Category: 1970s

The Passenger (1975)

Michelangelo Antonioni | 2hr 6min

Television journalist David Locke doesn’t know much about fellow hotel guest Robertson, but based on their limited conversations, it appears that he is joyfully liberated from the burdensome responsibilities that so many carry in modern society. “No family, no friends. Just a few commitments,” the mysterious Englishman shares in their first meeting. “I take life as it comes.” Now as Locke finds his new friend’s body lying cold in his room, he does what any man seeking to escape an unfaithful wife and unsatisfying job would do. This is his opportunity to make a clean break from his dull, disappointing life, reporting the death as his own and adopting Robertson’s identity.

In this moment, Michelangelo Antonioni plays a familiar trick of discontinuity that he had previously experimented with in L’Eclisse and Blow-Up, though in The Passenger it is his camera movement rather than editing which shifts our perception of reality. As Locke forges a new passport, an audiotape recording of his and Robertson’s first meeting plays over the top, and we slowly pan towards the balcony where the voiceovers imperceptibly transition into a live flashback. When their discussion begins to wrap up, Antonioni similarly drifts the camera across the room back into the present day, effectively eroding the boundaries of time and identity which have long been missing in Locke’s life. Perhaps becoming an entirely different person is the key to finding that purpose he has never known, our protagonist resolves, and thus he sets out on a globetrotting journey meeting all of Robertson’s scheduled engagements.

Locke stares down at the dead man whose identity he wishes to claim, resolving to start a new life.
Camera movement plays an unusually important role for Antonioni, erasing boundaries between past and present as it floats into this flashback…
…and then back to the present.

The Passenger’s scope is immense, spanning multiple countries across Europe and Africa which each hold some sort of clue to Robertson’s actual identity. This narrative might conceivably sound like a mix between Alfred Hitchcock and The Talented Mr. Ripley, though Antonioni is not so concerned with the meticulous plotting of its mystery, instead framing Locke as a man aimlessly wandering both a literal and figurative desert. This is where we meet him after all, not long before he is abandoned by his guides and gets his Land Rover stuck in a dune. He can scream at the sky all he likes, but that simply drives him to the point of exhaustion, collapsing him against the car as Antonioni’s camera despairingly pans across the Sahara’s vast, flat expanse.

Locke wanders a literal and figurative desert, searching for purpose in a world that simply drives him to exhaustion.

There are no manmade structures bearing down on Locke in this environment, and no busy crowds to stifle his expressions of anguish. Even when Antonioni does introduce magnificent architectural marvels into his mise-en-scène though, these aren’t the giant, oppressive monuments of his previous films, subjugating characters to a harsh, modern civilisation. Locke is not dominated by his surroundings, but lost in them, drifting through scenes set against vast backdrops of apartment buildings, cultural landmarks, and abstract public artworks. Somewhat ironically, this is also the sort of freedom that he relishes, every so often taking the time to appreciate this newfound independence. Leaning out of a cable car spanning a channel of water, he stretches his arms wide open, and he almost seems to fly as an overhead shot revels in his liberation.

One cinema’s great overhead shots as Nicholson leans out of a cable car, and for a brief moment seems to fly across the water.
Architectural marvels impose bold shapes and patterns on Locke’s environment.

Negative space is key to Antonioni’s compositions here, underscoring the emptiness which encompasses both urban and rural locations, though he often fills them in with textures that project Locke’s mental state onto the world. His outfit almost blends in with the white-washed plaster walls and green shrubs of a rustic Spanish settlement, and when he begins to realise that his wife Rachel has sent a television producer to track him down, his fragmented psyche manifests in a mosaic sculpture decorated with jagged ceramic shards.

Matching colours between Locke’s costume and surroundings, both bleeding into each other.
Negative space filled with gorgeous textures, underscoring the emptiness which encompasses our protagonist at every turn.
Locke’s fragmented psyche manifests in this mosaic sculpture decorated with jagged ceramic shards.

Without any clear boundaries defining these eclectic settings, the tension between Locke’s desire for both freedom and purpose sits at the heart of his inner conflict. To unite the two, he must effectively design his own labyrinth of winding paths and dead ends – and now that he has officially taken Robertson’s identity, what better artefact is there to arbitrarily craft it from than the dead man’s diary? Not even he knows what this itinerary might lead to, though it is surely more enticing a prospect than returning to the wife, house, and job that he has grown so disillusioned with.

Antonioni traps Nicholson in a modern labyrinth of winding paths and dead ends.
Modern structures rise up from concrete, forming the basis of Antonioni’s long shots and world building.

Jack Nicholson is sublime in his navigation of this quest, turning in his bombastic screen persona for a subdued uncertainty that pairs nicely with Maria Schneider’s gentle encouragement, spurring him on as a loyal companion. With no name given to her other than the Girl, her identity is kept vague enough to become whatever Locke needs in any given moment. It is fitting that he should introduce her as an architecture student as well, displaying an intellectual appreciation and understanding of their environments, even if she can’t always directly assist him. He alone must be the one to pave his path forward, discovering what it means to a live a life on his own terms.

The danger that comes with this unfettered independence is simply a part of the deal, Locke reasons, but there are certainly caveats here he would rather dismiss. When he learns of Robertson’s profession as a black-market arms dealer, he does not retreat to the comfortable confinements of his old life, but instead maintains the belief that he can keep outrunning trouble before it catches up to him. With both Rachel and a militant guerrilla movement on his tail though, each believing they are looking for Robertson, it is evident that the consequences of his decisions are inevitable – and perhaps there is a subtle recognition of this in his final monologue to the Girl as they lay down together in a rural Spanish hotel.

It is fitting that Locke’s love interest should be an architecture student, their first meeting taking place in this grand cathedral loaded with history and culture.

In the story Locke tells, the joy that a blind man found in regaining his sight was quickly dashed upon realising that “the world was much poorer than he imagined.” It doesn’t take a great imagination to recognise him framing himself in this allegory of existential suffering. The darkness that once consumed them both at least concealed the truth of life’s ugliness, and in the blind man’s case, suicide was tragically the only escape.

This is not the end that Locke is destined for in the final minutes of The Passenger, though his listless resignation to an early grave certainly aligns their respective deaths. The 7-minute long take which skirts around the edges of this incident formally caps off the wandering camerawork that has pervaded the film, and perhaps even stakes its claim as the strongest single shot of Antonioni’s career, divorcing us from Locke’s perspective as he lays down in his hotel room. With only his legs in frame, we peer across the bed at the window grills, opening onto the bright, dusty courtyard where each plot thread converges at once.

A 7-minute long take, and perhaps the finest shot of Antonioni’s career, beginning with a slow creep forward past Locke in his hotel.
The camera approaches the window grills and slyly slips through, seemingly defying the laws of physics.
The camera floats around the dusty courtyard as narrative threads collide.

As the Girl lingers in hesitation over whether to leave, the African assassin who has been right behind Locke for some time arrives, and Rachel arrives in a police car a couple of minutes later. Drifting forward ever so slightly, Antonioni’s camera frames everything perfectly between the iron bars, before it squeezes through the narrow opening and emerges outside. Antonioni’s nifty manipulation of the set in this moment lifts us beyond Locke’s subjective perspective, effectively defying physics as we take on the role of an invisible, neutral observer wandering the scene, and patiently wait for Locke’s inevitable collision with his pursuers.

Like our protagonist, we are but passengers on this journey, fluidly taking the point-of-view of whatever character we are positioned to identify with. There is an entire world beyond Locke’s solipsistic journey, but only now as the camera circles back on the building to look through the window from the other side do we view him within alternative contexts that he was blind to. Little did he realise when stealing Robertson’s identity that he was also adopting his fated demise, and the aftermath as well reveals a complicated legacy in his wake. “Do you recognise him?” the police officer asks Rachel, whose response in finding her lifeless husband rather than Robertson is layered with profound disbelief.

“I never knew him.”

The camera turns back around to look in at the hotel room from the outside, revealing Locke’s body as his wife arrives a few minutes too late.

Given the identical position of Locke’s body from when we last saw it, we can infer that there was little struggle when the assassin entered the room. That The Passenger should conclude not with this though, but rather a far simpler shot of the Girl departing the hotel at dusk only underscores his total irrelevance in a world that keeps moving on, fading his strange, fruitless bolt for freedom into the milieu. Antonioni does not seek to overwhelm us with grief here – that would be far too straightforward in its clear distinction between life and death. Like Locke, we must confront the desolate, senseless banality of the emptiness, and continue living with it long past his consciousness is granted a merciful release.

The Passenger is not currently streaming in Australia.

Two English Girls (1971)

François Truffaut | 2hr 10min

The first time François Truffaut adapted the young adult literature of Henri-Pierre Roché on film, he shook up the entire artform with Jules and Jim, telling the story of two male friends who fall for the same woman. When he directed Two English Girls nine years later, the love triangle which forms between aspiring French writer Claude and English sisters Muriel and Ann bore extraordinarily close resemblance to its gender-swapped counterpart, though it is evident that this is no accident. Much like Roché himself, Claude distils the romantic experiences of his youth into a semi-autobiographic novel pointedly titled ‘Jerome and Julien’, trying to heal his broken heart through artistic self-expression.

An incredible accomplishment of mise-en-scène for Truffaut, working wonders with the colours and textures of 1900s Europe.

