Author: SceneByGreen

Wes Craven | 1hr 31min

Before there was Freddy Krueger, the wise-cracking slasher monster that flooded every corner of mainstream pop culture, there was Fred Krueger, the stealthy, dream-haunting bogeyman, cloaked in shadows and supernatural mystery. It is a little surprising just how much Wes Craven hides his killer’s face from view in A Nightmare on Elm Street, especially considering how much he indulges in the sort of gory practical effects that 1980s horror became so notorious for, but it is a very fitting creative choice – not just in playing on the horror of the unknown, but also to emphasise the bewildering, intangible nature of Krueger’s greatest power. To invade one’s dreams as they sleep is to target them at their most vulnerable, and to evoke an intimate sense of terror. All it takes is the image of Krueger’s knifed fingers reaching up between the legs of our heroine, Nancy, as she closes her eyes in the bathtub to induce those sorts of uneasy chills.

Of course, the perverse nature of it all is hard to ignore. Given how sexually active many of Krueger’s targets are, the innocence which he ruptures is not so much tied to their chastity as it is to the naïve belief that these young adults are at the invincible age where they have nothing to lose. As much as they would like to think otherwise, they are not yet fully grown up and have not experienced the same horrors as their parents. There are still parts of their minds and bodies that have been untouched by others, and Krueger probes deeper into those areas than anyone has been before, violently pulling his surviving victims into adulthood in a disturbing coming-of-age metaphor. It is just too fitting that the older generation who knew about Krueger all along have kept him as a shameful secret as well, thereby leaving their own children entirely unprepared for his attacks.

While Craven’s allegorical screenplay does the heavy lifting between each new scare, his direction only really manages to lift off to new horrific levels when indulging in the visual power of his characters’ nightmares. His influences are all too evident, with the levitation of bodies being drawn directly from The Exorcist, and some particularly effective POV tracking shots inspired by Halloween, but he is also unmistakably a fresh voice in the horror genre. Freddy’s eerie nursery rhyme as sung by three young girls playing jump rope echoes in instrumental minor intervals all throughout the film, the image itself bookending the film beneath a dreamy white filter. As for Craven’s practical effects, there are few creepier than the shot of Krueger’s face pressing through the wall above Nancy’s bed, or her feet sinking into the stairs as she tries to run away.

A Nightmare on Elm Street tends to suffer more when it comes to the performances outside of Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger. There is a young Johnny Depp here who makes an impact in his relatively minor supporting role, but Heather Langenkamp is no great scream queen on the level of Jamie Lee Curtis, and neither is her character Nancy Thompson as compelling as Halloween’s Laurie Strode or even Psycho’s Marion Crane. Nevertheless, the strength of Craven’s fresh approach to horror filmmaking stands, playing into the genre’s conventional corruption of innocence by directly attacking deeper, more vulnerable areas of the human subconscious than any film had attempted before.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is available to stream on Stan and Paramount Plus, and available to rent or buy on iTunes and Amazon Prime Video.

Ernst Lubitsch | 1hr 50min

While screwball heroines of the 1930s were charming men with their flighty mannerisms and wily turns of phrase, silent film veteran Greta Garbo was setting herself on an entirely different comedic path. Nina Ivanovna Yakushova – or Ninotchka for short – is sullen, stern, and dead serious, arriving in France to conduct legal business for Russian clients. This is a character we might not attach to so easily were it not for Garbo’s utter deadpan, a marvellous screenplay co-written by Billy Wilder, and Ernst Lubitsch’s own sophisticated directorial touch, bringing a delicate air of whimsy and wit to even the most forthright proceedings.

Though the character of Ninotchka is largely absent for the opening 20 minutes, she is also the foundation upon which this film largely rests, as her arrival is heralded in advance by her bumbling clients searching for the mysterious Russian diplomat at a train station. As they stumble around looking for a man, Lubitsch shifts his camera very gradually to reveal a figure standing in the background – a woman in a sharp coat and long skirt, eyeing them off with disdain. This is not someone who caters to the fanciful needs and expectations of the men around her. Ninotchka is like a statue, unyielding, waiting for us to come to her.

