Author: SceneByGreen

Pedro Almodóvar | 1hr 52min

In the first scene of Talk to Her, two men sit side-by-side watching a dance performance in a theatre. Up on stage, two women glide through the space like blind sleepwalkers, while another man hurriedly moves furniture out of their way so as not to disturb their chaotic paths. As the spectator on the right begins to weep, the one on the left silently glances over. At this point in their lives Marco and Benigno are strangers, though this is not the last time their paths will cross. After suffering two strikingly similar twists of fate, twin storylines begin to emerge and intertwine in reflections of the dance that first brought them together, and a friendship takes form over a commonality in their unusual expressions of love.

There is no doubt something creepy about the way these men dote upon the two comatose women for whom they profess their love. But at times it is also endearingly sweet, as well as self-serving, and at one point morally repugnant – a mix of feelings as complex as the men themselves. Most interestingly, the emotionally expressive dynamics which Pedro Almodóvar typically reserves for his female characters take masculine form in Marco and Benigno, who continue to talk with and care for the targets of their affection. Marco is the more sympathetic figure between the two for several reasons, chief of all being the time Almodóvar spends in drawing out his relationship with his sweetheart, Lydia. Benigno is also prone to emotional sensitivity, but dangerously so, as his delusions around the love of an unconscious Alicia gradually consume his reality. Between the two, there is a thin line dividing love and obsession, and Almodóvar relishes every tiny formal parallel that binds them together.

This Spanish auteur is not one known for his subtlety, and indeed Talk to Her swells with broad strokes of saturated colours, like a Douglas Sirk melodrama with distinctly more flamboyantly transgressive sensibilities. Notions of rape, still birth, prison, and death play significant parts in this narrative, and although Almodóvar isn’t exactly undercutting the seriousness of his subject matter, these plot points always tend to be in service of the film’s expressions of sorrow and grief. Conversely, his bright décor builds out a world where life is still largely worth living in spite of it all, defined by its bold primary colours piercing through sumptuous, often symmetrical compositions. Even within the unusually green and yellow walls of the hospital, there is still a visual exuberance to be found that both complements these characters’ wild emotional journeys and effectively offsets the bleakness of their pain.

The unpredictable swings of these characters continue to emerge in the narrative’s numerous leaps through time, with titles letting us know we have flashed back “Four years earlier” or forwards “A month later.” The form of the piece is pushed even further in one section that seems to play out a metaphor of Benigno’s story writ large on silent film, though even this pastiche sequence still bears Almodóvar’s gaudy irreverence – a shrunken man crawling across the landscape of his lover’s naked body before slipping into her v****a, like a surreal, Bunuelian dream.

Almodóvar swings wildly across emotional extremes all through Talk to Her, but being the master of melodrama that he is, each moment remains under his careful control in its complex progression, right up until the final scene. There, we return the theatre from the opening with Marco, though this time it is a recovered Alicia he encounters rather than Benigno. Once again the interaction is tangential, though with both their counterparts missing, there is finally room for a sweet correspondence between them – a man and a woman with renewed abilities to respond to others, who are open to real connection, and are now ready to move on with their lives.

Talk to Her is not currently available to stream in Australia.

Sofia Coppola | 1hr 37min

Even rarer than a director making a debut film of as high a calibre as The Virgin Suicides is a director doing so in their twenties, but then again Sofia Coppola is no ordinary filmmaker. Being raised by one of the great masters of cinema, Francis Ford Coppola, there were surely lessons passed on from one to the other, but an even more distinct image of her childhood and adolescence emerges in the closed-off, dreamlike spaces her stories unfold within, meditating on notions of celebrity, privilege, and disillusionment.

Michelangelo Antonioni might seem like a fitting comparison to draw here tonally, and yet stylistically The Virgin Suicides is more often in line with François Truffaut, playfully removing us from the immediacy of the narrative to freeze frames over character introductions, playfully opening up an ‘x-ray’ iris to peek at a pair of underwear, and dividing shots with creative split screens. With a nostalgic voiceover playing over the top of it all, a pensive yet whimsical atmosphere takes hold through which the lives of the Lisbon sisters are languidly filtered. The power they hold over the neighbourhood boys is immediately evident in the intrigue and reverence with which they are shot, like sacred mysteries to be untangled. The influence they continue to exert long after this story ends also remains clear in the narration’s wistful mythologising, speaking in first person plural without clear individuality, like an embodiment of the entire town reflecting on its own history.

