Michael Mann’s brief detour from crime movies into historical epics spanned a total of one film in the early 1990s, though the visceral action that commonly brings good and evil into conflict throughout his oeuvre is no less present in The Last of the Mohicans. Within the broader French and Indian War of the mid-18th century which saw various Native American tribes ally with opposing British and French colonies, personal vendettas run deep. The humiliation that Huron chief Magua once suffered at the hands of Colonel Edmund Munro has marked the officer as his mortal enemy, and the prospect of cutting out his heart is not enough to satiate his bloodlust. Meanwhile, Munro’s underestimation of his enemy does not only compromise his tactical and technological advantages, but also woefully sets back those caught in the middle who desperately seek some sort of harmony within the chaos.
For Mohican-adopted woodsman Hawkeye, this bitter violence between Brits and Hurons especially undermines his efforts to preserve the Indigenous traditions that white colonialism threatens to erase. He is a mythic hero lifted straight from James Fenimore Cooper’s literary series Leatherstocking Tales, typifying the ideal union of European and Native American cultures. Now as a grown man, he lives with Mohican elder Chingachgook and his son Uncas, both the last of their tribe. When the responsibility of escorting Munro’s daughters Cora and Alice back to their father falls into their laps, intimate bonds continue to develop between natives and settlers, and yet the consequences of Magua’s vindictive fury and Munro’s ruinous pride can only be averted for so long.
Colonial America stranded in natural, foreign environments, out of place and isolated from their motherland.An excellent use of natural lighting, with candles and campfires shedding a warm glow in otherwise dark scenes.Fantastic blocking upon discovering the remnants of a massacre, dividing the two groups by their insight and uncertainty.A poignant farewell beneath the mournful blue wash of this waterfall.
Still, the cross-cultural romance that Hawkeye and Cora share right next to Uncas and Alice brings a gentle reprieve to the film’s brutality, even if they must first work through their differences. When they first encounter a farm of massacred settlers and deduce the activities of a Huron war party, Mann’s blocking sets the tiny, clueless Europeans apart from Hawkeye and his native companions whispering in the foreground, and this division continues to echo through his immaculate staging of British and French forces. Only in the wilderness where the prejudices and conventions of white civilisation are left behind can these impossible relationships flourish, illuminated by the warm natural light of campfires and shrouded in the blue glow of cascading waterfalls.
Symmetry in reflections and blocking – The Last of the Mohicans features some of Mann’s finest visuals, tied together with authentic period production design.
The beauty that Mann consistently finds in America’s terrain of rough mountains, leafy forests, and still lakes may only be outdone though by the absolute attention to detail he pours into his period production design and battle sequences. From a distance, the French’s siege of Fort William Henry lights up the night with bright orange smoke, while up close his camera tracks through their relentless barrage of gunfire and cannonballs aimed at sturdy stone walls. Slow-motion is used to brilliant effect in these scenes too, often centring around Daniel Day-Lewis as he daringly runs into the thick of combat and subsequently proves his versatility as an action hero.
The siege of Fort William Henry burns brightly, imprinting silhouettes against the smoke and fire as the camera vigorously rolls across the battlefield.
The climactic confrontation which Mann builds all of this to makes for a magnificent show of cinematic storytelling in the final act of The Last of the Mohicans, stripping away the dialogue to underscore the final struggle with Scottish fiddles reiterating a persistent, propulsive melody. Time slows down once again as Hawkeye races across a mountain to rescue Cora and Alice from Magua, and yet it is Uncas who first reaches his destination and is consequently slain by the Huron’s blade. Resolving to follow her lover rather than be trapped with Magua, Alice throws herself from the cliff, at which point Mann seems to turn the entire world upside down in an extreme low angle that sorrowfully beholds her tragic fall.
The Last of the Mohicans reaches its apex in its final act, bringing together excellent editing, cinematography, and music in a showcase of cinematic storytelling.
Finally, Chingachgook takes on his son’s killer in a duel, and it is just as he is about to land the final blow that Mann pauses on a tremendous wide shot of them standing face-to-face against a vast, mountainous backdrop. Both native men were only brought into conflict through the interference of white settlers and are blocked here as equals, but it is Chingachgook who ultimately holds the upper hand with his long, curved gunstock war club hanging between them. Anticipation bleeds through the stillness of the composition, and yet there is also a quiet sorrow here as the last Mohican delivers his coup de grâce, anguished that he was pushed to commit such terrible violence.