Then there is Count Leon d’Algout, her English adversary and new paramour, who, while not being quite as compelling a character, provides a more flamboyant counterpoint to her severity. Where she speaks of love as “a romantic designation for a most ordinary biological process,” he tenderly talks of Paris as a city split into two halves, but drawn amorously together. As the two look out at a view of the city lights, she disparages western culture as an indulgent, self-destructive culture, and from both their incongruent perspectives emerges one side of a conversation attempting flirtatious repartee, and another side maintaining a hilariously impassive rationality.

“You must admit that this doomed civilisation sparkles. Look at it. It glitters.”

“I do not deny its beauty, but it’s a waste of electricity.”

This is a woman who sees a trip to the powder room as an opportunity to spread Marxist propaganda, and yet for all of her detachment to the western world, there is indeed some truth in Leon’s poetic musings. While he grows sympathetic to her political ideologies, she begins to indulge a little in capitalistic luxuries, and all of a sudden, his talk of two halves becoming one moves just a little closer to reality. It takes a director as known for his classy “touch” as Lubitsch to smoothly integrate such clashing elements together under an elegantly blossoming romance, and then puncture that with brilliantly straight-faced bluntness. He may have directed films with a keener sense of subtextual wit, but none which feature as magnificent a character as Garbo’s comically deadpan Ninotchka.

Ninotchka is currently available to stream on The Criterion Channel, and available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

David Lowery | 2hr 5min

There many not be too many hardcore fans of Arthurian legends hoping that David Lowery’s adaptation of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ remains faithful to its source material, but right up until the film’s final few minutes, this is surprisingly the case. It is no easy task maintaining secrecy around what exactly unfolds in this dénouement where the two stories part ways, especially given how much it represents the zenith of his stylistic and formal achievement of filmmaking, but this much can be said without risk of spoilers – his narrative’s eventual surrender to the creeping power of time and nature is far more in line with its pagan influences than its Christian.

The medieval kingdom of The Green Knight is built on fragile foundations of ego and pretence, with even its royal crowns radiating outwards like metallic imitations of iconographic halos. The sombre spirituality which can be found within these castle walls is not a bright beacon of faith, but is rather represented as a dark, deathly decay, pierced only by light pouring down from above like heavenly blessings. This is but a small taste of the transcendent, otherworldly power which Gawain will discover on his journey across the beautiful rolling landscapes of England, where encounters with scavengers, lords, and supernatural creatures gradually temper his ambitions of glory and honour. As he comes to grapple with the dark and mystical beauty of the world beyond King Arthur’s castle, so too does Lowery in his visual artistry, relishing the poetic fantasy and dreamlike imagery of such a grand, chivalric quest.

There is a sizeable difference between the medieval world which Lowery constructs here versus those grittier representations of the era from more historically-minded films. This is a setting which seems to spring forth from the oral tales of ancestors, as a visual sense of delicate impressionism emerges from within every set piece. Matte paintings are used early on during the Round Table scenes, effectively turning its backdrop of gaping arched hallways into a canvas upon which Lowery stages his ensemble of knights and nobles. Later as Gawain approaches the end of his journey, a supernatural orange mist engulfs the final trek, as if to tempt him away from the inverse colours of the Green Chapel. Such evocative imagery rejects any perceptions of this narrative as a piece of pure history, but rather establishes it as a tale that has been pulled apart and reconstructed thousands of times over centuries, distilling its core down to a pure expression of humanity’s total insignificance.

The destiny which the young knight Gawain finds himself bound to comes not from religious prophecies, but is instead foolishly created by his own hand. “Tell me a tale of yourself, so that I might know thee,” King Arthur implores him at a Christmas feast, and yet unlike those other great men of the Round Table, he has none. As if summoned by this request, a man made entirely of bark and leaves rides into the dining hall. He offers a challenge: anyone who shall land a blow against him must have the exact same blow delivered back to them one year later. Tempted by the glory, and feeling the pressure to prove himself worthy, Gawain steps forward and beheads the Green Knight. It is a show of superficial strength, but also of foolish arrogance, as he thus sets in stone a fate which will see him reap what he has sown.