Once again, Truffaut makes Roché’s work his own in Two English Girls, casting himself as our omniscient narrator. Through this voiceover he lifts passages directly from the source material, imbuing Two English Girls with a literary quality that probes the interior thoughts of his characters, and condensing lengthy conversations into prosaic summaries. Particularly in the early days of Claude and the Brown sisters’ burgeoning friendship, the rhetoric devices that Truffaut attaches to their leisurely adventures tenderly defines each individual in relation to the others, while uniting them as a whole under self-reflective similes.

“They stopped to gaze at a waterfall. They agreed that the upper smooth falls were like Ann, the turbulent splashes were like Claude, and the calm pool beneath like Muriel.”

Truffaut’s voiceover is not alone though, as letters and diary entries written by our three leads are often expressed in this pensive form too, while on a couple of occasions he even cuts to them directly addressing the camera. “Your ironic raised eyebrow, your face when you laugh, are etched inside me,” Claude romantically writes with Muriel on his mind.

“Each day is a new step. I imagine you as my wife, raising a child in our home. This vision enthrals me.”

The ocean and house become scenic backdrops from high angles, basking in the green, rugged coast of Wales.

These days spent in the Browns’ seaside cottage atop the craggy, green cliffs of Wales may be the most joyful of their lives, held up as a vision of youthful bliss by Néstor Almendros’ ravishing cinematography. Truffaut often frames their interactions outside the house from a high angle, turning the ocean into a serene backdrop, and the lush gardens into a fertile paradise. There, Ann finds immense inspiration for her oil paintings, while Muriel is given the time and space to soothe her damaged eyes. The 1900s period décor that adorns the interiors here are equally handsome, especially in Truffaut’s use of bright blue, mottled wallpaper that sets an oceanic contrast against the harsh red walls of Claude’s home back in France.

Oceanic blue wallpaper in Wales, offering a soothing respite from Paris.
Blazing red backdrops at Claude’s home in France – locations defined by colour palettes.

With both Muriel and Claude’s mothers objecting to their proposed matrimony, Paris is where he inevitably returns, abiding by their deal that the two lovers may marry if they are able to spend a year apart from each other. While Muriel yearns for her fiancé back home though, it unfortunately doesn’t take long for Claude to fall into bohemian circles and promiscuous affairs, eventually driving him to eschew all romantic commitments so that he may focus on his career as a writer.

This might almost end their connection altogether were it not for Ann’s visit to Paris some time later as a successful painter, thus beginning a new relationship – at least until she heads off to Persia with another man. Over the following years, the two sisters’ irregular visits to the French city keep Claude in a constant state of turbulence, cycling between the outgoing, adventurous Ann and the quiet, sensitive Muriel.

Quaint iris transitions close out chapters in these characters lives, calling back to silent cinema.
Gentle long dissolves between scenes, bringing a lyrical quality to Truffaut’s storytelling.

Though Two English Girls spans almost a decade of these characters’ lives, Truffaut does not rush his narrative, but much rather prefers to savour each individual encounter before skipping ahead in time. In the absence of literary chapters, his elliptical editing frequently bridges scenes in gentle fades to black, while closing out episodes in their lives with iris transitions calling back to cinema’s silent era. The playful energy that these bring is distinctly set apart from the melodramas of Truffaut’s classical Hollywood precursors, especially given his light-hearted indulgence in his characters’ sexual exploits, though he has certainly at least taken on their influence in his picturesque recreation of 1900s Europe.

Ann’s art studio is a bohemian mess of paintings, sculptures, and art supplies laying around the room.
Claude and Ann consummate their relationship during a brief escape to a lakeside cabin – a picturesque, nostalgic paradise.

Ann’s art studio which she sets up in Paris is a highlight of bohemian production design, its rough sketches, relief sculptures, and messy array of supplies curiously studied by Truffaut’s floating camera, while the cabin that she and Claude stay in by a lake makes a gorgeous setting for the consummation of their relationship. Elsewhere, Muriel’s most beautiful scenes keep her at a lonely distance, seeing her write broken-hearted diary entries from behind a rain-glazed window and super-imposing her face over passing country views outside a train. The love that Claude holds for both women cannot be compared, though Truffaut elevates them equally in his protagonist’s eyes, even as their desires and insecurities frequently escape his efforts to keep one or the other by his side.

Muriel is kept at a lonely distance behind rain-glazed windows as she writes broken-hearted diary entries.
Muriel reads her letter to Claude, her face superimposed against the passing countryside view from a train as Truffaut visually infuses her monologue with passion and vigour.

That Claude is still single fifteen years later in the epilogue of Two English Girls reveals just how deeply both women scarred his heart, with an ailing Ann eventually passing away and Muriel deciding that he could never be a father to her children. “We only recognise happiness in hindsight,” she once wrote, and now as he observes a group of young English girls playing in Paris, it is apparent that these words have stuck in his mind. Perhaps if there is one who bears resemblance to Muriel, then it could be her daughter, returning a trace of her mother and aunt’s essence to the streets of their youth. As far as Truffaut is concerned though, these are simply the musings of a middle-aged man who only chased after real love when it was too late, now left to mourn the memories of two beautiful women who disappeared with his heart into the ether.

Truffaut leaves us on an ambiguous note, denying the resolution that Claude seeks as he wonders if a remnant of his treasured memories still lingers somewhere in the world.

Two English Girls is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to purchase from Amazon.

My Little Loves (1974)

Jean Eustache | 2hr 3min

Life is not measured by months or seasons during the year that Daniel spends with his estranged mother in Narbonne, but rather by memories drifting by in their own timeless dimension. “How long were we there? Two hours? More?” his voiceover ponders while lying next to Françoise in the long, dry grass after their first kiss, grasping at however many minutes they have left together. It is only now as he approaches the date marking his return to his hometown of Pessac that time becomes a tangible limitation in My Little Loves, threatening to halt his emergence into adolescence. How could his old childhood friends possibly understand all that he has experienced in Narbonne, and the dauntingly seductive glimpse of adulthood that has been endowed upon him?

Through the nostalgic, mundane minutia that Jean Eustache composes in My Little Loves, Daniel’s self-discovery gradually unfolds. He is a quiet observer of the world who learns through imitation, reflects its lessons back into society, and hopes to gain some admiration from his peers along the way. Before moving away from his hometown, this takes the innocent form of a magic trick he picked up from a travelling daredevil act, yet when he surrounds himself with the older boys in Narbonne his influences become far more adult orientated. At the local cinema where teenagers go to make out, Daniel uses the moves being performed by his peers and the actors onscreen to crack onto a girl sitting in front of him, before quickly leaving once he has successfully procured a kiss.

Delicate detail in the character building as Daniel recreates the daredevil act he watched at the circus. He is a quiet observer of the world who learns through imitation, reflects its lessons back into society, and hopes to gain some admiration from his peers along the way.
Similarities to Eric Rohmer in the light narrative pacing and window shots of My Little Loves, framing Daniel through his bedroom window against long, dry grass as he leaves for school.

Although this film takes a far brighter, more languid tone than the highly verbose character study of The Mother and the Whore, Eustache’s admiration of François Truffaut’s avant-garde storytelling remains just as present. Much like The 400 Blows, My Little Loves dedicates its realism to the study of a boy on the verge of adolescence, grappling with the expectations of a restrictive society while seeking to understand his own nascent masculinity.

Quite dominant in this struggle is Daniel’s thirst for an academic education that his mother cannot afford, with his only lessons now coming from the moped repair shop where he is forced to work. The brown wall of tools become a recurring backdrop to his wasted days here, leaving the regular passersby glimpsed outside the window as his only entertainment – a woman who consistently visits the same corner to kiss different men, for instance, and a young mother who frequently strolls by with her pram. Daniel falls asleep thinking about her, his voiceover divulges, as Eustache frames her in a dreamy vignette effect that seems right out of Truffaut’s playbook.

The brown wall of tools become a recurring backdrop to Daniel’s wasted days at the moped repair shop, far from the liveliness of the schoolyard that he longs for.
Traces of Truffaut in the avant-garde iris shots, dreamily narrowing in on the woman who passes by the shop each day and catches his eye.

Very gradually, this repetition of familiar elements develops a mundane, formal rhythm in My Little Loves, aided by the elliptical fades to black between scenes. Daniel’s matter-of-fact voiceover does not dwell too long on sentiment or poetry, but rather offers a reflective, Bressonian distance from his emotions, which even he frequently struggles to comprehend. There is no reason to rush into adulthood at his age, and so there is equally no need for Eustache to artificially raise the stakes with disingenuous plot contrivances. Character tension emerges organically as Daniel tentatively wades through uncertain waters, choosing to remain silent when a pair of customers complain about today’s youth, while elsewhere letting his actions speak loudly by stealing back his crush Françoise from his more audacious friends.

Parallel blocking along these rural roads, mirroring romance across children and teenagers.
Strong depth of field as Daniel and his new friends eye off the girls approaching them down the street, framed perfectly in the dead centre of the shot.

This film evidently forms a crucial link between The 400 Blows and Richard Linklater’s plotless coming-of-age films some decades later, though within that cinematic lineage as well is Eustache’s contemporary, Eric Rohmer. There is an affinity between the colour photography of his post-New Wave work and the visual warmth of My Little Loves, giving each shot the impression of an old, faded photograph taken in the heat of a French summer. Their penchant for composing stylistic frames through windows and doorways further links both auteurs too, even if Eustache is clearly far more comfortable directing less talkative protagonists than Rohmer, often letting dialogue drop away to dwell on the picturesque scenery of Pessac and Narbonne. Tree-lined walkways bisect lush parks and rural roads run next to dry, yellow fields, hosting Daniel’s wandering journeys as he bikes and ambles through landscapes handsomely shot by Rohmer’s regular cinematographer, Néstor Almendros.