As such, there is also an element of destiny which haunts this narrative like a ghost, slyly directing the sisters down a tragic path of self-destruction right from the youngest’s very first suicide attempt. Maybe their fate was spelled out from the start, but more likely is that it is simply the concoction of an unreliable narrator, imagining an aura of sacrosanctity around these girls who are put up on pedestals by both the town and their own conservative parents. As the local boys pry through one of their diaries, their imagination of its contents manifest in a graceful montage of open wheat fields, unicorns, sparklers, and close-ups of the sisters’ faces lightly flowing in dreamy long dissolves, and illuminated under the gorgeous glow of golden hour lighting. “We knew they knew everything about us, and we couldn’t fathom them at all,” the boys extol in wonder, and yet such daydreams only set them up for disappointment in those moments when that mystique briefly fades away.

The second-youngest daughter, Lux, especially begins to stand out as the source of this disenchantment. Under tight restrictions from her parents, school heartthrob Trip is given permission to take her out to the homecoming dance, though it is when the two finally make love that her allure suddenly disappears. In a beautiful day-for-night wash across the school football field, he stands up and silently walks away in the early hours of the morning before she wakes up. “I liked her a lot, but out there on the field… It was just different then,” an older vision of Trip reflects, still unable to properly sort through his feelings though clearly no longer under the spell still possessing so many of his friends. Though he has found the heart of the legend, the only riches he has discovered is a real, vulnerable human.

And then there is Mr and Mrs Lisbon, whose reactions against having their image of their daughters ruined manifest far more severely than mere indifference. Their home becomes a prison, and perhaps here that aforementioned Antonioni influence does manifest in Coppola’s framing of the sisters within tight spaces and behind staircase bannisters. Outside, a time lapse of the house shows no one going in or out, and yet the boys continue to watch from across the street, plotting ways to contact and rescue the trapped girls. There is little these sisters can do to take control of their own narratives, especially as they brought to national attention in news stories more than once, further propagating the mythology they would much rather shed.

One has to wonder whether such obsessions would exist at all had these parents not locked their daughters down so tightly, thereby creating the illusion of great treasures hiding behind closed doors. In the sleepy, yellow radiance that bathes this small, 1970s Michigan town in the sentimentality of memory, Coppola might initially seem to be participating in the tender worship of these young girls. It is in those moments where she sees them as flawed beings though that they are brought back down to earth, transforming the film’s affectionate fascination into a poignant recognition of pain, longing, and overwhelming grief.

The Virgin Suicides is currently streaming on Stan, and available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

Reinaldo Marcus Green | 2hr 24min

Though King Richard is a sports film, sports players are not our focus. Instead, director Reinaldo Marcus Green crafts a character study of mentorship – the kind that doesn’t rebuke or harshly punish students when they fail, but rather nurtures them holistically into better people, and not just betters players. High expectations are set, but the relationship is a two-way street. While other aspiring tennis players are berated by overbearing parents and burn out from the stress, teenagers Venus and Serena Williams find the opposite problem. Their father, Richard, fully believes that they will become the best in the sport one day, but in the meantime, patience, family, and education will be top priorities.

There is no hypocrisy to his lessons either, as it is equally when they are not looking that he continues to work tirelessly for them. While the days are spent on their training, he works nights as a security guard to support them beyond mere verbal guidance, and is even willing to put his neck on the line in confronting a group of thugs lurking outside the local tennis courts. Not once in King Richard do we ever doubt that he has anything but his daughters’ best interests at hearts, but the frustrating patience with which he approaches their professional progress drives a tension in the family drama which is not easily resolved. If Venus is growing irritated with the pace at which he is pushing her, Serena is even more exasperated, being the one to live in the shadow of her older sister. But even when tempers are raised, there remains an air of cool collectedness to Will Smith’s performance, giving Richard all the confidence of a man who acts as if he has seen decades into the future.

Or maybe it is just his complete faith in the 85-page plan he wrote in his daughters’ infancy, plotting out their rises to success in careful detail. Though some adjustments are made along the way, his strong principles of humility and patience are rigidly maintained, as is his own detailed understanding of the sport. Most significantly, after he identifies a toxic atmosphere within the junior tournaments, he pulls both of them out and disallows them from competing in matches until they turn professional, aggravating both them and their befuddled coaches.

Time passes and the girls’ talents grow, and Green proves himself to be a particularly good editor in the sharpness with which he moves through it all. A jump forward three years in time lands a graphic match cut precisely on the hit of a tennis ball mid-serve, and these sound effects similarly punctuate transitions between other scenes as well. Montages and slow-motion sequences continue to move through climactic matches with superb tension, though among it all Richard remains a grounding force, as a source of conviction that the future remains bright even at his daughters’ lowest moments. Just as he is patient with them, so too is Green patient with him, peeling back the layers of this kind yet stubborn character whose unconventional choices cannot be fought against, but merely trusted with all the faith one would put in a sturdy, dependable father figure.