Given its lyrical musings, cryptic symbolism, and enchanting monologues, The Green Knight is certainly a film built for multiple viewings. The threat of Gawain losing his head lies as a persistent undercurrent beneath his quest, especially as he is met along the way with the task to retrieve another’s from within a spring. But as he searches for greater significance, it also comes to signify something more personal to our hero – a spiritual chastening, through which he loses his ego and accepts the presence of greater natural forces at play. The ravages of time specifically wreak great devastation upon human delusions of power, and in formally recurring visions of alternate futures seeded throughout the film, Lowery continues to posit either one of two ideas – either we meet the consequences of our actions in the present, or we meet it further down the road. Twice do we see such visions paired with slow-moving, 360-degree camera pans through which he evokes the steadily pivoting hands of a clock, visually manifesting the glacial encroachment of nature and time upon the realms of men.

And indeed, these two forces are often bound together in the film, fusing both physical and metaphysical worlds within the representation of the Green Knight himself. He is patient, but also inevitable. He does not seek out Gawain, and yet he doesn’t need to. Most importantly, he is no villain. He encourages those at the end of their lives to not experience death as a terrifying epiphany, but rather a great humbling. As for when exactly one meets their end – that is merely a reflection of their own actions towards the world at large. Such delicate poetic justice instils The Green Knight with a cyclical structure, not so much within Gawain’s immediate story, but within the hypnotic rhythms and repetitions of the world around him, and consequently pulls us ever deeper into its mystical, foreboding heart.

The Green Knight is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.

The Coen Brothers | 1hr 57min

The eccentric worlds of Coen Brothers films aren’t often built by epic establishing shots or detailed production design, though they do revel in these on occasion. Their settings usually come together through the uniquely American idiosyncrasies of their characters, the dark humour of their screenplays, and, especially as we see here in The Big Lebowski, their thorough understanding of how genre conventions can be flipped, bent, twisted, and discarded with altogether. Initially considered a disappointment hot off the success of Fargo, The Big Lebowski was subject to complaints of jumbled, convoluted plotting which, if anything, puts it in good company with the pulpy detective novels and films that it takes so much inspiration from. 
  
In the rich lineage of directors who bring to life their own artistic takes on Los Angeles-based neo-noirs, the Coens look favourable next to those such as Robert Altman and Roman Polanski who trod similar ground before them. Their vision of the sunny Californian city is one of contradictions, where slackers co-exist with businessmen, war veterans, artists, and young families, all of whom have some role to play in the crime and corruption which escalate from the smallest, most ridiculous misunderstandings.

Jeffrey Lebowski, more colloquially known as The Dude, isn’t immune to this. Though his breezy attitude keeps him cool in extreme situations, it also makes him an easy target for manipulation by those pulling the strings. Bunny, the missing wife of a wealthy philanthropist also named Jeffrey Lebowski, seems to have been kidnapped by a gang of German nihilists, and with the promise that he might be able to return to his peaceful life of bowling if he sorts all this out, the Dude searches for answers, trying desperately to keep up with the pointless, conflicting demands thrust upon him. Virtually everyone, from porn industry kingpin Jackie Treehorn to postmodern artist Maude, has some stakes in the matter of Bunny’s disappearance – but really, no one here knows what they are doing. It is simply much easier for them to pin their confusion and failures on the guy who openly wears his bewilderment on his sleeve. 
  
The Dude himself is a masterstroke of creative characterisation from the Coens. Where one might expect to find an intelligent, relentless, hardboiled detective dressed in a sharp suit and fedora, we instead find the opposite – a bearded man dressed in sandals, baggy shorts, and a robe, stuck in the hippie movement that has long since grown out of fashion. Jeff Bridges delivers his lines with all the nonchalance and hilariously lax timing of a man who sees the wild, intense world running around him, and cares very little for it. After a violent threat from a bowling opponent, his only response is a short pause and a quiet “Jesus…”, a comically far cry from whatever sharp witticism private investigator Philip Marlowe might have retorted with. 