Painterly long shots revealing the town of Narbonne where Eustache sets and shoots his film, dwelling in the park, streets, and shops.
Eustache infuses his exteriors with a summery warmth, lazily drifting days by as Daniel rides bikes with his older friends.

Eustache’s camera is also notably freer than Rohmer’s, mostly tracing the movements of his actors through scenes, while only moving on its accord in two prominent instances. After briefly capturing Daniel lying in bed at his grandmother’s Pessac home in the film’s very first shot, a graphic match cut fades into the next morning, the bed now empty and unmade. Very gradually, it drifts past the patterned wallpaper to an open window, before cutting again to his dresser where it tracks across a small collection of framed black-and-white photos, a carved figurine, and a small painted chest. The motion is not directly attached to any character, but rather reveals the nature of Daniel’s living situation before we properly meet him – this is a child living in the home of an old woman, drastically contrasting against the dark, cramped apartment he will soon occupy in Narbonne.

Eustache’s opening shot fades to black, before fading back into the empty bed in the morning.
A series of simple, elegant camera moves setting the scene – this is not a family’s house, but carries the musty, old-fashioned warmth of a grandmother’s cottage.

If Eustache’s meandering narrative can be said to have a climax, then the second unmotivated camera movement worth noting in My Little Loves delicately builds it around the kiss shared between Daniel and Françoise, letting us slowly orbit them as they freeze in their romantic embrace. For Daniel, this is the moment where he stops being a child and begins taking charge of his own life, even though he openly admits that he has no idea what he is doing. Upon moving back to Pessac, his attempt to act upon his newfound confidence results only in nonplussed rejection when he gropes one of his friends. Maybe he will one day learn the nuances of sexual consent, or perhaps he will grow up to be as cluelessly entitled as Alexandre from The Mother and the Whore, though that future escapes the scope of Eustache’s wistful ruminations in My Little Loves. This year spent isolated from familiar childhood comforts is a point of transition for Daniel, dense with formative experiences, and tenderly revealing the whiplash of a lonely, confusing, yet stimulating adolescence.

Eustache’s camera slowly revolves around Daniel and Françoise’s heads as they kiss, marking this pivotal moment of maturation in his childhood.

My Little Loves is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

The Mother and the Whore (1973)

Jean Eustache | 3hr 40min

In the Les Deux Magots café where intellectuals and artists of Paris gather, Alexandre tries a little too hard to blend in with the crowd. He speaks eloquently of the May 68 protests, classic filmmakers, and the state of modern relationships, yet he never quite drops the tone of cynical self-importance, barely masking the lack of substance in his political philosophising. When invited to dance at a club, he justifies his refusal with two excuses – “It bores me, and I have no money” – though it is plain to see the self-consciousness which underlies his haughty indifference. As long as he is in control of his environment, then he can maintain the hypocritical pretence that compartmentalises his misogyny, sexuality, and desperate desire to be taken seriously – an effort which is severely threatened by the meeting of his two girlfriends.

Sigmund Freud’s infamous Madonna-whore complex is baked right into the title of The Mother and the Whore, calling out the male psychological desire to pursue both love and sex, but never with the same woman. To Alexandre, Marie is the reliable caretaker who he shares a small, shabby apartment with, spitefully tolerating his affairs. Meanwhile, Veronika is the promiscuous paramour whose no-strings-attached attitude fools him into thinking she lacks any greater depth than what she presents on the surface. Where both women overlap is in Alexandre’s flattening of their identities, believing they only exist to serve his conflicting desires for stability and excitement while rendering their emotional needs inconsequential.

“You don’t love me. You love Marie. You live and sleep with her, you wash with her, you shit with her. You love a woman and fuck another.”

Alexandre frequents Les Deus Magots café, trying to blend in with its intellectual clientele yet clearly lacking the substance to hold a thoughtful conversation that isn’t hinged on his ego.

The extent to which the director based this character study on his own youth is clearly defined by Jean Eustache himself, who openly named the real-life people that these women were based off. Though he admitted more freely to his weaknesses than Alexandre, he nevertheless shared similar passions and anxieties, drifting around the edges of the French New Wave during its peak with featurettes and documentaries before falling victim to creative block. The concept for The Mother and the Whore struck him very suddenly in 1972, at which point there was no holding back his immense ambition for his first feature film, using its nearly four-hour runtime to apply an intensive focus to the lives of three young adults and their juvenile struggles in love.

Like Truffaut before him, Eustache shoots on location through the streets of Paris, often with a handheld camera that underscores the film’s raw naturalism.
Grim, shabby minimalism in Alexandre’s apartment, which also happens to be the same apartment where Eustache lived – the autobiographical connection is strong.
City lights bounce off the Seine, forming a muted backdrop to this conversation between Alexandre and Veronika on a park bench at night.

Production for Eustache’s epic drama lands firmly outside the span of time that the French New Wave covers, yet it still couldn’t be more aligned with the movement’s subversive ideals. Shot in the streets and cafés of Paris on grainy black-and-white film stock, Eustache achieves a gritty, urban naturalism in his compositions and handheld camerawork, and even lets the noise of passing cars occasionally drown out his characters’ conversations. City lights bouncing off the Seine become a muted backdrop to Alexandre and Veronika’s meeting on a bench, and their threadbare apartments are completely empty of shelves, bed frames, and decorations, leaving clutter to gather on the floors instead. Eustache’s long takes prove to be crucial in appreciating the minimalist beauty here, as well as the dedicated performances of his actors, whether it is Bernadette Lafont crying to the entirety of Edith Piaf’s song ‘Les Amants de Paris’ or Françoise Lebrun commanding a powerful close-up in Veronika’s climactic eight-minute monologue.

The entirety of Edith Piaf’s song ‘Les Amants de Paris’ plays through this static shot as we sit with Marie in her misery, drawing a deep melancholy from the mundanity.
Françoise Lebrun commands an eight-minute close-up with a shattering monologue, shedding her carefree image to lament the emptiness of her sexual pursuits.

Ultimately though, Jean-Pierre Léaud’s thorny portrayal of our two-faced hero marks the greatest acting accomplishment in The Mother and the Whore, with his casting nodding to Eustache’s colossal influences Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. As insufferably verbose as he may be, it is telling that the only thing he listens to other than his own voice is his vinyl collection of French classics and British rock, offering those artists a respect that he never affords anyone else. When Veronika notices his fondness for music and sings a poignant love ballad in a rare moment of vulnerability, it is comical just how jarringly he changes the topic by turning on his favourite radio station, landing right in the middle of a segment railing against the laziness of modern society.

Eustache uses close-ups masterfully to forge a connection with his actors, giving Jean-Pierre Léaud the platform to deliver one of his best performances.

Smugness evidently goes hand-in-hand with insecurity for Alexandre, and it isn’t hard to see how his loquacious brand of intellectual pretence would later go on to shape the characters of Woody Allen and Richard Linklater films, especially considering the gaping chasm that lies between his narcissistic ego and feeble masculinity. It is much easier for him to blame women at large for his romantic struggles than to turn a critical eye inwards, as he shallowly longs for an era with old-fashioned values while remaining ignorant to the fact that he still would have been just as undesirable back then.

“I wish I had known the days when girls, in the streets of our cities, on our country roads, swooned over soldiers. The prestige of the uniform. These days they swoon over sports cars. These days, young businessmen, young executives, professionals, have replaced the military. I’m not sure we’re better off.”

Eustache’s screenplay is introspective, using Alexandre as a surrogate to put all his anxieties and shortcomings on display – and then tear them apart.
Eustache’s camera especially loves this brief shift to a high-end establishment in Paris, relishing its fine décor and lighting.

The cognitive dissonance needed for a radical leftist like Alexandre to make such a conservative statement is staggering, though clearly his politics are as fickle as his choice in women. Neither Marie nor Veronika have entirely figured out who they are yet either, but at least within The Mother and the Whore they develop a self-awareness that their common boyfriend never quite finds the courage to face. When the three of them enter a polyamorous relationship, Marie and Veronica are united in a mutual understanding that leaves Alexandre deeply discomforted, helplessly watching his psychological division between love and sex slowly erode. As it turns out, these women are far more complicated than the neat boxes he has designed for them. With Marie’s façade of stability fading, she not only finds the freedom to explore her sexuality, but also unleashes a pent-up rage she had previously contained. Similarly, Veronika’s claim that she is only after sex from men completely disappears when she reveals her jealousy towards Marie and tearfully laments the emptiness of her carnal pursuits.

“If people understood, once and for all, that fucking is shit. That the only thing that’s beautiful is to fuck because you’re so in love you want to a conceive a child who looks like you, or else it’s something sordid. We should fuck only if we’re in love.”

Alexandre gets exactly what he wants – both the mother and the whore – and yet it is at this point that he also unravels, helplessly watching his psychological division between love and sex slowly erode.

Alexandre is lucky to have two girls who love him and like each other, Veronika declares, but still happiness eludes him. After all, if he were to accept this state of affairs then he must also relinquish control of a dynamic that preserves his simplistic world view and protects his ego. Perhaps this is why Veronika’s unplanned pregnancy spurs such a rapid, uncharacteristic change of heart, sending him impulsively running back to her apartment to propose, and hopefully reduce this complicated love triangle to a traditional two-way relationship.