King Richard is currently playing in theatres.

Brian de Palma | 1hr 48min

Less than a decade after newspaper journalists exposed the Watergate scandal, and almost two decades after the Zapruder film became an immortal reference point for the endless probing of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Brian de Palma’s Blow Out examined the growing power of evolving media technologies to expose government-toppling truths. Of course, there are all the usual de Palma watermarks present – gorgeous split diopters, point-of-view tracking shots, dizzying 360-degree camera pans, and a suspenseful, absorbing narrative. But the Hitchcock acolyte has rarely used all of these so perfectly and in tandem with thoughtful colour compositions to deliver such a thrilling interrogation of a uniquely American brand of political corruption.

When sound technician Jack Terry is out searching one night for sound effects to use in his latest movie, his accidental recording of a political assassination literally lands him in deeper water than he had anticipated. Two other tight-lipped witnesses are present at the incident, and Jack’s romantic interest in one of them, Sally, pulls him even further into an underworld of conspiracies and dirty, murderous politics. 
  
In an early scene before the incident, we watch Jack framed in a split screen working on a slasher film, while the broadcast television news plays on the other half of the frame. Two types of stories are being created simultaneously here – one aiming for escapism, the other aiming to inform – and yet as Blow Out progresses there is a sly inversion that takes place. Later as Jack returns to his studio with his recorded evidence, we spend a great deal of time sitting with him as he rewinds, slows down, and marks the audio tape, his artistic methods becoming a meticulous, painstaking search for truth. Meanwhile, the news media covers the event as a freak accident, maintaining the happy illusion that American politics operate on an honourable code of integrity.

Like so many other directors before and after him, de Palma keeps coming back to a red, white, and blue scheme as a representation of his nation’s proud colours. It is there in the décor of a motel room’s bold, patterned wallpaper and the floats of a street parade, but it is even more dominant in his lighting, as it dimly illuminates a bar where Jack and Sally flirt, and later bathes a dingy parking lot in the glow of neon signs. 

But it is in Blow Out’s climax where de Palma combines these patriotic primary colours with some of his most suspenseful editing in a slow-motion chase, and thereby delivers perhaps the greatest set piece of his career. The masses celebrating Liberty Day are unwittingly cast as worshippers at the altar of a giant, American flag, where the political establishment viciously sacrifices its most recent victim in the name of protecting their own interests. De Palma’s camera dramatically circles around Jack as he cradles a deceased Sally in his arms, the parade’s red and blue fireworks simultaneously lighting him up and drowning his anguish in a dazzling display of nationalistic spectacle. 

The tragedy of Jack’s loss comes with his devastating recognition that recorded evidence alone is not enough to expose the bedrock of innocent blood upon which America’s flag-waving “freedom” is built. Media certainly holds some influence in Blow Out, but the truth is easily concealed by mainstream news sources who work alongside the political establishment. Sally’s murderer, the “Liberty Bell Strangler”, is only ever spoken of as some sort of un-American aberration, though of course the cruel irony is that those people who condemn him also rely on his brutal actions to uphold their blissfully ignorant privileges. Those like Jack who survive encounters with such men simply wind up with nothing but the ultimate curse of knowledge – understanding the truth, but incapable of wielding it in any practical way, other than pouring it into their own indulgent, escapist fabrications.

Blow Out is currently available to rent or buy on the Microsoft Store.

Woody Allen | 1hr 29min

He was ten movies deep into his career built on neurotic comedy, riding a wave of popularity defined by his resounding successes Annie Hall and Manhattan, and then Woody Allen made this – a scathingly existential and autobiographical deconstruction of fame and artistic purpose, which came and went in the eyes of the public with little fanfare. Stardust Memories was not what people were expecting from him at the time, though years later he would claim it as his best work, and steadily its reputation has begun to approach its deserved status as one of his most accomplished films.

In its early scenes one might draw comparisons to Sullivan’s Travels in the framing of a comedic director looking to work on something a little more serious and sombre than his traditional fare, though Allen himself has noted he had not seen the Preston Sturges film at the time of making this. A far more apt parallel is Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, not just in its self-referential subject matter, but in its suffocatingly surreal string of images working to trap an overwhelmed director in a culture that has its own mind made up about his life’s trajectory.

And much like the traffic jam scene that opens 8 ½, the first scene of Stardust Memories sticks its own lonely director, Sandy Bates, in a crowded, inescapable vehicle, introducing the underlying metaphor that runs through the rest of the film. As he sits on a train waiting to depart the station, he catches the eye of a woman on a neighbouring carriage, who flirtatiously kisses the window in his direction. The passive, zombie-like stares of his fellow passengers burn into him as he hammers at the doors and windows, trying to reach that woman, all the while the train whisks him away from the target of his yearning desire.