As a veteran stuck in his glory days of the Vietnam War, John Goodman’s Walter also makes for an explosive, comedic counterpoint to the Dude’s untroubled attitude. Though they have opposing approaches to almost every complication they come up against, both recognise each other as misfits in a culture that has moved on without them. With nothing else out there for either one, their responses to tough, unresolvable situations end in agreement on one course of action.   

“Fuck it Dude, let’s go bowling.” 

The Coen Brothers’ films aren’t often recognised for their sumptuous imagery, and yet they take The Big Lebowski a step further than its noir predecessors in literalising the Hollywood dream through surreal, wandering interludes. One Busby Berkeley dream sequence rendered in black, white, red, and gold is a magnificent reflection of the Dude’s subconscious working its way through the mystery at hand, his bizarre relationship with Maude, and of course, bowling. Outside these hallucinations, slow-motion shots of objects, lights, and people floating across pitch black backgrounds are threaded through the Dude’s reluctant investigation, continuing to lift the plot out of reality and into a weightless realm – a visual representation of his own light passage through otherwise dark situations. In a world where these deceitful, seedy environments are as inescapable as they are erratic, the Dude’s carefree lifestyle is ultimately the only constant which we can depend upon.

The Big Lebowski is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, and available to rent or buy on iTunes and YouTube.

Mike Leigh | 2hr 40min

W.S. Gilbert is the intelligent dramatist, reciting his lyrics like light poetry. Sir Arthur Sullivan is the musical genius, directing his cast with his sense of rhythm, pitch, and dynamics. With one expressing himself through words and the other through jaunty, musical tunes, the two aren’t always speaking the same language, and conflict frequently arises. But when they are finally in sync, creativity flows uninhibited, and inspiration strikes without warning. This is especially the case when Sullivan visits an exhibition of Japanese arts and crafts, where he has an epiphany to write what would become one of their greatest musicals – The Mikado. This fruitful period of the duo’s partnership is the historical canvas upon which Mike Leigh grafts reflections of his own creative processes in Topsy-Turvy, drawing together artists, egos, and aristocrats in this world of splendour and sensitivity.

It is incredibly refreshing to see Leigh lavish such opulently stylistic expressions all over a film which belongs to a genre so frequently confined to stale templates, and often stripped of unique directorial voices. The best artist biopics in some way reflect the eccentricities of their subjects, and when Gilbert and Sullivan just so happen to be the points of interest, opportunities to present extravagant set pieces and musicals are abundant. Leigh does indeed make the most of such scenes where we watch the duo’s theatrical visions erupt in patterns of reds, greens, and golds across the stage, with the sumptuous décor of pink cherry blossoms and Japanese architecture adorning the space, but at the same time, his sights are set far beyond the products of their virtuoso, brilliant as they are. There is beauty to be found all through their journey of creation, from the gorgeous wallpaper splashing bold colours up against the backdrops to their lowest points, to the dramatic dolly in on Gilbert’s face during his stroke of inspiration, and right down to the exacting rehearsals, where both frustration and humour is present in the actors’ repetitions of their scripted lines.

And then, as if to push its ambitions even further, Topsy-Turvy continues to expand its scope beyond Gilbert and Sullivan’s focused efforts, becoming an ensemble piece that gives full credit to the collaboration of multiple minds as necessary factors in this creative process. It is certainly worth acknowledging Jim Broadbent’s performance as Gilbert as one of his best, but the collective power of every other supporting and minor character has just as much of an impact, with each of them, from Andy Serkis’ pipe-puffing choreographer, John D’Auban, to Timothy Spall’s self-conscious performer, Richard Temple, getting the chance to make their presence known.

The Robert Altman comparison is inevitable here, especially given Leigh’s adoption of his directorial method of guiding actors through improvisations, thereby letting character relationships organically emerge from seemingly insubstantial discussions. He spends full scenes fixating on whether or not actor Durward Lely shall wear a corset beneath his kimono, the wage negotiations of another actor, George Grossmith, and the attempts from the show’s “three little maids” to imitate the walks of authentic Japanese women. In heavier moments, the depictions of alcoholism, drug abuse, and health issues tie the film to its setting of Victorian London, where even the wealthiest folk aren’t completely immune to the economic and social ills of the era.