Predictably, his regret is almost instantaneous. For as long as his arrogance keeps him from addressing his own inhibitions, he will never find fulfilment in romantic intimacy, especially when it is contained within an institution as rigidly traditional as marriage. As Alexandre sinks to the floor in the final seconds of The Mother and the Whore, he has no lengthy monologue or deflection to steal back control. Eustache simply concludes this film of endless verbal debate with bleak, dampened silence, cynically anticipating the birth of a dysfunctional family, and its fathering by an infantile egoist who cannot understand the fundamental virtue of selflessness.

A foolish snap decision that would be framed in any other film as a romantic gesture, and an ambiguous resignation to the bathroom floor as he realises what he has done. Eustache’s ending is both dryly funny and totally hopeless.

The Mother and the Whore is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

The Devils (1971)

Ken Russell | 1hr 51min

The French Wars of Religion had long since passed by the time the fortified town of Loudon became the epicentre of lingering tension between Catholics and Protestants in the 17th century, setting the scene in The Devils for a battle fought not with weapons, but political and religious manipulation. Urbain Grandier, the outspoken priest charged with defending the statehood of Loudon, is popular among the people for standing firmly with its high Protestant population, while making enemies of those Catholic authorities who deem him a threat. If Loudon is to be demolished and subjected to the rule of the Catholic Church though, then it would take more than an assassination to undermine Grandier’s influence. The priest must be so thoroughly discredited to the point of humiliation that no one can stand by his side without suffering the same ostracisation, thus bringing the rest of the town to its knees in feeble surrender.

It is incredibly good timing then that Sister Jeanne des Anges should come forward with baseless accusations of witchcraft aimed squarely at Grandier right as the Church begins conspiring against him. Though she is the abbess of the local Ursuline convent in Loudon, she is an outsider among her own nuns, tormented by sexual desire for Grandier and filled with self-loathing over her hunchback. “Take away my hump!” she prays in screaming agony, longing to be seen for once as beautiful. As such, when she discovers that Grandier has married another local woman, her furious, vindictive jealousy is unleashed.

A magnificently unsettling performance from Vanessa Redgrave as the villainous Sister Jeanne des Agnes, weaponising the blind faith and fear of the city, but also carrying her own insecurities as she struggles with sexual temptation.

Ken Russell’s narrative and characters here are rooted heavily in recorded history, yet the parallels shared between The Devils and Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible are extremely visible. Both storytellers are heavily concerned with humanity’s natural tendency towards irrational fear, and how it drove the discrimination against individuals in a pair of 17th century settings. Where Miller sought to write an allegory for 1950s McCarthyism by studying the infectious hysteria of the Salem witch trials though, Russell feverishly opposes 1970s religious conservatism in The Devils, treading far more explicit ground with violence and nudity that triggered the censors to come down hard with an X rating.

Sacrilege and blasphemy – Ken Russell pushes the boundaries of censorship in 70s Britain with the ‘Rape of Christ,’ violently subverting theological symbolism.

From Russell’s perspective though, the outrage that surrounded The Devils would have been far more justified had it been directed at the harsh subject matter it is depicting. He particularly expressed frustration over the deletion of the scene he called the “Rape of Christ,” in which Sister Jeanne masturbates using the charred femur of the deceased Grandier following his execution. Even without this though, Christianity’s perversion of its own spiritual icons rings loudly throughout The Devils, framing Grandier as a persecuted saviour being punished for the sins of the world. Vanessa Redgrave may steal every one of her scenes with Sister Jeanne’s hunched posture and seething contempt, but Oliver Reed’s commanding presence is a steady, unwavering force among Russell’s visual chaos, taking to the screen with the booming confidence of a seasoned theatre actor. As he is cruelly interrogated by the Church, he delivers monologues with resounding gravitas, shamefully confessing his flaws as a prideful, even lecherous man while meeting Sister Jeanne’s accusations of sneaking into her bed with righteous indignation.

“Call me vain and proud, the greatest sinner to ever walk in God’s Earth! But Satan’s boy I could never be! I haven’t the humility. I know what I have done, and I am prepared for what I shall reap. But do you, Reverend Mother, know what you must give to have your wish about me fulfilled? I will tell you. Your immortal soul to eternal damnation. May God have mercy on you.”

A magnificent close-up of Reed’s profile facing the light of heaven, yet shrouded in darkness.
Russell’s eye for composition when it comes to blocking his ensemble is astounding, filling out the height of his frame on both sides and enclosing a vulnerable Grandier in the centre.
Reed delivers a career-best performance as Grandier, facing unjust persecution yet standing firm by his principles.

Grandier is far from sinless, but what man living at this time of religious corruption and violence isn’t? In their monochrome garments, Russell’s characters often blend in seamlessly with the clean white masonry and darkened rooms of Loudon, becoming one with the dominant palette that tangibly manifests their harsh moral binaries. The town of perfectly rounded arches and geometric skyline makes for a remarkable feat of production design too, combining the stark minimalism of The Passion of Joan of Arc with the architectural ambition of Metropolis, and formally drawing this austerity through rigorously blocked scenes of black-and-white crowds.

Russell’s brutalist, black-and-white architecture is a triumph of production design, his geometric shapes towering over ensembles who carry through that palette of harsh moral binaries.

It is no coincidence that the one figure who doesn’t conform to Russell’s sparse visual design is the puppeteer of Loudon’s witch hunt, sitting high above the fray. Dressed in his blood-red robes and wheeled around by servants, Cardinal Richelieu appears to be the only true demon in this town’s vicinity, determined to destroy the man who stands between him and the demolition of Loudon’s walls. Where Sister Jeanne acts impulsively on a wounded ego and even attempts to hang herself late in the film, Richelieu carefully orchestrates Loudon’s descent into madness, chaotically underscored by a writhing, discordant cacophony of pipe organs, trumpets, and percussion. In this period setting, the anachronistic jazz of Peter Maxwell Davies does not seem so unholy as it does viciously anarchic, matching confronting scenes of nuns playing up their fake possession with an equally disturbing soundscape.

The Cardinal aggressively breaks through the monochrome palette with his bright red robes, symbolically drenched in blood of innocents.
Russell stages chaos with hysterical fervour, as if adopting the anarchy of a late-career Fellini film and possessing it with something demonic.

Only when Grandier has perished through fiery injustice at the stake does silence settle over the town again, albeit one that is despairingly lifeless. His refusal to confess to the false charges may be the only solace to be taken from this, as it is with his last breath that the walls of Loudon come crumbling down in chilling synchronicity, ushering in apocalyptic scenes of ruin and suffering. Right to the final frame, Russell’s theological symbolism continues to inform his magnificent visuals and narrative, as his camera sits on a long shot of Grandier’s wife Madeleine approach an opening in the town’s demolished fortifications.

No longer drawing a clean divide between its shades of black and white, The Devils’ bleak scenery sinks into a dirty greyscale, as the widow trudges over a mountain of debris and exits what was once a vice-ridden yet relatively sheltered Garden of Eden. No longer do the strings and woodwinds clash in fervent rhythms, yet still they whine and wander through dissonant harmonies as Madeleine shuffles forward into an uncertain future. The Devils may be set in 17th century France, and yet with his final note Russell’s mourning of what religious tyranny has destroyed continues to escape a narrow relegation to the distant past, infusing his cautionary tale with a bitter, anachronistic timelessness.

A bitter, solemn ending, shifting away from the stark black-and-white palette and shifting into a medium greyscale as Grandier’s widow leaves a ruined city now totally dominated by religious tyranny.

The Devils is available to purchase from Amazon.

Fellini’s Casanova (1976)

Federico Fellini | 2hr 28min

Each time famed adventurer Giacomo Casanova tumbles into another sexual escapade during his worldly travels, his wind-up bird is right there by his side, bobbing and flapping its wings in suggestive, mechanical motions. As both a literal and figurative cock, its phallic shape is not easily missed, casting giant shadows on the wall much like its owner’s. In any other sex scene, in any other film, it would be jarringly out of place – this act is meant to be one loaded with spontaneous passion after all, vulnerably exposing humanity’s most primal instincts. Within the lecherous ventures of Fellini’s Casanova though, this bird is simply an extension of the Venetian playboy’s libido, consistently ticking along like a metronome to Nino Rota’s contrived score of rigid, unwavering synths.

Though based on the memoirs of the real Casanova and his expansive voyage through 18th century Europe, Federico Fellini’s reimagining of his life manifests with demented surrealism, twisting the historical figure into a man trapped in cycles of meaningless carnal exploits. Sex in this decrepit world is not an expression of deep yearning, but rather an imitation of pleasure performed out of obligation, as if trying to convince oneself of an authentic, sensual connection that simply isn’t there.

Within Casanova’s lecherous ventures, the mechanical bird is simply an extension of the Venetian playboy’s libido, consistently ticking along like a metronome to Nino Rota’s contrived score of rigid, unwavering synths.

The giant head of Venus which sinks to the bottom of Venice’s Grand Canal in the opening scene becomes a symbolic reminder of this too, returning in the film’s final scene beneath the frozen surface to illustrate the abiding death of everything the goddess of love represents. In her absence, lovemaking is dispassionately chaotic. Coital partners seesaw in the most untitillating manner possible, while Fellini’s camera rocks and zooms in jerky motions as if synchronised to the ensemble’s outrageous acting.

The sunken head of Venus bookends Fellini’s Casanova – a mythic symbol of love trapped in icy waters.

Even outside of these scenes Casanova does not mark a significant achievement for Donald Sutherland, and yet his effeminate, foppish spin on the great Venetian adventurer nevertheless fits perfectly within Fellini’s garish scenery, thinly concealing a deeply insecure ego. After all, it is not his sexual vitality, but his intellectual pursuits as “a poet, philosopher, mathematician” which he would rather be known for – but if his prodigious reputation for bedding women is to be his legacy, then who is he to deny this extraordinary talent?