There is once again a symmetry to Mann’s blocking in this key shot, framing both Chingachgook and Magua as equals against a vast, mountainous backdrop before the death blow is dealt.
Gazing out at the horizon and praying for Uncas’ deceased soul, Cora, Chingachgook, and Hawkeye’s profiles are perfectly aligned, united in the harmony they have long sought for and attained at great cost. These remarkable visuals are not unusual for Mann, though the sensitive storytelling of The Last of theMohicans certainly is, dwelling in serene sorrow without the need for release. His grand mythologising of colonial America forecasts a bleak future, solemnly recognising that the Mohican tribe will soon perish with Chingachgook, and yet it is also through this native elder and his adopted son Mohawk that the seeds of cross-cultural peace miraculously begin to grow in the infertile soil of war.
A perfect alignment of facial profiles, finally united rather than divided.
The Last of the Mohicans is currently streaming on Stan, is available to rent or buy on Apple TV and Amazon Video, and the Blu-ray can be bought on Amazon.
The modern, commercialised Hollywood of The Player is so steeped in the grand mythology of American filmmaking, it is no wonder that those left to continue its legacy fall so drastically short. It isn’t exactly nostalgia that Robert Altman is expressing here, though his sentimental adoration for the great cinematic masterpieces is evident. This industry has been so thoroughly milked of originality that virtually every new pitch thrown out is a retread of old ideas – Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate for instance, and even the potential for a dark sequel to The Graduate is seriously considered.
On one hand, the churning out of tired tropes and cliches at least brings in audiences and guarantees Hollywood’s long-term survival. On the other, it destroys any potential for creative innovation, teaching filmmakers to sacrifice artistic integrity for box office earnings. As a metacommentary on the American movie industry, mass entertainment, and the necessity of pandering to audience expectations, The Player occupies a curiously subversive space among all of this, turning one Hollywood studio executive into the star of a crime plot he would much rather stay out of. Much like those films it is sending up too, The Player wears its neo-noir, thriller, and comedic influences on its sleeve too, albeit in much more self-reflexive manner.
It is mainly Altman’s narrative paying tribute to film noir, though in shots like these he is drawing heavily on old visual conventions – rain-glazed windows, neon signs, voyeuristic camera placement.
In many ways, this is no huge departure from Altman’s usual interrogations of genre traditions, having previously taken on war, neo-noir, and western films, and yet it is worth noting that The Player comes out over a decade after his unparalleled run of hits in the 1970s. His penchant for satire has not faded, though his targets are closer to home than ever, tearing down the egos behind his line of work. Writers driven by pure passion put everything on the line, desperately hoping that their script is the one to be picked out, while the producers who call the shots insensitively brush off a vast majority of them, only hiring the remaining few with the intent to warp their vision beyond recognition.
There is not a whole lot that separates our antihero Griffin Mill from every other executive who conforms to these rules. It is only through pure misfortune that he is the one to be targeted by a rejected screenwriter. Postcards have been turning up in his mail for some time now with threatening messages, and after some effort he finally locates the man who he believes is responsible – one David Kahane. The clumsy scuffle that incidentally kills David may disturb a guilt-ridden Griffin, though not enough for him to take responsibility for it. He can’t dwell too long on the ominous image of a writer lying face down in a neon red puddle, his hopes and dreams quite literally dead in the gutter. Pressures and deadlines are looming at work, heaping on a thousand other priorities that take priority over this one.
The puddle where writer David Kahane is killed is lit like a pool of blood, literally leaving his hopes and dreams in the gutter.
What a busy, expansive world Altman builds here too, recalling his talents that previously breathed life into cinematic depictions of Nashville, a rural Western town, and a war hospital, and now applying them to an urban landscape so vast that brutal murders simply blend into the miasma. Though not an overly beautiful film, his camera pans and zooms capture an organic naturalism not bound to any single frame, but rather sprawls beyond its borders. The lives of A-list celebrities, star-struck visitors, impatient producers, and eager assistants intersect in his chaotic overlapping dialogue here, refusing to limit the story of Hollywood’s dream machine to any one perspective.