And yet these hardships and petty arguments do little to separate these artists when they collectively approach Gilbert in a bid to convince him not to cut Temple’s main song, “A More Humane Mikado”. Even through such trials, their effort in restoring confidence in their friend and colleague is abundantly sweet, but it also importantly underscores the value of collaboration and sacrifice in the dramatist’s own approach to the creation of art.

With Leigh placing such an emphasis on cooperation in the production of The Mikado, it is only right to similarly give credit to his own talented team, made up of his regular cinematographer, Dick Pope, his costume designer, Lindy Hemming, and Eve Stewart, whose specialty in period production design rightfully earned her an Academy Award on this film. There is no doubting that Topsy-Turvy is an extraordinary expression of Leigh’s visionary voice, examining his own ideas of how great art comes together. And yet in the gloriously lavish interiors, the depth of the ensemble’s talents, and the painstaking detailing of each of these characters’ intricate emotional journeys, the film becomes an ode from everyone who worked on it, dedicated to those artists who can put aside their egos to share in the joy of mutual creation.

Topsy-Turvy is currently available to stream on The Criterion Channel.

Kenneth Lonergan | 3hr 6min

When Margaret wrapped shooting in 2005, it was its famously troubled post-production that began to take over its legacy. While studios insisted on a cut under 150 minutes, Kenneth Lonergan maintained that 3 hours was necessary to maintain the integrity of his artistic vision. Through countless delays and lawsuits, the battle raged on for years, until both versions were eventually released in 2011 and 2012 respectively.

So, is the additional half hour that Lonergan fought so hard for entirely necessary? Without having seen the studio cut, it is hard to say. This isn’t exactly a lean narrative, but the operatic weight of Lisa’s emotional turmoil can be felt in its epic scale, blowing up every emotion to larger-than-life proportions. Such wild fluctuations are carried confidently by Anna Paquin in this loud, effusive role, bringing a performative quality to Lisa’s attempts at artificially drawing meaning from senseless tragedy. As tiresome as her talking and arguing in circles may be, it strongly indicative of a young woman who values her voice above all else.

When it comes to Lonergan’s rich, layered screenplay, this is a film which belongs far more to the era of the mid-2000s than the early 2010s, as Lisa’s emotional journey of guilt, angst, rage, and growth speaks directly to a specific kind of trauma that unified New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11. She is not the only person implicated in or affected by the devastating death of a woman walking through the streets of Manhattan, but it does take on a much more dramatic significance in her life than many others involved. With the mindset of an emotionally immature, dismissive teenager she can keep denying responsibility, but as she comes to face up to her culpability, she finds her life intertwining with other strangers bound together by a common tragedy.

The deceased woman, Monica, has only a few minutes of screen time, and yet the big name casting of Alison Janney in this part effectively establishes her as the centre around which the rest of the drama revolves. Her death, set in motion by the recklessness of Americans, becomes Lonergan’s perfect metaphor for the 9/11 attacks, and the fallout is similarly messy. How much blame can one person alone shoulder for this? Must those whose lives have been cut short be held up as beacons of lost innocence? Monica’s good friend, Emily, speaks of her as a tough but kind person, and yet in an early phone call with her cousin, Abigail, she is painted out as difficult and selfish. It would be easy to offer unconditional sympathy to Monica and every other character who suffers so intensely, and yet contradictions such as these only serve to throw us off from any conventional expressions of grief. These are imperfect, thorny humans bearing obnoxious flaws, and while these often challenge our efforts to connect with them, they also effectively ground this story in a complicated, bitter reality.

Behind the camera, Lonergan is no great stylist, but the careful consideration he puts into repeating scenes of heated classroom discussions, opera, and cutaways of New York streets and architecture is crucial to the emotional resonance of Lisa’s story. Through these familiar beats, we tune into how parts of her identity shift over time, particularly in her attitude towards opera as an entirely dull affair. Perhaps it is the way she learns to wrestle with how other people’s emotional states are inextricably tied to her own, or the lesson she receives in listening to others speak, but there is a gradual appreciation that mounts within her for the unique experience of sitting in an audience of hundreds, and sharing communal feelings of pain, anger, and elation being expressed by a single person.