It is clear who these nameless, expressionless men and women are meant to stand in for once we properly delve into the film’s narrative. All around Sandy, fans and journalists clamour over him with bizarre requests, questions, and statements, most of which are impossible to respond to. One man hands him a script his son wrote intended to be a “spoof on jockeys.” Another claims that he “can prove that if there’s life anywhere in the universe they will have a Marxist economy,” with remarkable confidence. “I was a Caesarian,” yet another states quite plainly. “That’s great,” replies Sandy. What else is there to say, really?

Allen continues to return to his first person POV shots all through these scenes, filling them with overzealous crowds peering enthusiastically right down the lens. Even beyond the masses of people, the overwhelming architecture of the Stardust Hotel continues to dominate compositions and obstruct characters, in one scene blocking Sandy out entirely as a man shakes hand protruding from behind a wall.

Allen’s collaboration with cinematographer Gordon Willis has always been an important one, but here in Stardust Memories it is absolutely key to the diminution of Sandy’s stature beneath this constant onslaught of chaos, as well as the slightly more expressionistic divorce from reality than his typical black-and-white film. The subtle darkness of the narrative manifests intermittently throughout the film in the empty silhouettes of its characters, as well as at one point in a montage of critics delivering scathing reviews set against pitch black backgrounds. Sadly, the answers that Sandy craves are not to be found here.

It is rather in the surreal blend of life and art, whereby one represents a larger, heightened version of the other, that he strives to find a common purpose in both. At least in the various women who come and go in Sandy’s life (perhaps mirroring the women of La Dolce Vita) he finds some companionship and understanding. In a flashback to his meeting of a previous lover, Dorrie, he spots her standing isolated beneath a large, overbearing mural, both overshadowed by and reflected in the art around her. Instantly, he recognises a shared pain between them.

In more comedic moments, formal boundaries of narrative logic are pushed to great effect, as in one scene that may or may not come from one of Sandy’s movies where he encounters a group of aliens, and poses them grand philosophical mysteries which they cannot answer. It is ultimately when he arrives at his most pressing question about himself that his own position in a meaningless universe begins to take form.

“If nothing lasts why am I bothering to make films or do anything, for that matter?”

“We enjoy your films, particularly the early, funny ones.”

Perhaps this is what provides the motivation for the final few minutes of the film then, in which personal and professional fulfilment meld together in a reflection of the opening scene, though this time with Sandy willingly riding the train in whatever direction it takes him. Suddenly we cut to a movie theatre audience applauding, having just watched everything we did, and in a starkly contrasted response to their earlier disparaging reactions there at least seems to be more thoughtful discussions.

There may be a slightly capitulation to populist sentiment in Sandy’s creation, though it is somewhat ironic that Stardust Memories is clearly not a film dedicated to audiences looking for easy entertainment. For those artists such as Sandy who place at least part of their self-worth in how much they are loved, the act of creation implies a question of who it is for – a question which Allen beautifully draws out with surreal, contemplative devotion to the act itself.

Stardust Memories is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Paul Thomas Anderson | 2hr 13min

Even as Paul Thomas Anderson has experimented in period pieces, romantic comedies, and psychological dramas, his fascination in the surrogate families and oddball coupling of unlikely characters has barely wavered over the decades. Often these characters find themselves lost in the turmoil of unpredictable, changing worlds, from the post-war America setting of The Master to the smaller, more contained collision of chaotic plot threads in Punch Drunk Love, and Licorice Pizza is no exception. What does set this apart from anything else in his filmography is just how languid it is, almost like the happy-go-lucky first half of Boogie Nights but with no impending sense of doom, and far less cocaine.

In fact, the rate at which times passes here is entirely unclear. Gary is 15 with confidence of a 30-year-old and the heart of an 8-year-old, auditioning for children’s parts in movies while hustling a few different businesses on the side. Alana is “25”, but you could give or take a few years based on the wavering conviction with which she tells us this. They meet at Gary’s high school on picture day when she comes in to take photos, and then we never see another scene set there again, their friendship instead unfolding over what could be a few weeks, a few months, or a year on the streets of the San Fernando Valley. Neither look like the sorts of movie stars we have come to expect from even the most casual coming-of-age movies, their pimples and crooked teeth letting them blend into crowds of teenagers and young adults with similarly natural imperfections. Even in Anderson’s lesser films, he has never made one that lacks in characterisation, and here, in what may be considered one of his more modest artistic achievements, this remains the case.