By the time Fellini adapted Casanova’s autobiography in the mid-1970s, he was no stranger to reshaping classical texts and historical eras with lurid experimentation, frequently sacrificing narrative convention in favour of episodic vignettes. As such, Fellini’s Casanova bears especially close resemblance to his cinematic interpretation of the Ancient Roman text Satyricon, which similarly journeyed through warped, theatrical landscapes that never seemed to feel the touch of natural sunlight. Casanova’s excursion to a Venetian island where a wealthy voyeur pays to watch him sexually perform lays the brazen theatricality bare in the opening scenes, sailing his boat across a black sea of billowing tarp, while his convergence with civilisation brings astoundingly anachronistic renderings of 18th century high society. Fellini carries a Sternbergian sense of unruly excess here as he clutters his colourful mise-en-scène with candles, statues, and exorbitantly large plates of food, painting Baroque portraits of overindulgence fuelled by an insatiable emptiness, and curating cinematic galleries of incredible orgiastic anarchy.

Aggressively theatrical mise-en-scène, floating Casanova’s boat atop an ocean of black, billowing tarp.
Fellini carries a Sternbergian sense of unruly excess here as he clutters his colourful mise-en-scène with candles, statues, and exorbitantly large plates of food, painting Baroque portraits of overindulgence fuelled by an insatiable emptiness.

In Rome, Casanova is invited to the patrician palace of the British ambassador, where a deranged party of obscene games demeans the surrounding historical art that once signified class and decorum. There, his pretentious attempts to wax lyrical philosophy are met with bewilderment, and to curry favour he instead participates in a contest with a peasant to determine who can sexually perform the most times in the space of an hour. In London, he attends a hypnotically gloomy Frost Fair on the River Thames, where he moves on from the suicidal grief of losing his girlfriend to another man and instead pins his new obsession on a royal giantess. Later in Württemberg he attends what is meant to be “the most beautiful court in Europe,” and yet which rather appears as a haywire nightmare of insane aristocrats wreaking havoc, while musicians fill the air with a dissonant cacophony emerging from the pianos and organs hanging off the walls.

Casanova moves from one party to the next, encountering bizarre characters and adventures, yet never quite finding the fulfilment he seeks.
A haywire nightmare in Württemberg, where musicians fill the air with a dissonant cacophony emerging from the pianos and organs hanging off the walls.
A dazzling composition of chandeliers hanging above Casanova at the opera – with his bigger budgets, Fellini does not half-commit to his production design.

The disconnection between these wandering vignettes somewhat hurts the overall form of Casanova, and yet this detachment also serves to underscore the wistful isolation at the core of Sutherland’s performance, elevating the moment where he discovers what he deems true love. It is during his adventures in Germany that he meets Rosalba, a life-sized mechanical doll who dances stiffly with the voyager like a ballerina in a music box, and whose only objection to his sexual advances is a silent, pained grimace. She is a bastion of unchanging purity in this world of absurdist mayhem – a clockwork contraption not unlike Casanova’s metal bird who reflects his desire for fastidious control over his emotions, relationships, and libido.

Rosalba the mechanical may be Casanova’s one true love, becoming bastion of unchanging purity in this world of absurdist mayhem.

Clearly little has changed in the decades that pass between their awkwardly romantic tryst and Casanova’s retirement from travelling, choosing to take up the role of librarian in a cold, draughty Bohemian castle as he approaches the end of his life. Still he attempts to impress audiences with dull poetry recitations, and still he is ridiculed for his pomposity, leaving him to retreat in shame to his darkened chamber where dreams of waltzing with Rosalba upon an icy Venetian lagoon await. As Rota’s music box motif tinkles a soft, metallic melody for the last time, they rotate like tiny figurines, eternally frozen in plastic. There, at the end of this traveller’s long life, Fellini finally reveals the impossible fantasy which has eluded him through many cities, parties, and romances – the frigid, lifeless embrace of a woman as hopelessly inhuman as him.

Resigned to the end of an empty life, Casanova retreats into his imagination with Rosalba. As Nino Rota’s music box motif tinkles a soft, metallic melody for the last time, they rotate like tiny figurines, eternally frozen in plastic.

Fellini’s Casanova as currently available to purchase from Amazon.

Amarcord (1973)

Federico Fellini | 2hr 7min

Spring arrives in the Italian village of Borgo San Giuliano with white, fluffy poplar seeds floating on the breeze, bearing a striking resemblance to the snow that has just melted away. In summer, school student Titta relishes the warm weather on a family day trip to the countryside, with his Uncle Teo being granted short-term leave from the psychiatric hospital where he resides. Autumn later brings cooler temperatures, and sees the vast majority of the population sail out on boats to witness the passage of the ocean liner SS Rex, while winter’s frozen grip on the small town heralds sickness and tragedy in Titta’s family.

The year that passes over the course of Amarcord is not bound by plot convention, and yet each vignette has its formal place in the eccentric portrait of 1930s Italy that Federico Fellini sentimentally models after his own childhood. Unlike the wandering odyssey of Satyricon or the pseudo-documentary of Roma, Amarcord never falters in its lively, easy-going pacing, loosely building its episodic formal progression around the seasonal changes and communal traditions of these villagers’ mundane lives.

Spring arrives with white, fluffy poplar seeds on the breeze – an annual occurrence that each year enraptures the small town of Borgo San Giuliano.
Summer brings warmer, brighter days, as Titta visits the countryside with his family and Uncle Teo for an amusing escapade.
The SS Rex passes by the town in Autumn, met by locals eager to witness this feat of maritime engineering.
Winter settles over the village, the snowflakes bearing notable resemblance to Spring’s white poplar seeds.

Perhaps then we must look even further back to I Vitelloni for the closest comparison in Fellini’s filmography, similarly trapping young men within cyclical routines that connect them to a larger community and hamper their dreams of escape. Like his 1953 hangout film, the camerawork here is dynamic, gliding and panning in breezy tracking shots that gently soak in the remarkable scenery. Even then though, the difference between Fellini’s early neorealist-adjacent style and the vibrant surrealism of Amarcord is gaping, as if his own nostalgic reflections have grown more playfully distorted with age. Characters here slip into dreams with careless abandon, dwelling on fables that infuse Borgo San Giuliano with its own spectacular mythology, and distant fantasies that may only ever live in their minds.

This town’s distinctive character comes together in scenes of communal celebration and tradition, the camera gliding breezily through the detailed mise-en-scène.
The town of Titta’s adolescence also possesses its own unique mythology, manifesting with surreal wonder in the dreams and memories of its people.

Little do these people know, they themselves will one day become legends to be wistfully recalled by a grown Titta in years to come as well, colouring in the vibrant ensemble of his life with effervescent idiosyncrasies as they rotate in and out of Amarcord’s narrative. Much like Saraghina from 8 ½, the town’s beach-dwelling prostitute Volpina becomes a subject of fantasy for Titta during his adolescent sexual awakening. Local hairdresser Gradisca is conversely a far more untouchable beauty, frequently drawing stares in her shapely red dresses and hiding a loneliness that delicately parallels Titta’s own discontent. The Grand Hotel where she is rumoured to have slept with a prince also plays host to a tall tale propagated by food vendor Biscein that comically details his wild night with 28 foreign concubines, while the long-suffering town lawyer perseveres through the heckling of neighbours to relay this village’s culture and folklore directly to the audience.

Minor characters cycle in and out of Fellini’s vignettes, fulfilling familiar archetypes wherever they are needed – the town prostitute, the untouchable beauty, the friendly lawyer.

The absolute persistence of ‘Mr. Lawyer’ in offering a scholarly perspective on Borgo San Giuliano is amusingly at odds with its pragmatic, free-spirited people, and it is telling that he is the one of the few to regularly break the fourth wall. “Theirs is an exuberant, generous, loyal, and tenacious nature,” he kindly elucidates, describing their proud heritage that runs “Roman and Celtic blood in their veins.” His appearances are intermittent, yet his self-aware monologues work powerfully to divorce Amarcord from the naturalism it occasionally leans towards, sweeping us into the subjective realm of memory where Fellini is at his strongest as a filmmaker.

Nino Rota’s endless variations of the film’s main theme capture this whimsy with carnivalesque panache as well, and are absolutely crucial to the sensitive evolution of each scene. The motif swoons on strings as the camera romantically glides through a frozen tableau of soldiers, forms the jazzy underscore to Titta and his friends’ waltz with imaginary women in the foggy darkness, and even passes diegetically to a musician playing his flute in a barbershop. Its joviality is resilient, never quite losing its optimism even as it fades out with the village lights dimming at night, and ultimately becoming a pure expression of the town’s own flamboyant character.

A dream frozen in time – the camera gently drifts through the Grand Hotel with mystical intrigue.
A dense fog settles over the town, while Titta and his friends waltz with imaginary women, deep in a trance.

It is quite remarkable as well that every street, building, and monument of Borgo San Giuliano is entirely constructed on studio sets, allowing Fellini a level of control over his handsomely offbeat mise-en-scène that captures a specific era in an isolated region of Italy. At the same time, the scale of Amarcord’s production is enormous, transforming this village into an entire world – which of course it is to an adolescent Titta. The cultural and historical detail woven into the architecture is particularly rich, though Fellini also chooses opportune moments to subtly let authenticity slide for a more wistful evocation of his hometown of Rimini instead, cutting out sharp shadows and silhouettes in his low-key lighting. Even the Victory Monument which stands in its square is recreated with impressionistic elegance, baring the backside of a woman that draws the lustful gaze of visitors, while the small addition of angel wings elevates this voluptuous figure to a level of divinity that exists only in Fellini’s memory.