While she certainly learns what it means to mature, there are some behaviours which remain intrinsic and unchangeable in Lisa’s being. This hot-headed student who we saw towards the start of the film arguing with a fellow classmate over the political causes of 9/11 is still participating in similar debates three hours later, just as fiery as ever.

By its very design as an educational safe space, the classroom becomes a microcosm of the world at large, allowing confrontations such as these over weighty subjects, while sheltering them from any real consequences. In one English lesson, Lonergan is very purposeful in his selection of a Shakespeare quote which compares humans to gods as “flies to wanton boys.” When one student offers his interpretation of this passage as signifying the inability of humans in grasping a universe beyond their comprehension, it is somewhat ironic that the teacher shuts him down so forcefully, instead asserting that his own analysis regarding its relation to the insignificance of the individual against the cosmos is the correct one.

As this quote applies to Lisa’s own life, there is truth in both readings. She may be both blind and inconsequential to the larger universe, but as she realises, at least one of those is fixable. All throughout Margaret, Lonergan draws our attention to the dialogue of strangers overlapping with the main drama in a sprawling, Altman-esque fashion, effectually pulling us away from Lisa’s “adolescent self-dramatisation”. Lisa may like to believe her life is an opera, as Emily so bluntly puts it, and this may indeed be a reflection of her own overwrought, self-centred hysteria. But it is only through this process of understanding how real trauma is experienced and managed that she can overcome such delusions of self-importance, and in the final minutes of this epic drama, finally allow herself to be moved by an emotion expressed by someone other than herself.

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

Tom Tykwer | 1hr 21min

To watch the German thriller Run Lola Run is to sit through three separate heart attacks, each one divided by a brief moment of respite allowing us to catch our breath before throwing us right back into the state of panic we came from. It is a showcase of remarkable rapid-fire editing, energetic camerawork, and vivid colours, but just as compelling as Tom Twyker’s vivacious style is his segmented formal structure, repeating Lola’s effort to find and deliver 100,000 Deutschmarks to her boyfriend, Manni, in a unified triptych of timelines. To call this a meditation on any level would be wrong, and yet the poise and thoughtfulness with which Tykwer attacks questions of fatalism and free will in this onslaught of deadlines is on the same level as any slow-burn arthouse film.

Lola herself might as well be an action video game character with her distinctive look of bright red hair, tank top, and expression of obstinate grit – a fitting image for a woman at the centre of a narrative which itself mirrors video game mechanics. Presented with a singular goal, a pressing time limit, and a pathway loaded with endless opportunities to dramatically shift the course of events, Lola finds herself a free agent in a world can be manipulated by playing to its own internal rules. Should she fail, she simply respawns in a Groundhog Day-like rebirth, presented with the chance to not just affect her own future, but those of the people she bumps into along the way.

Paired with Lola’s race against time is a confronting sensory overload, beating us into submission at the feet of a relentless, ticking clock. It doesn’t take great leaps of the imagination to see why Edgar Wright has listed this among his top 40 films, or the significant influence it has had on his own creative, kinetic style. Run Lola Run is certainly among the best edited films of the 1990s, with its match cuts smoothly stitching together leaps between each segment, its constant restlessness in finding off-kilter angles to approach simple actions, and its synchronicity with the pulsing, electronic score that barely ever lets up. But even within its quick, sharp bursts of images, Tykwer’s camera is almost never static, as it circles, tracks, and dollies in on characters, impatiently pushing them to action. The three-pronged structure goes beyond a repetition of narrative events, but it is also the repetition of such audacious artistic choices as these which ground the film’s recklessly fast pace in a sense of familiarity. A long take through Lola’s apartment each time she leaves, a brief animated interlude as she makes her way out onto the street, a three-way split screen as she nears her destination – this is evidently a film that is built upon on its remarkable form as much as its blazing visual bravura.