How odd it is to call a film of this calibre “modest” though. Licorice Pizza may be possess less stylistic or formal ambition than Magnolia or There Will Be Blood, and yet for virtually any other working filmmaker it may as well be their crowning jewel. The Los Angeles from Anderson’s childhood is recreated in especially loving detail, calling back especially to Quentin Tarantino’s own Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with the brazen commitment to yellows all through the production design, and the attractive matching of colours between period costumes and sets.

Most impressive of all though are Anderson’s tracking shots, lingering by the sides and backs of Alana and Gary as they move through their constantly shifting environments, like a restless search for stability in a world pushing them from one capitalistic pursuit to the next. In one scene set in the 1973 Teen-Age Fair, the camera skilfully weaves through crowds of students and performers where Gary plans to sell waterbeds, though even here his venture is cut short by a hilariously unfortunate case of mistaken identity. Later when the 1973 oil crisis hits, his shrewd business instincts prove to be even more useless against the overwhelming force of economic turmoil.

Meanwhile, Alana carries a sharp insight into social situations that he does not possess, seeing the misogynistic, racist culture they live in for what it is and manipulating it to her benefit. There is little glamour to be found in this memory piece, as those unsavoury parts of eras we have left behind are recalled not with heavy didacticism nor merciful nostalgia, but rather a bitter amusement and heavy acceptance.

Yet regardless of where they are coming from or what blows they have suffered, Gary and Alana consistently find themselves running back to each other, this visual motif carrying with it a desperation to obtain the security which corporate America cannot provide. Alana’s discovery that the mayoral candidate for whom she is working is hiding a homosexual relationship from the public in fear of its impact on his popularity becomes a turning point for her, as it also comes with a realisation that very few people are suited to the mould cut out for them. Definitions around her relationship with Gary don’t come easily either, as although there is an attraction there, it manifests in complex ways. Are they friends? Business partners? Lovers? Theoretically nothing about them should work, especially given the age gap. And yet despite it all, they continue to run, driven by an instinctive need for companionship and mutual understanding that no one else can offer.

And when they are united in camaraderie, Anderson takes great pleasure in peeling back the layers of their flaws, passions, and mannerisms, building their friendship up with each new revelation. Just as Gary playfully points out that Alana often habitually repeats the statement twice in a row, so too does she slyly pick up on his unspoken fetish when he compliments a woman’s painted toenails. Later, she coyly uses that to her advantage while demonstrating how to flirt with potential customers, teasingly putting her own feet up on her desk.

The other vignettes in this seemingly endless summer (or year?) of entrepreneurship unfold with unhurried, comedic naturalism, and yet individually become the sort of memories one might recall years later as funny anecdotes – that time Gary was mistaken for a murderer and arrested, that time we flooded a movie producer’s house just because he was a d*ck, that time Alana fell off a famous film director’s motorbike. “I’m not going to forget you. Just like you’re not going to forget me,” he tells her, and though within that there is an implication that they will eventually set off on different trajectories, so too does it reserve a special place for each other in their individual futures.

But whenever that separation occurs, it isn’t going to be within this bubble of eternity that Licorice Pizza is set inside. In the final minutes as they once again run towards each other, there is the sense that this really is the last time they will ever have to do so, now that they realise where they both stand. While Anderson cuts from one to the other coming from either sides of the frame, he also inserts brief cutaways of them hurtling along sidewalks and fields from earlier scenes, as if everything up until now has built to this one climactic collision. As it is represented in this motif, the tension underlying this film is not predicated on whether they will find romantic feelings for each other – that would be to reduce their connection down to something far too conventional. As they keep on running, heading towards a common point in space, the suspense leading us on is simply the hope that they will find each other.

Licorice Pizza will be coming soon to VOD.

Woody Allen | 1hr 47min

If Annie Hall was Woody Allen’s most experimentally formal film in its boundlessly creative self-reflexivity, Hannah and Her Sister’s structural ambition acts as a counterpoint to that in its far more naturalistic and composed approach, unfolding like chapters of a novel. The decades of history behind the dysfunctional family relationships that swirl around Mia Farrow’s titular Hannah feel tangible in their organic interactions, and although she is the link through which each narrative thread of this film comes together, she is not our focus. Instead, Allen shifts our attention to three other characters around her – her cheating husband Elliot, her hypochondriacal ex-husband Mickey, and her chaotic, formerly drug addicted sister Holly. Just as her self-absorbed relatives take her bountiful generosity for granted, so too does Allen relegate her own personal issues to the background of each story arc, wrapping us up in the internal voiceovers of men and women who can only perceive the world through their own narrowed perspectives, passing us from one to the next like batons in a race that each character is running only for themselves.

