with vibrant visual expressions. It is through these that he also clues us into the specific brand of subjectivity that each unreliable narrator adopts.

Red is the chosen colour for the calligraphy house where Sword and Snow are hiding out in the first version, and where Nameless sets in motion a plan to turn them against each other. Both being past lovers, this tale burns with a fierce anger and passion, and in a later conflict between Snow and Sword’s pupil, Moon, their deep scarlet robes make sharp imprints against the yellow and orange leaves of the forest.

When the king realises the lie in Nameless’ story, he puts forth his own hypothetical, considering a circular room flooded with a soothing blue palette which sees Nameless working with, rather than against, the three assassins. Even as the swordsmen venture out into the desert, Zhang tints the sand and sky with a pale indigo, letting the mournful heartache of this story reach out across gorgeous Chinese landscapes.

The complex politics in this version still sees Nameless go up against Sword in duel, though the conflict is driven far more by sorrow than it is by anger, as the two dance lightly across the top of a still blue lake, disturbed only by the ripples of their swords and feet skimming lightly across the surface of the water. Where other combat scenes in Hero are tightly edited, here Zhang luxuriates in long dissolves of Nameless and Sword’s faces lingering over picturesque wide shots of the scenery, savouring each second with gorgeous slow-motion photography.

Finally, the truth comes out as Nameless takes hold of the story again, delivering a take as pure and honest as the white palette which permeates its aesthetic. The blue room we previously saw in the king’s tale is now a pale, bleached hue, and so too are the sands and sky, untainted by embellishments of subjectivity. And yet even within this flashback emotional bias cannot be escaped entirely as we hear one more historical account, this one from Sword. It was years ago that he faced up against the king in the same great hall Nameless is in now, though in his memory it is lined with large, billowing sheets, rippling a pale green around their duel. So too do we find the once-red calligraphy house cloaked in the same verdant colour that dominates the rest of his recount, within which we discover his turn to pacificism and reluctant support of the king as a means to achieve peace.

Rashomon is evidently not the only Akira Kurosawa influence at play in Hero though, as colour continues to play a part in Zhang’s staging of thousands of extras within magnificent battle scenes, evoking similarly epic sequences from Ran. It isn’t hard for any of our main characters to stand out among the military forces of Qin, whose black armour and red feather crests serve better to identify them as a single cohesive unit moving in tight formations than as individuals. Even as the king’s followers persuade him to execute against Nameless towards the end, they speak as a single chorus under the unified vision of China he is dedicated to advancing.

As Zhang’s narrative winds towards its conclusion, questions around the ideals of a warrior begin to arise in Nameless’ quest. Determining what makes a hero is integral to the martial arts traditions he is so dedicated to honing, and as such, so too is it crucial to the formation of a culture that can thrive. Hero is dedicated to all those interpretations of history that have sought an answer to such questions, and through Zhang’s vibrantly colourful expressions we find the majestic value in each of them.

Hero is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes and Amazon Prime Video.

Michael Powell | 1hr 44min

When it comes to the formal technique of shifting from black-and-white to colour that Michael Powell so effectively uses in A Matter of Life and Death, two other films come to mind – The Wizard of Oz and Stalker. All three movies are masterpieces and use this switch to contrast reality with a metaphysical dream space, and yet Powell’s work is using this device to an entirely different effect. Here, it is the Earth that is flooded with beautiful technicolour, and the surreal afterlife that is shot in black-and-white. Where The Wizard of Oz and Stalker celebrate the magic of other worlds, A Matter of Life and Death is in love with the joys of living.

The scenes of the afterlife are gorgeous in their own way though. It is made up of impressive set pieces, the two most notable being the stairway to heaven adorned with statues of historical figures, and the gigantic amphitheatre sitting inside a spiral galaxy. It isn’t exactly surrealist cinema, but there are unique images here that would not look out of place in a Luis Buñuel film, with the metaphor of the stairway entering the frozen operating room especially making powerful and imaginative visual statement.

In fact, the editing preceding this moment is impressive in itself, foreshadowing the eventual meeting of the afterlife and the real world. Peter’s fate is being decided in both places at once, by both brain surgeons and a jury of deceased men. It is left deliberately vague as to which group holds more power, as the entire afterlife could be all in Peter’s imagination. But the point remains – the metaphysical and physical worlds are inextricably bound to each other.

It is a tricky formal balance that Powell maintains in painting out this relationship, with both always offering counterpoints to each other. If life wins in one moment, then death will later hit back in a similar manner. This isn’t just in Peter’s story, but in Dr Reeves’ own fatal motorbike accident, foreshadowed earlier by a narrowly missed collision. Each of these characters’ lives is positioned on a knifepoint, and it is this fragility that makes them all the more precious.