One of Amarcord’s strongest compositions arrives at the Victory Monument, baring the backside of an angel who draws the lustful gaze of visitors venturing out into the rain.

In those moments of surrealism where this narrative departs from reality altogether, Amarcord moreover reveals a pointed, satirical edge aimed towards the nationalistic tyranny bearing down on Italy’s younger generations. When Mussolini comes to town, the red-and-white papier-mâché model of his face that is raised in a formal procession is laughably cartoonish, and even begins speaking when Titta’s lovestruck classmate Ciccio imagines it marrying him to his crush, Aldina. Suddenly, this military ceremony transforms into a wedding before our eyes, and the fascist pageantry is defanged as red, green, and white confetti is joyously tossed over the underage newlyweds.

Fellini delivers one excellent set piece after another, mocking the obsessive, fascist pageantry of the era with a giant papier-mâché face of Mussolini who springs to life and weds a pair of young school students.

Fellini continues to send up the stern teachers at Titta’s school and the church’s ineffective Catholic priests with mischievous glee as well, and yet he is also delicately aware of the malice which lurks within these institutions. There is no comedy to be found in the local authority’s torture of Titta’s father for making vaguely anti-fascist remarks, nor in their chilling speeches of “glowing ideals from ancient times.”

With baggage like this attached to otherwise cheerful memories, maybe it is best for them to remain in the past, Fellini contemplates, though not without sparing a sad thought for those like Gradisca who were carried away by the cultural norms of the era. She may have been the subject of many fantasies in her eye-catching red, black, and white outfits, but she is still a woman with her own hopes and insecurities, revealed in fleeting glimpses behind her veil of cool, feminine confidence. Perhaps then the loneliness which brings her to tears one night in front of a crowd is also what spurs her to marry a fascist officer in the final scene of Amarcord, even as her own fate beyond the inevitable fall of Italy’s totalitarian regime is left sorrowfully ambiguous.

The camera pans across this low-lying landscape just outside town, where Gradisca marries a fascist officer and resigns herself to an uncertain future. Titta’s absence is only barely noted – this too is a turning point for him to carve out a new future away from the only home he has ever known.

She is evidently not the only one leaving Borgo San Giuliano with dreams of brighter futures either. As the camera slowly pans with the remaining wedding guests across the countryside, their distant shouts offhandedly mention Titta’s departure with little elaboration. Given the recent passing of his mother from an infectious illness though, it isn’t hard for us to surmise the reason. The winter months have wreaked devastation on his family, and their funereal grief has been absorbed into yet another communal ritual carried out with depressingly rote perseverance.

Still, time continues to traipse forward, seeing spring’s puffballs replace the glacial winter snow and old memories give birth to new beginnings. Escaping the routines that govern this community need not arrive as a grand epiphany, but may even be as subtle as a silent, unremarkable departure, leaving one’s name to be fondly recalled by those who have stayed behind.

The loss of Titta’s mother also marks his loss of innocence – a rite of passage which, unlike all those other small ventures throughout the year, is carried out with depressing perseverance.

After all, within Fellini’s portrait of evaporated childhood, memory moves in both directions. Distance across time and space may erode our physical connection with old friends, yet those relationships are revived in the mercurial oceans of nostalgia. Just as the past wistfully lingers in the present, the present sways the past, constantly remoulding it into new forms that reveal previously hidden truths. Only through Amarcord’s reality-warping hindsight can Fellini recognise the absurd norms of his youth with the nuance they deserve, from the oppressive evils and mournful insecurities of his neighbours, to the sweet, boundless joys that have faded with the encroachment of adulthood.

Amarcord is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, and Amazon Video, and can be purchased on Amazon.

Fellini’s Roma (1972)

Federico Fellini | 2hr 8min

The two eras of Rome that Federico Fellini displays in his offbeat homage to the Italian city are set apart by three decades, though the boundaries separating one from the other aren’t always so clearly outlined. Hippies lounge around ancient monuments in the 1970s, air raids send civilians running for cover in the 1940s, and yet still life goes on for those who seek the simple pleasures of sex, entertainment, and good food. After all, what else is there to cling to in a world eternally bound within a state of perpetual chaos?

This is not quite the Rome chronicled in history books, nor the Rome captured with authenticity in the films of the Italian neorealists. This is Fellini’s Roma – an absurd, urban landscape defined more by its culture, politics, and traditions than any individual icon. Not to say that Fellini’s film lacks idiosyncratic characters – in fact virtually everyone here sets themselves apart from the colourful crowd – but they are simply threads woven into a larger, vibrant tapestry. Despite its familiar interrogations of modern Rome’s debauchery, Roma bears far greater resemblance to the surreal, episodic madness of Fellini Satyricon than the focused character study of La Dolce Vita. Such a grandiose defiance of narrative convention comes with some structural unevenness, though Fellini’s recreation of the city he both loathes and adores is nonetheless rich with impressionistic detail, filtering moments in time through the wily incongruity of satire and memory.

A city littered with millennia of history – fading, crumbling, yet always to be replaced with new artefacts and stories.
Hippies lounge around ancient monuments in the 1970s while bombs drop on Rome in the 1940s – parallel timelines marked by war and celebration.

If there is a consistent character in Roma whom we are to follow beyond Rome itself, then it is the strange presence of Fellini himself in two forms. The first is a semi-autobiographical representation of the director watching silent films about Ancient Rome as a child, and later moving to the Nazi-occupied city as a young man. The camera moves with him past magnificent fountains and cathedrals in travelogue-style tracking shots, before he finally finds lodging at a shabby guesthouse bustling with vain actors, rowdy children, and religious zealots. The insanity seemingly has no boundaries, populating the streets at night with noisy al fresco restaurant patrons, and still we continue weaving through the crowd as our attention jumps from a waiter carrying a plate of pasta to the young Fellini being invited to eat with friendly strangers.

Fellini self-autobiographically enters the film as his younger self moving to Rome, embracing all that the city has to offer.

This version of Fellini is often little more than a passive observer accompanying our journey, while the second cinematic representation of the filmmaker manifests as an older, wiser extension of the same man – an unseen tour guide of sorts, offering amusing descriptions and opinions on Rome’s eclectic culture through omniscient voiceover. He is our constant companion through this adventure, possessing a whimsical self-awareness as he introduces a “portrait of Rome” exactly as a young, naïve Fellini once perceived it – “a mixture of strange, contradictory images.” Later as we stumble across Italian actress Anna Magnani walking home to her palazzo, this voiceover even holds a conversation with her, distilling all the facets of Rome down to this living symbol who has lived out its many lives on film.

“Rome seen as vestal virgin, and she-wolf. An aristocrat, and a tramp. A sombre buffoon.”

Rome’s proclivity towards fascism echoes through time, dominating the culture with fervent nationalism and authoritarianism.

On occasion, Roma does not always handle these fourth wall breaks so well, leading to some patchiness in one highway scene that turns the camera back on Fellini’s own crew capturing the traffic jam. Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend is the obvious influence here, as we observe anarchy unfold on the roads one stormy night. Dead animals, burning trucks, hippie protestors, and police barricades are illuminated under harsh spotlights to paint an image of societal breakdown, but for once the chaos seems to escape Fellini’s control.

Some vignettes in Roma are more effective than others, and the highway set piece is one that suffers in comparison.

It is evident that Fellini handles the mayhem with greater poise when he is aligning these disordered elements under unified set pieces, digging into the bedrock of culture and history the city quite literally rests upon. The wondrous regard these people hold for their heritage is not to be outdone by their relentless pursuit of progress, as industrials drills paving the way for a new transit system smash the walls of an ancient Roman house to pieces, revealing alabaster sculptures, mosaics, and frescoes that have miraculously survived for two thousand years. “Look how they seem to be staring at us,” one woman remarks as these artworks cast a stern eye upon their new visitors. Suddenly, the paint’s exposure to the outside air triggers a rapid deterioration, and thus these representatives of the ancient world cast their final judgement on modern civilisation for its graceless, irresponsible ineptitude.

The tension between past and present comes through bleakly in the industrial dig site. Attempts at establishing a new underground transit system are frequently halted by historical discoveries, and inadvertently ruin them in the process.

Still, little can erase the immense pride of a culture that annually celebrates the Festa de’ Noantri – literally translating to ‘Festival of Ourselves.’ Fellini stations his handheld camera in a car as it passes by colourful lights, bustling crowds, and folk musicians filling the air with joy, capturing a slice of the real celebration in an almost documentary-like manner, and even bringing in American writer Gore Vidal to reflect on his life in Rome. “This is the city of illusions,” he ponders to an audience of rapt listeners. “It’s a city, after all, of the church, of government, of movies. They’re all makers of illusions.”

Fellini’s location shooting soaks in the sights of the Festa de Noantri – the lights, the food, the community, everything comes together to form a lively picture of Roman celebration and joy.

Fellini does not attempt to escape from beneath the shadow of this reputation either, but rather devotes his vision of Rome to its extraordinary artifice, understanding that the truth never lies far from its projected façade. With Roma’s production taking place a few years after Vatican II, this is especially relevant to the church’s struggle of identity in a modern world, and thus he launches a scathing attack upon its attempted reinvention through a hilariously gaudy fashion show.