In its bookends of two Thanksgiving parties set 24 months apart, Hannah and Her Sisters is marked by those family gatherings where relatives who might barely see each other throughout the year converge and share in moments of unity, though evidently here that comfort is only found by those willing to open themselves up to lives beyond their own. As Allen’s camera idly drifts around this upscale New York apartment at either end of this narrative, we see these important players brought together in one space, their personal arcs laid out clearly by the contrasting dynamics of both celebrations.

Of course, it is Hannah who is responsible for running these events, remaining the one constant in the lives of those around her who fluctuate and change. This image of poise and altruism that she projects may stir some gratefulness on occasion, but it also inspires insecurity. “I need someone I can matter to,” whines Elliot when reflecting upon the growing distance between him and his seemingly perfectly wife. Worsening the situation is that his secret lover is Lee, another of Hannah’s sisters, whose abuse of her sibling’s trust just piles onto the stack of characters who cannot reconcile their love for her with their own sense of value. She might agree with Elliot that “It’s hard to be around someone who gives so much and needs so little in return”, but it is barely a reasonable excuse for either of their philandering. Even so, it remains quite extraordinary that in Michael Caine’s performance we can still find sympathy for this kind of egocentric self-doubt.

Meanwhile in Mickey’s storyline we find a man wading through the murky philosophical waters of existentialism and mortality, his apprehensive medical check-ups played out in comical montages of contraptions and wires winding all over his body. Like Elliot, he too is plagued by insecurities that overwhelm his own perception of reality, in one scene hallucinating his doctor’s sombre delivery of the news that he has cancer, right before the doctor actually walks in and informs him that he is clear. In one harsh cut, he leaps out onto the streets of New York, dancing with glee to the tune of loud band music, before suddenly stopping dead in his tracks as he nihilistically reminds himself that he will still die one day.

Driven by his mid-life crisis to find the answers to life’s big questions, Mickey considers converting to different religions as casually as one might research a holiday destination, though it is only when he embraces the unknowability of his existential queries and when his story collides with Holly’s that he finds his way back into the folds of the family as a place of acceptance. She lives perhaps the messiest life of anyone else here, moving between acting, a catering business, and television writing, and struggling to find success in any of these ventures. It is clear in her thoughtless use of Hannah’s personal life as a subject for her screenplay that like the others, she doesn’t give much regard to her sister’s feelings, though in finally turning her pen inwards in self-examination she finds both love and professional success with Mickey.

Through the complex tapestry of vignettes, flashbacks, and plot threads that make up Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen keeps returning to chapter breaks and philosophical quotes, structuring the film like a piece of literature concerned with the bearing of human thought and ethics on small lives. “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless,” Allen’s text displays, quoting Tolstoy as a means to contextualise Mickey’s search for purpose, while titles like “The Abyss”, “The Audition”,and “The Big Leap” mark new episodes over the two years this story is set across. Allen further splits up his characters by associating them with specific musical genres, underscoring Elliot’s scenes with opera, Mickey’s with jazz, and revealing Holly’s love of rock in one particular flashback that also divulges it as a historical point of conflict between her and Mickey.

Even with such fantastic formal ambition in its divisions, Hannah and Her Sisters flows remarkably smoothly in its organic character drama and dialogue. When all three sisters meet for lunch in a brief collision of plot threads, Allen fluidly circles his camera around their table, letting Hannah and Holly converse over the latter’s career struggles while focusing predominantly on a silent, guilty Lee. Back at home, their discussions and volatile arguments move through different rooms of the apartment, and Allen’s camera continues to pan and drift along with them, framing these family members in doorways and against walls that confine them to claustrophobic spaces. Through their quarrels there is seemingly always some domestic chore or task for them to perform, maintaining that impression of a world beyond their own immediate issues, while keeping up a restless energy in their ongoing interactions.

How fascinating it is though that in this ensemble of magnificently complex and flawed characters, the one who we might assume would be the lead is the least developed of them all. She too might have her own hilarious and poignant anecdotes to tell, but Hannah and Her Sisters is primarily intrigued by those more selfish lives which branch out from her own, undergoing emotional arcs that come to decisive resolutions. For someone as kind and giving as Hannah, whose life is dedicated to the endless pursuit of helping others, a tidy, gratifying ending is simply an unfathomable prospect.

Hannah and Her Sisters is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Jia Zhangke | 2hr 6min

Having spent much of his career progressively inching further away from his neorealist roots, Mountains May Depart marks Jia Zhangke’s most significant withdrawal from that distinctive, authentic style, and is slightly more disappointing for it. The emotions are bigger and broader here, as he plays more into the conventional melodrama of his characters’ relationships than the quiet beats of disaffection, which he has always wielded such brilliant control over. Rather than sitting back at a distance where we can appreciate the sensitive ambiguity of their exchanges, Jia’s camera narrows further in on their faces than it ever has before, taking a certain edge off his otherwise remarkable use of traditional and modern architecture to define their connections and identities.
 
