The anonymous affair which widower Paul and young actress Jeanne conduct makes for a warped power dynamic in Last Tango in Paris, and Bernardo Bertolucci is unafraid to plunge the crude depths of their precarious arrangement, prodding at raw, psychological wounds that explode with love, grief, and violent anger.
Federico Fellini’s Roma is not quite the familiar city we recognise from history books, but rather an absurd, contradictory landscape of rich impressionistic detail, filtering its vibrant culture, art, and politics through vignettes distorted by the wily incongruity of satire and memory.
Ingmar Bergman’s wrestling with matters of faith and tortured female relationships has never been so vividly illustrated as it is in Cries and Whispers, confining its three sisters and their maid to the crimson-saturated dreams of their family home, and surreally interrogating the fractures which only deepen with their parallel suffering.
For the bohemian misfits of Cabaret, it is easy enough to believe that the Kit Kat Club is a safe refuge to escape the angry politics of 1930s Germany, but as Bob Fosse skilfully intercuts its musical numbers with scenes of hope, love, and violence, we discover the chilling tension that exists between the dwindling escapism of one subculture and the burgeoning totalitarianism of another.
Nature has never been so frightening nor humanity so stubbornly delusional as they are in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, as Werner Herzog’s disorientating camerawork and breath-taking cinematography of the Peruvian wilderness loses us in the absurd quest of 17th century Spanish conquistadors to find the fabled country of El Dorado.
In transposing classical storytelling traditions onto a 1940s New York crime family in The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola effectively crafts an epic piece of American mythology for the twentieth century, unravelling one of the greatest pure narratives put to film with monumental ambition in its sheer economy and compellingly tragic characters.
With each successive scene building on previously established motifs and ideas, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie develops a rigorous theme and variation structure that serves to bolster Luis Buñuel’s acidic attack on Europe’s wealthy ruling classes.