“Model number one: Patience in a classical line of black satin for novices,” the emcee announces to the crowd of cardinals, bishops, and nobles, as a pair of nuns walk down the catwalks in glossy habits and leather boots “suitable for Arctic wear.” Next, two more nuns with headdresses that flap like turtledove wings, priests on roller skates clad in “robes for sport,” and then men in frilly doilies swinging thuribles with choreographed panache – “Elegance and high fashion for the sacristan in first-class ceremonies.” The ecclesiastical accoutrements only grow more ridiculous, eventually culminating in the arrival of the Pope himself on a blinding white set, radiating sunbeams as the audience collapses to their knees in awe.

The true highlight of Roma comes in the form of an ecclesiastical fashion show, sending up the material obsession of the Catholic Church is it seeks a connection to modern culture. Particularly magnificent costume work from Danilo Donati.

Costume designer Danilo Donati must be commended for the visual extravagance of this vignette, though it is Fellini’s genius which unites each garment under a single, scathing criticism of religious hypocrisy, and its attempts to win modern audiences through material spectacle. Then again, how can we blame the church for appealing to the masses in such an excessive manner when the people themselves are so blinded by escapist self-indulgence? Men from across the lower and upper ends of this society are far more likely to frequent local bordellos for a taste of intimacy, as Fellini only separates their endeavours by the sophistication of the facilities themselves. In the shabbier brothel, a long corridor fills with working class men hoping to pair off with a woman, before it is eventually shut down by police. In the more luxurious one, older men take their pick of the escorts before taking an elevator up into grand bedrooms decorated with red wallpaper and classical paintings.

An up-class and rundown brothel continue to draw parallels between different segments of Rome, uniting its men as seekers of physical pleasure.

Art and entertainment similarly prove to be effective distractions from the ills of the modern world, manifesting in the 1970s as a film director neglecting to depict the negative aspects of Rome, and in the 1940s as a vaudeville show that unites audience members in laughter, bawdiness, and nationalistic sentiment. The musical and comedy acts run for a little too long here, but the announcement of Germany and Italy’s successful defence of Sicily that interrupts the performances is worth it, erupting in disconcerting cries of support from the crowd.

The irony that this jubilant resolve dissipates into pandemonium the moment sirens start blaring a few short moments later is not to be missed. “Whose baby is this?” one patron shouts upon discovering a baby left alone in the evacuated theatre, while outside Fellini shoots the emptying streets in a chilly blue wash. Though present-day Rome has long moved past the terror and instability of World War II, the insecurity that comes to light here is a ghost that continues to haunt this city – a city which, as Vidal elucidates, “has died so many times and was resurrected so many times.”

A haunting juxtaposition between Rome’s nationalistic celebration and the violent bombing a few short minutes later – this is a snapshot of a city in turmoil, at odds with its own contradictions.

More specifically, it is Rome’s historical inclination towards fascism which can’t quite be expelled from its culture, and which becomes the subject of the town fool’s rhyming couplets comparing Italian dictators across time. “This fascist shit, his head is split,” he cackles at a damaged statue of Julius Caesar, before turning his insubordinate poem to the 1940s.

“Now we’ve got another meanie,

By the name of Mussolini.”

Fellini’s obvious disdain towards the police in the 1970s timeline formally brings this partisan statement full circle, noting that despite the political lull, there remains an oppressive, authoritarian influence quashing freedoms in contemporary Rome. These people may find any excuse for a communal celebration of family, art, food, or religion, and yet such lively passions can sway dangerously towards prejudice with the right provocation. “It seems to me the perfect place to watch if we end or not,” Vidal predicts, and by the end of Roma, Fellini has thoroughly substantiated his claim. Within this vividly surreal portrait, its culture is a vibrant epicentre of history and modernity, community and intolerance, highbrow art and lowbrow entertainment – and worth cherishing in all its wonders, contradictions, and flaws.

Fellini’s Roma is currently available to buy from Amazon.

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

Robert Wise | 2hr 11min

Though the primary antagonist of The Andromeda Strain may be the extra-terrestrial organism described in its title, it isn’t too hard to see the wariness towards world governments lingering beneath the film’s doomsday warnings. As the scientists of the secret underground facility Wildfire note early on, the Andromeda bacteria may not even necessarily be deliberately hostile in its native environment, and its harmfulness to terrestrial lifeforms could very well be an incidental mismatch between their biological codes. Until it is brought into contact with humanity, its nature is not inherently good or evil. It only becomes a global hazard through its exploitation by political leaders, and our own arrogant belief that we can keep such unknown forces as these under control.

In short, The Andromeda Strain offers the perfect metaphor for widespread nuclear warfare at the dawn of the 1970s, falling into the same subgenre of paranoid political thrillers as so many other films of the era like The Conversation and The Parallax View. Though the atomic detonation built into Wildfire was designed as a safeguard, the eventual discovery that it may in fact fuel Andromeda with enough energy to end all life on Earth effectively turns a protective countermeasure into an apocalypse waiting to happen. That the lead scientists behind Wildfire believe this newly discovered organism can be used as a biological weapon is pure hubris, leaving only a small team of contracted experts to unravel Andromeda’s mysteries and defuse a potentially world-ending threat.

Haunting scenes at the town of Piedmont, where all but two citizens dropped dead in the middle of everyday activities – a horrifically intriguing start to this scientific mystery.
Wise’s staggering of bodies throughout shots is executed with clinical precision, using the full breadth of his wideframe and an incredible depth of field.

The realism that Robert Wise applies to The Andromeda Strain also speaks to a far more authentic feeling of insecurity too than the sensationalised Cold War allegories that pervaded the cinematic landscape up to this point, including his own 1951 adaptation of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Having been well-established in the industry since the 1940s, he is essentially a bridge between Old and New Hollywood, applying his talent for deep focus cinematography learned from Orson Welles to a more naturalistic aesthetic. More specifically, it is the split diopter lens that becomes the foundation of so many Wise’s greatest compositions, applying two different focuses at once to effectively allow for a close-up and wide shot within the same frame. Brian de Palma would be the director most associated with this technique in years to come, but not even he was so rigorously bound to the stylistic device as Wise is in The Andromeda Strain, which barely goes a minute without underscoring the dramatic irony disconnecting subjects in the foreground and background.

Many directors have mastered the split diopter lens, but none have made a film that uses it so perfectly and consistently as The Andromeda Strain which turns it into a fully realised aesthetic. Close-ups and wide shots are effectively achieved within the same shot, imparting a great deal of visual information and dramatic irony.

In this way, Wise uses the split diopter as a tool for suspense, particularly in the early scenes when we learn about the small, rural town of Piedmont whose entire population suddenly died without warning. When military police officers arrive at Dr Jeremy Stone’s home and urgently summon him to ground zero, the two greeting his wife at the door evenly frame the third restlessly pacing by the car behind them, astoundingly dividing the lens’ focus into three individual segments. Later when Stone arrives on site with Dr Mark Hall, their investigation is eerily laced with more of these shots, pressing the profile of a dead man right up against the camera while they anxiously observe from a distance.

An inventive twist on the split diopter – segmenting the frame into thirds rather than halves, and framing the police officer in the background with two more on either side.
Chilling scenes in the town of Piedmont, viscerally captured with Wise pressing a dead man’s face in close-up against the camera while scientists investigate from a distance.
The two survivors of the ghost town make for a compelling mystery – a crying baby and the local drunk, both seemingly unaffected by the lethal bacteria.

The other purpose this deep focus serves during Stone and Hall’s reconnaissance mission is purely economical, loading the visuals with a great deal of information without needing to cut between multiple shots. The pacing here is slow but gripping, thoroughly earning each puzzle piece that gradually slots into place – the satellite that recently crashed in town, the clotting of human blood into a powdery substance, and the two sole survivors being a crying baby and the town drunk.

The mosaic use of split screens during this sequence consequently feels like a natural extension of the split diopter technique, drawing our eyes to multiple subjects in the frame while abundant evidence of an invisible alien invasion stacks up. On the left, Stone and Hall peer through windows of quiet houses, while on the right we are given the view of dead bodies inside. Similarly, their studies of Andromeda in the depths of Wildfire use these split screens in place of conventional montages, methodically drawing connections between different parts of their experiments without impatiently rushing through their painstaking processes. Along with the time stamps frequently marking the date and time of significant events, Wise’s precise visuals are effectively cataloguing this scientific study into a detailed presentation of exacting focus, desperately trying to apply hard logic to what remains impenetrably enigmatic.

Wise approaches his narrative with clinical precision, formally marking its progression with timestamps that help to sort through its sheer density.
Wise’s mosaic split screens serve a similar purpose as his split diopters, connecting disparate points of the investigation to reach a firmer conclusion.
The colour red punctures Wise’s sterile sets with jarring urgency.

With such remarkable formal precision guiding Wise’s direction, the Stanley Kubrick influence is clear, especially given the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey just three years prior. Just like that science-fiction masterpiece, accusations could be levelled at the dry jargon and cold characterisations of Nelson Gidding’s screenplay, though the clinical restraint displayed here is merely part of Wise’s sterile atmosphere. Instead of a small crew journeying into outer space, we watch four scientists descend deep into the Earth, yielding their humanity to the artificial technology that keeps them alive. To reach the main laboratory at its base, they must first pass through four sublevels of decontamination, with each room possessing the sort of intricate production design that wouldn’t be out of place in Kubrick’s spaceships. The crimson, silver, and yellow uniforms worn by these scientists vividly match the metallic walls of their respective floors, while the red warning lights on the bottom level pierce its polished grey surroundings with jarring urgency, though it is the laboratory’s central core which proves to be the most impressive set piece of them all in the heart-pumping climax.