Still, this is not bad drama by any means, and it isn’t like he is abandoning all visual style entirely. Jia finds the time now and again to return to a long shot of a beautiful, towering pagoda, rising up in the background behind the characters, reminding us of the history that continues to hang over their lives. And when it comes to narrative structure, the framing of Mountains May Depart across three separate time periods may not carry the heavy, epic weight of his earlier film, Platform, but it at least efficiently illustrates the accelerating speed with which Chinese culture is evolving.

On the eve of the new millennium in 1999, we meet Tao, a young shopkeeper caught in a love-triangle that sees her wind up with her more attractive but arrogant suitor. Later, she gives birth to a baby boy, Daole, and divorces her husband. In 2014, she reaches out to her estranged 7-year-old son, and even at this early point in his life she poignantly recognises the cultural distance between their generations. In the final act, set in 2026, we begin to follow Daole as a young man who has moved to Australia and adopted the moniker “Dollar”, effectively cementing his identity within a westernised culture. The only links back to his heritage are through his troubled relationship with his father, who he doesn’t even share a common language with, and his Chinese language teacher. The promise of globalisation to bring the people together is exposed as a lie, as this small family which once held so much hope for the future has been fractured in every sense. Dollar has not seen his mother since he was a childhood, but Jia sparks some hope for their relationship in the final moments, as the young immigrant finally considers reconnecting with her.

As much as this final act works to tie off Jia’s point about China’s modernist progress isolating its own citizens, it is also here where he loses sight of the film’s formal strength. With Tao almost completely dropping out of the narrative, and a jarringly inauthentic vision of a futuristic society, the last forty minutes of the film feels oddly out of place with the rest of the film.

That is, until the largely silent epilogue, when Jia returns to a lonely, middle-aged Tao, back in China. We watch as she walks outside her home into the thick snow laying over the village, pauses, and begins to dance. As suggested by the musical bookends of The Pet Shop Boys’ song “Go West”, the westernised culture that her nation has adopted still isn’t going anywhere. But at the same time, neither is that gorgeous, monumental pagoda, rising up out of the landscape like a shrine to China’s past.

Mountains May Depart is not currently available to stream in Australia.

Lynne Ramsay | 1hr 35min

The prisons which Lynne Ramsay’s characters trap themselves inside are not made of material, but of time and memories, reverberating with echoes of past traumas and in the case of Joe, teasing him with visions of potential futures. As he lumbers through everyday life caring for his elderly mother, he disappears into himself as a hulking mass of emptiness, and then when he sets himself to work he transforms into a force of pain and justice. His targets? Human traffickers, specifically those who kidnap and profit off young girls. For a man who lives in persistent agony and possesses the talent to exact that suffering upon others, the cause towards which he channels it is surprisingly noble, though given how closely he identifies with the corrupt world around him, these missions to restore its lost innocence touchingly point towards a shred of hope for his own salvation.

Saving young victims of trafficking is only one path out of his mental prison though. The other is far blunter, and much easier. Just as Joe is plagued by visions of Nina, one specific girl he has been tasked with rescuing, so too does he indulge in fantasies of his own suicide, imagining the sort of release that would come with letting it all go. Equally as immediate as his own prospective futures is his tragic past, punctuating the narrative in bursts of flashbacks that reveal glimpses of an abusive childhood he continues to re-enact in the present, wrapping himself up and suffocating in plastic just as his father used to do to him, all the while Ramsay reveals the direct parallels between these timelines in graphic match cuts.

Like all of her films before, You Were Never Really Here is far less concerned with crafting a plot and dialogue than it is creating an impressionistic sense of a lonely, disorientated mind out of montages, leaping across time in non-linear structures that destabilise any notion of objective reality. With such a minimalist screenplay, Ramsay frees herself up to follow in the steps of such experimental silent filmmakers as Sergei Eisenstein by building hypnotic rhythms and powerful visual juxtapositions in the editing room, drawing us into a bitter nightmare of hallucinations and flashbacks quietly spinning out of control.

Inhabiting the vessel of trauma that Ramsay’s restless style whirls around is Joaquin Phoenix, whose aptitude for psychologically broken characters takes on entirely different dimensions here than we have seen before. His face is covered in shaggy, grey hair, serving the same purpose as his baggy clothing and low-profile cap in concealing the shape and identity of the man who lies beneath. Neither fat nor muscular seem like proper descriptions here, but he is heavy, laying his whole body into physical confrontations and choosing the blunt force of a hammer over other more practical weapons. Few of Joe’s opponents pose any real challenge to his raw physical power, and we come to accept this to the point that Ramsay eventually excludes his fights altogether as he infiltrates a mansion where Nina is being held captive. Instead, we simply cut between the black-and-white surveillance footage of his determined trudge through the halls and the quiet aftermath of each encounter along the way, his enemies silently lying in pools of their own blood.