It takes a performance as emphatically physical as the one which Franka Potente delivers here to match such dynamic direction. While she thrusts her body forward through space, her eyes remain keenly focused on the road ahead. Then, in moments of utter desperation, Lola lets out a supernaturally loud, glass-shattering scream, reverberating on a frequency which seems to bend the chaos of the universe to her will. At times it might seem like Lola’s influence is unlimited – after all, this is a woman who we have seen alter the course of a woman’s life with a single bump, sending her down paths of crime, wealth, and religion – but all it takes is a slight variation set in motion from an outside source to dispel that illusion of total control. In one powerful, form-breaking moment, Tykwer’s universe springs forth from its image as a neutral, mechanical contraption, and the presence of some deeper driving force emerges. There is indeed a logical consistency to the fatalism and free will in his effervescently metaphysical world, and yet just as Lola moulds it to her design, there is similarly an independent, enigmatic sentience present guiding her and everyone else along a path that only ever makes sense when we come to its end.

Run Lola Run is currently available to stream on SBS On Demand.

Jacques Demy | 1hr 30min

Unlike so many other auteur filmmakers closely associated with movie-musicals, Jacques Demy was no American working within a restrictive Hollywood studio system – this is a French director who stepped up to the plate in 1961 with his enthralling debut, Lola, and thus began his own cinematic revolution contained within the larger French New Wave movement. While not quite the full-fledged musical that his later efforts would be, Lola is instead about as close as a film could get to being a musical without intermittently indulging in songs. In fact, there is only one number to be found, “Lola”, sung near the halfway mark by French actress Anouk Aimée. This song, much like the film’s title, is named after its leading character, who herself is named after the iconic Marlene Dietrich character, Lola Lola. Similarities to the German cabaret singer of the 1930 film The Blue Angel are abundant, particularly in Aimée’s enthralling performance as a beautiful, talented woman with a long line of suitors, receptive to their charms but ultimately unwavering in her singular focus.

The relative lack of songs should not be taken to mean that Lola unfolds with any less panache, vigour, or sensitivity than a traditional musical though. In the same year, 1961, Demy’s French contemporary, Jean-Luc Godard, also deconstructed the genre in A Woman is a Woman, similarly using an instrumental score beneath scripted dialogue to imitate the rise and fall of emotions conventionally expressed through musical numbers. But where Godard’s effort is marked by bright colours, self-awareness, and his trademark dissonance, Lola is far more elegantly muted in comparison. Demy would later indulge in striking colour compositions in his most famous musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but this is his first and only film shot in black-and-white, and as such it is rather through his brisk tracking shots, soft natural lighting, and rhythmic cutting that his delicate artistry shines through. 

Though it is Josef von Sternberg who is honoured in the character archetype of the titular Lola, Max Ophüls is the one who Demy pays tribute to right up front in his opening credits. The Ophüls influence is certainly present in the way Demy glides his camera gracefully through his streets and sets, but it can also be found in his feminist-tinted meditations on fate, which underlies the form of the entire narrative. Whenever one character in Lola is drawn to another, there is almost always a slightly obscured nostalgia behind the attraction, with the object of their attraction often bearing similarities to a man or woman they once loved. The most obvious case of this is in the real past shared between Lola and Roland, an old friend she runs into by chance on the streets of Nantes. While he pursues her, Lola herself seems more hung up on another former lover, Michel. This longing becomes the motivation for her fling with American sailor and Michel-lookalike, Frankie, who himself strikes up a friendship with Cécile, a 13-year-old girl that reminds him of his sister back in Chicago, and who, coming full circle, reminds Roland of Lola.

Within this tangle of faint reminiscences, Cécile stands as the only one clear-minded in the connections she forms with others, having not yet been tainted by the pain of long-lost memories. When Frankie takes her to the fair, Demy draws us away from the immediacy of the moment in his swelling score and slow-motion photography, as if to turn this into a pure, nostalgic impression that she will never fully recapture. Though Cécile is one of the lucky few who can live in the moment without the burden of the past, the emphasis on the celebration of her 14^th birthday underscores the transient nature of her own youth, indicating that one day she too will find herself pining after old memories.