Peter sinks into the background in the final act which suddenly zooms out and adjusts to a massive scope, giving enormous weight to his life. His agency is taken away, and his fate rests in the hands of both friends and enemies with the power to grant him either life or death. All of history comes to bear witness to the decision, with rows upon rows of deceased people from different periods and cultures watching to see whether he will come and join their ranks.

The random Midsummer Night’s Dream reference serves to emphasise the afterlife as a relaxed, comedic, pastoral place, and much like the final lines of the play, A Matter of Life and Death essentially tells us in fewer words:

“If we shadows have offended,

Think but this and all is mended,

That you have but slumber’d here,

While these visions did appear.”

In short, everything we might have just watch may or may not be a dream. That will be left up to us.

Most of all though, A Matter of Life and Death is an allegory, manifesting the deciders of our fate in the afterlife. The romance never develops past the initial honeymoon phase, closing the film on the sweet, final words:

“We won.”
“I know, darling.”

And leaving them at that point is absolutely the right choice. Peter and June’s futures are undefined, but as long as they are alive it is in their hands.

A Matter of Life and Death is currently available to stream on SBS On Demand, and available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Richard Linklater | 1hr 38min

Stan was born in 1959 on the cusp of the Baby Boomers and Generation X, and at age 10 ½ this makes him just old enough to be drafted into NASA’s secret space program for children right before the moon landing. He is a proto-astronaut of sorts, testing the waters for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to clear up any technical issues that may arise. The fantasy element is obvious to us, but to Richard Linklater it might as well be a part of history. Above its whimsical dreams of traversing the cosmos, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is a loving memory piece based in the late 60s Texas of Linklater’s youth, drawing heavily from the details of its entertainment, education, scientific industries, food, music, and politics to paint out a cultural landscape filtered through the eyes of a child.

The style of rotoscoped animation that Linklater experimented with in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly makes a return here in the creation of this intricate setting, offering an uncanny authenticity to the facial expressions and movements of its characters. When Apollo 10 ½ turns to reconstructing archival footage, it shifts slightly into a more minimalistic style with a boxy aspect ratio, reserving the finer details and widescreen format for Stan’s first-hand memories. The complexities of political movements and affairs simply do not linger in our young protagonist’s mind. Instead, the film unravels like a continuous stream-of-consciousness, carried along by a ubiquitous voiceover from an older Stan who, while played by Jack Black, might as well stand in for Linklater himself.

It is often Apollo 10 ½’s editing which entrances us more than its visual beauty, flitting through montages that bridge one thought to the next with relative ease, densely packing in the idiosyncrasies and mundanities of Stan’s childhood. His mum’s resourceful reinventions of Sunday’s leftovers into dinner for the next four nights, his siblings’ cruel jokes about him being adopted, his disappointment with his dad’s unexciting low-level position at NASA, his nan’s regular trips to the cinema to watch The Sound of Music – for the first fifty minutes of Apollo 10 ½, Linklater exhibits little interest in plot, forgoing traditional narrative to bask in the authentic reconstruction of a cherished time period, much like he has done before in Dazed and Confused and Boyhood.

With this easy-going setup dominating the first fifty minutes of the film, the progression into Stan’s childhood fantasy barely feels like much of a shift at all. His obsession with NASA is all-encompassing, feeding his aspiration and wonder at what the future might hold, and its manifestation in his imagination carries about the same level of detail as anything else, with Black’s voiceover breaking it down to its most basic, humdrum details. In reframing the space race as part of an everyday routine, Linklater discovers a universal experience within it – the thrill of progress and discovery, not being reserved for scientists and astronauts on television, but rather being shared by every living being in a single moment of unity.

From Linklater’s perspective, these pioneers travelling to the Moon may as well be children given their tiny size within the grand scope of the universe, and with helmets blocking out their faces and identities, he happily indulges that prospect. Through Stan’s half-awake eyes, we see this hazy dream being born on the precipice of sleep. In that world, it is his face that looks out from behind the astronaut’s reflective visor, seeing mankind’s giant leap open up a whole universe of possibilities. If Apollo 10 ½ isn’t a fantasy, then perhaps it is Linklater’s alternate history, reflecting on the innocent ambition of the past and constructing a version that justifies its own naivety. For as idealistic a filmmaker as him, the future has never looked brighter than it does in the hands of a child.

Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood is currently streaming on Netflix.