The 2001: A Space Odyssey influence is distinctly felt in Wise’s uniform production design and blocking, making for some particularly striking imagery as the scientists descend ever deeper into the Earth.

To draw that 2001: A Space Odyssey connection even deeper, Wise’s decision to hire special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull pays off in the green computerised depictions of Andromeda itself, dynamically visualising its mutations into different variants. This rapid evolution may be its greatest weapon against human analysis, granting itself the power to disintegrate the plastic and rubber keeping it contained, though it is equally the fast thinking of scientists which at least temporarily defuses the situation. The threat in the film’s final act is a little contrived, counting down to an apocalyptic nuclear detonation, but Wise’s deft editing paces the tension perfectly right to the final seconds. An uneasy stalemate is the only solution which guarantees survival for both species, and may be the best anyone can hope for given their immense powers of mutual destruction. In an era so fraught with mistrust between neighbours, the pursuit of greater knowledge is nothing more than a path to existential insecurity in The Andromeda Strain, forcing civilians to grasp the fragility of their own blissfully ignorant lives.

Even 2001: A Space Odyssey’s special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull contributes to the morphing design of Andromeda itself, rendered digitally as a green, mutating prism.
The measured pacing ramps up in the final act with a climactic countdown to the end of the world, but Wise continues to wield an excellent control over his camera angles and tension.

The Andromeda Strain is currently available to rent or on Apple TV, YouTube, and Amazon Video, and the Blu-ray can be bought on Amazon.

The Tenant (1976)

Roman Polanski | 2hr 5min

It is a horrifying enough realisation on its own that Polish immigrant Trelkovsky is slowly transforming into Simone, the previous occupant of his Parisian apartment who jumped from its window. Even more disturbing is the creeping feeling that his condescending neighbours are erasing all traces of his real identity, leaving the ambiguous question by the end of The Tenant as to whether it is even worth distinguishing between the two residents. From the moment he goes to visit a barely alive Simone in her hospital bed with her face wrapped in bandages, he feels strangely drawn to her, though he is abruptly interrupted from investigating further when she locks eyes with him and lets out a monstrous scream. Sometime later, she dies from her injuries, though one thing at least has been made clear – she too sensed the presence of that mysterious, frightening connection between them.

All that is left of the previous tenant Simone is this bandaged, dehumanised mummy, letting out a monstrous as she locks eyes with Trelkovsky.

In the eyes of Monsieur Zy and the other inhabitants of their building, that bond is superficially obvious. Both the foreigner Trelkovsky and the queer-coded Simone are troublemakers with little regard for those social conventions that keep a tenuous peace – no loud noises, no visitors, fall in line with the majority opinion. They are as bad as that mother and her disabled daughter being viciously evicted from their apartment via a petition that Trelkovsky refuses to sign, which incidentally alienates him even further. The unifying thread binding him together with these similarly ostracised strangers is never explicitly labelled, but it doesn’t need to be. Whether one diverges from the mainstream through their sexuality, ethnicity, or physical condition, there is little room to be made for outsiders in these flats.

With a setting this absurdly oppressive, one could easily imagine some alternate version of The Tenant as a Kafkaesque comedy, or a drama aimed at confronting social issues. As the final piece of Roman Polanski’s Apartment trilogy though following Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion, Trelkovsky’s disintegrating psyche is complete submerged in paranoid horror, creeping into those safe spaces one would hope to savour as their last sanctuary in a treacherous world.

German expressionism in this manipulation of shadows, angles, and sets – there is a lineage from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari to this shot.

Cinematographer Sven Nykvist strays far from his usual close-up heavy work with Ingmar Bergman here, using wide-angle lenses that claustrophobically warp the dimensions of building hallways around Trelkovsky, and tracking his camera through dark rooms with measured precision. The Hitchcockian influence is apparent too, mounting an intrusive suspense in the opening shot as we float outside the dreary grey establishment and peer through its windows, and later when the central stairwell is framed at dizzying angles that almost look to be straight out of Vertigo. Like James Stewart’s private detective Scottie, he too is destined for a great fall.

Overhead shots looking down stairwells call back to Vertigo, leading our protagonist to an inevitable fall from a great height.
The Alfred Hitchcock references continue in abundance – Rear Window here as Trelkovsky spies on his neighbours through binoculars, suspicious of their odd behaviour.

With an inquisitive Trelkovsky being pulled deeper into a mystery that won’t let him go, the comparisons don’t end there either. His observations of suspicious behaviours through binoculars frame him like Stewart in Rear Window, as he amasses a collection of bizarre clues pointing back to Simone in long, patient stretches of purely visual storytelling. So too does Psycho’s influence rear its head as her identity begins to take over, cutting a feminine silhouette of his body in the apartment that has steadily grown darker and messier over time, and which reverberates disarray across a wintery lakeside chaotically littered with fold-up chairs. Though Polanski often uses wide shots to frame his deteriorating mise-en-scène, his compositions frequently carry a psychologically invasive effect, isolating him at the centre of a conspiracy that follows him wherever he goes.

Polanski hits the trifecta of Hitchcock allusions with Psycho, putting Trelkovsky under a microscope as his identity and gender come into question.
The chaos of Polanski’s mise-en-scène is astonishingly composed, littering a wintery lakeside with green fold-up chairs – a visual representation of Trelkovsky’s disintegrating psyche.

As for how much of this plot is merely in his head, Polanski consistently underscores Trelkovsky’s loose grip on reality, but otherwise remains purposefully ambiguous. “The former tenant always wore slippers after ten o’clock. It was always more comfortable for her – and for the neighbours,” he is first advised when he moves in, though what starts as simple pointers soon becomes a cloud of ridiculously strict expectations hanging over his head, making him anxious to even turn on a tap. Though lingering deep in the subtext, Polanski’s past as a Holocaust survivor and victim of prejudice after the war is embedded in Trelkovsky’s experiences with this community of authoritarian neighbours, and the allegory is only emphasised in his bold but ultimately misguided choice to cast himself as the lead. When he begins to realise the influence coming from servers at a local café trying to offer him Simone’s regular orders and cigarette brands, Polanski’s acting simply cannot sustain the intensity of his own direction.

Still, this imperfect performance does not keep The Tenant from excelling in its psychosexual study of alienation and guilt, leading us along a string of bizarre motifs disassociating Trelkovsky from his physical body. When he finally investigates the bathroom where he has spied neighbours standing motionless for hours on end, he finds a wall of hieroglyphs, leading him back to Simone and her academic studies in Egyptology. Looking out the window, he sees another figure watching him through binoculars from the reverse angle – only to realise with horror that it is himself in his own apartment. An effectively unnerving score of trembling and plucked strings accompany these unearthly discoveries, many of which are never so much explained outright as they are weaved together into an occult of urban conformity and ostracisation, until that sacred sense of selfhood comes into question.

“At what precise moment does an individual stop being who he thinks he is?”

Conspiracies, connections, and delusions emerge. Hieroglyphs in the bathroom call back to Simone’s interest in Egyptology, and Trelkovsky even witnesses his own double spying on him from across the courtyard.

In the midst of his madness, this is the question Trelkovsky is driven to one drunken night as he feels himself slowly slipping away. “If you cut off my head – would I say, ‘Me and my head’ or ‘Me and my body’? What right has my head to call itself me?” he slurs to his new friend Stella – a woman who of course used to be Simone’s friend too. Like the Ship of Theseus that had all its original components replaced over time in the famous thought experiment, we too are left to question how long he can still call himself Trelkovsky while all those pieces that once defined him are being swapped out. In the end, he is only becoming what everyone else already sees him as – just another outsider, trying and failing to play by an impossible set of rules.

Of course, the more Trelkovsky tries to placate his neighbours’ demands, the more he loses control of his own mind, leaving us to wonder with this recent emergence of Simone is really the manifestation of a more authentic, transgressive self he has tried to repress for the sake of the status quo. His courtship with Stella often feels more like a social obligation than anything else, hinting at a part of his sexuality that he has never properly sought to understand, and which has only fuelled his fear of being exposed.

Transgressive and controversial characterisations, situating characters as outsiders from the status quo due to their queerness, ethnicity, and disability.
Trelkovsky’s fate is written out from the beginning with Simone’s attempted suicide, revealing the broken glass that she fell through, and which Trelkovsky will soon shatter again in the exact same way.

In effect, Trelkovsky is caught in a destructive loop of self-loathing, finally throwing himself out of his apartment window as Simone did before him, and then almost immediately repeating the act a second time. So too does Polanski recall the opening tracking shot at this moment as well, floating the camera around the outside of the building, but this time seeing Trelkovsky’s hallucination of all those who had conspired against him cheering and clapping his attempted suicide.

It isn’t until Trelkovsky finds himself waking up under layers of bandages that The Tenant finally comes full circle though. Now at his lowest point, he is more identical to Simone than ever, bearing a perfect resemblance to the maimed, faceless woman he met back in the hospital ward that he now occupies. As his eyes meet those of the visitor standing above him, all he can do is let out a monstrous scream – not just in recognition of his own face, naively peering down at his disfigured body, but also of that infinite loop which will once again take him down the same deranged path of stolen individuality and mutilated personhood.

A haunting closure of the narrative loop, bringing us back to the start with the reveal of Trelkovsky and Simone’s merged identity – a path of mutilated individuality and dehumanisation.

The Tenant is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play, or YouTube, and the Blu-ray or DVD can be bought on Amazon.