Whether Terry Gilliam’s mischievous storyteller in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a hero, a liar, or both, he is undoubtedly a man who can reach the hearts of those who listen, constructing magnificently surreal worlds of aliens and gods that place him right alongside history’s greatest mythical figures.
Cinema Paradiso bleeds the sort of pure, unassuming love of film that greater movies may have tackled with more ambitious visual artistry, and yet Giuseppe Tornatore’s majestic coming-of-age fable nevertheless inspires a rousing sentimentalism which erodes all traces of cynicism in even the harshest critics.
The Hitchcockian setup of an obsessive voyeur with a telescope in A Short Film About Love is very familiar, but in place of a suspenseful mystery Krzysztof Kieslowski instead absorbs us in a compelling morality play concerning two opposed yet twisted perceptions of love – the romanticisation of one-sided affection, and the complete denial of its existence.
The vision of Warsaw that Krzysztof Kieslowski presents in A Short Film About Killing is a barren wasteland of mud and shadows, strained through a sickly, jaundiced filter that unnervingly reveals the truly grotesque horror in justifying the malevolent destruction of human life.
Given the relative scarcity of body horror to be found in Dead Ringers, it is often David Cronenberg’s compositions of extreme hot and cold colours which instead build out a world of severe psychological distress, using this striking visual dissonance to mirror the co-dependent duality of the Mantle twins who begin a slow, mental decline when their inexorable bond comes under threat.
Memories flow like water in Distance Voices, Still Lives, seamlessly gliding from one to the next through intuitive connections and poetic tangents, bringing a photo book quality to Terence Davies’ nostalgic ode to the love and struggles of his old-fashioned, working-class family.
The blend of dry English humour and the brazen smarminess of American comedy in A Fish Called Wanda makes for a delicious mix of character dynamics, setting up the patriotic egos of both countries and then knocking them down a few pegs purely through their hilarious, bitter, and petty distaste for each other.