With the ghosts of old lovers, friends, and relatives emerging in vague associations all throughout Lola, the physical manifestation of one such memory towards the conclusion seems almost too good to be true, despite it keeping with the tradition of happy musical endings. Why is it that Michel returns to whisk Lola away? Is this abrupt resolution really all that earned? That any of these characters who are so bogged down in bygone days might actually have a future seems impossible. As Lola drives away with Michael towards her new life though, the figure of Roland walking the opposite direction down the street catches her eye. And just as she has always done whenever teased by a hint of the past, she once again turns backwards to linger on what could have been.

This bitter sting in an artificially sweet ending may be a departure from the traditionally optimistic fare of movie-musicals, but Demy is not a cynic at heart. In his characters’ foolish devotion to the past, we can see his own love for cinema history, as he aims to evoke a similar joyous innocence to those musicals that inspired him – yet in holding Lola back from becoming a proper musical itself, and by adding in notes of such ambiguous regret, there is a purposeful incompleteness to this feeling. For Lola, and for everyone else around her, their nostalgic yearnings are never-ending attempts to reclaim a feeling that never existed, but as Roland reminds her just before their final farewell, “There’s a bit of happiness in simply wanting happiness.” And just as that is enough for Lola as she moves on, it too becomes enough Demy in his wistful musings over his love of film.

Lola is currently available to stream on Stan, Mubi Australia, and Foxtel Now.

Lynne Ramsay | 1hr 34min

The Glaswegian streets of Ratcatcher are infested. Rats, garbage bags, even children, who themselves are crawling with nits – this working-class suburb of Scotland is a plague-ridden, inescapable hellhole. Especially with the garbage men on strike, such scourges only continue to spread like a cancer, until they simply become extensions of everyone’s homes. Plastic bags of rubbish turn into sofas, and chasing rats becomes a hobby for those disillusioned youths with nothing else to do. Lynne Ramsay’s vision of blue-collar Scotland in the 1970s is evocative of a bygone era of childlike innocence, but to call it nostalgic by any means would be a stretch.

Even though the free-flowing, lyrical editing and structure of Ratcatcher does evoke a pacing not unlike Terence Davies’ autobiographical tribute to the British working class, Distant Voices, Still Lives, it has far more in common with the Italian neorealist films of the 1940s and 50s. James Gillespie is the 12-year-old boy who is introduced as the vessel through which we experience this world, and yet despite his age, he does not stand as a beacon of innocence. Any chance that that might be the case is stripped early on when he inadvertently commits a devastating act that weighs heavy on his soul, instilling in him such an unbearable guilt that only feeds his desire to escape this dreary, infested world that promises nothing but decay.

As for what brings about this deterioration, Ramsay doesn’t position James as so much of a victim as he is one of many agents perpetuating society’s slow, repulsive descent into corruption and squalor. Just a few days ago, his conscience was unmarked, and in his suffering, he could at least place the blame on his environment. Now, he is as good as one of those rats, spreading disease and filth wherever he goes. In this self-identification, he displays much empathy for the loathsome vermin overrunning the streets of Glasgow, who surely dream of some faraway utopia, just as he does.

As Ramsay has proven in the years since this debut, she is primarily a director who finds her film in the editing room, crafting montages that offer a tint of hypnotic delicacy to otherwise harsh environments. It is particularly in three brief, escapist interludes where she breaks the heavy realism of Ratcatcher to allow her characters some indulgence in a magical realist fantasy, and lets the film disappear into the light rhythms of her cutting. There aren’t a great deal of picturesque images to be found in this film, as Ramsay is clearly more committed to the rundown architecture of the setting, and yet in these moments of wonder she finds the time to linger on a window frame opening up onto a field of wheat, or in the melancholy conclusion, sitting with a body hanging in stasis beneath the surface of a murky canal.

In this suffocating imagery, Ramsay calls back to the opening shot of James wrapping himself up in a curtain in slow-motion. In her persistent motif of infested landscapes, burying oneself deeper into the all-consuming anathema is often the only practical way one might dull one’s senses to it. Sure, there is always the dream of finally floating away to some paradise on the moon, or moving away to a brand-new, upper-class estate. But in the agonising existence of Scotland’s lower classes, Ratcatcher recognises the disheartening disparity between such pipe dreams and reality.

Ratcatcher is currently streaming on Mubi Australia.