Aside from one ambush that takes him unaware, it is evident that taking out these corrupt men poses little challenge to Joe, leaving the film open to a more internal conflict that pitches him against his own self-destructive psyche. Inside it, a haunting sound design of panicked whispers and Jonny Greenwood’s score of uneven, percussive beats melds with such perfect unease into Ramsay’s fragmented editing style, while in her mise-en-scène she continues to frame Joe in all sorts of mirrors that seem to reflect broken or incomplete visions of himself back at him. At times it is all too easy to sink into the ambient sea of bloody violence and death that she crafts here, but just as our troubled protagonist cannot escape those unexpected, sharp flashes of trauma, we too never fully acclimate to his ongoing pain. It is that possibility of just one more young life being saved which pulls us along, raising us up to the surface when the depression takes hold, and which offers a revitalised sense of purpose for even the most hopelessly imprisoned minds.

You Were Never Really Here is currently streaming on Kanopy, and available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

Alfred Hitchcock | 1hr 48min

In this story of serial killers and sinister secrets, there is an eerie motif of ballroom dancers twirling and waltzing in tight formations that Alfred Hitchcock frequently cuts to in the midst of thrilling developments. It is an image of duelling doubles, male and female, each of whom perform mirrored movements in perfect synchronicity, and yet serve no narrative purpose other than underscoring that darkly fated relationship at the centre of Shadow of a Doubt. “The same blood flows through our veins Charlie,” murmurs Uncle Charles to his niece, their inseparable connection drawn right down to their parallel names. Even while considering the wretched corners of the human psyche that Alfred Hitchcock has so frequently probed all through his career, perhaps this is his most disturbing – a twisted portrait of two Charlies, uncle and niece, locked in a secret seeping with subtext of incest, grooming, and sexual abuse.

Often just as fascinating as Hitchcock’s obsession with human perversities is the hyper-focused manner in which he invites us into them, as all it takes is a cutaway to a newspaper suspiciously stuffed in a pocket or an inscription on an emerald ring to place the same curiosity in our minds as that which his characters possess. Our gaze is often attached to these objects as intensely as we fixate on a suspected killer, in one scene slowly tracking in with unabashed curiosity on his profile until he turns to face us directly, and the camera suddenly freezes in terror. Therein lies the suspense of Hitchcock’s narrative and camerawork – we may submit to our own yearning for answers to the mystery of the Merry Widow Murderer, but as we see in the case of young Charlie, it is a dangerous and potentially deadly game.

In his crafting of such psychological darkness, Hitchcock digs down into expressionist lighting and mise-en-scene as its visual foundation, at one point trapping Charlie behind the shadows of stair bannisters cast up against the wall by low lights, imprisoning her in the aura of evil that her uncle has brought with him on this family visit. Though there is initially a sly sexual tension between them, their relationship evolves into one of menacing mistrust. “Who would believe you?” he teases her when she begins to consider turning him in, and the sexual abuse allegory grows even more potent when he tells her that it would “kill her mother” should she expose his lies.

Though more known for his pairings with Orson Welles, it is in this collaboration with Hitchcock that Joseph Cotten fully embraces the spotlight, shrewdly containing huge amounts of murderous rage beneath a thin veneer of respectability. With such concentration in his study of his subject’s guilty observations and reactions, Hitchcock turns Uncle Charles into one of the most compelling characters of both their careers, as a man so consumed by a densely nihilistic philosophy that the only rules of existence left to abide by are the depraved voices inside his own head.

“The world’s a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?”

He is no doubt a sad, lonely person, and for those caught up in his web of deceit and murder, the world becomes just as much of an isolating hell them as it is for him. It is especially after Charlie’s suspicions are confirmed by the inscription on the ring he has gifted her that she becomes more alienated than ever, as the camera is lifted up in a magnificent crane shot away from a close-up of that piece of jewellery into a wide with one smooth, deliberate camera movement, forcefully estranging her within the long shadows of a cavernous, gloomy library. And then, just as we have seen before, Hitchcock takes this moment to return to that motif of the perfectly synchronised dancers, and with a single crushing blow he delivers the paradox at the heart of Shadow of a Doubt – that infectious isolation which spreads from one to another through the disclosure of a dark, crushing secret, binding the two together in a complex dance of abuse and manipulation that no one else could possibly understand.

Shadow of a Doubt is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.