Altman’s camera zooms are naturalistic and well-placed, directing our eyes around crowded settings.
With this ensemble framework in mind, the eight-minute shot that opens the film effectively captures a slice of Hollywood’s everyday routines, commencing with a fourth wall-breaking clapperboard before hovering the camera just outside Griffin’s office window as conversations pass by. Despite the commotion, not a single detail escapes Altman, who briefly lingers on a discussion regarding the great long takes of cinema history. Touch of Evil reigns supreme, one studio bigwig asserts, claiming a family connection to the shoot while shutting down the delivery boy’s suggestion of the obscure British musical Absolute Beginners. The Player vaguely follows in Orson Welles’ lineage in this way, and yet there is a spontaneity to Altman’s roving camera which is quite distinct from Touch of Evil’s, crafting a shot that is entirely his own even as he pays homage to that which came before.
An eight-minute long take opens the film, hovering outside Griffin’s office where the everyday commotion of Hollywood unfolds. It is simultaneously paying homage to the other long takes of film history, and carries Altman’s visual trademarks – the roving camera, the spontaneity, the zooms.
The microcosm of Hollywood captured in this opening also serves another purpose in The Player’s heavily intertextual screenplay. Whether hanging the threat of total failure over Griffin’s head by evoking the box office catastrophe of Heaven’s Gate, or having his stalker summon him with the fake alias of Joe Gillis, the writer from Sunset Boulevard killed by the movie star, Altman is using Hollywood’s historical legends to mark significant narrative beats. In this modern setting though, they are propped up as images of industrial icons while stripped of their substance, leaving foreign classics to be written off entirely.
“When was the last time you actually bought a ticket to see a movie? You actually paid your own money to see it?
“Last night. In Pasadena. The Bicycle Thief.”
“It’s an art movie, it doesn’t count. I’m talking about ‘movie’ movies.”
This is a big cast outside of Tim Robbins’ slimy studio executive, sprawling across several subplots in 90s Hollywood that compete for attention.
To executives like these who prioritise profits above all else, a Hollywood movie must tick off a list of boxes to be successful – suspense, violence, hope, nudity, sex, and a happy ending. Sure enough, Altman is consciously sprinkling in a little bit of each here too, subtly noting their contrived artifice as they consequently pull us out of the story. As for films that fall outside the mould like Habeas Corpus, the legal drama Griffin decides to greenlight – they can at least be reshaped into the desired form if the potential is there, and as long as the writers are open to making changes.
Rather than letting these cliches confine The Player, Altman delights in their escalation of narrative stakes across multiple subplots, as Griffin simultaneously discovers that David was not the man behind the postcards, finds his job under threat, and lands himself in the middle of a murder interrogation. Adding on top of that his perverse romance with David’s girlfriend, June, as well as his unlikely acquittal in a police lineup, and The Player’s keen manipulation of genre conventions pushes our suspension of disbelief in playfully comic directions.
Griffin comes close to being caught out, and escapes at every turn, subverting our expectations of how crime movies are supposed to play out.
Going by the rules of Hollywood moviemaking, Griffin’s improbable reversal of fortune by the end of The Player is exactly how the story is meant to play out, paralleling the contrived happy ending of a heavily rewritten Habeas Corpus as it plays for test audiences a year later. “What took you so long?” a young Julia Roberts asks Bruce Willis as he heroically carries her from a gas chamber. “Traffic was a bitch,” he quips in return, setting up a corny one-liner that Griffin echoes in the final scene when he happily comes home to his now-wife, June.
The fake movie-in-a-movie is hilariously corny, playing to every Hollywood trope as Bruce Willis carries Julia Roberts in his arms – and of course, the actual ending of The Player mirrors this as well.
The self-awareness of this unexpectedly conventional resolution comes with yet another chilling twist though as Griffin receives a call from his colleague, introducing a man with a brilliant movie pitch. It is called The Player, and is about a studio executive who kills a writer, runs off with his girlfriend, and escapes his comeuppance. These similarities are more than just fate. “He gets away with it?” Griffin nervously asks. “Absolutely. It’s a Hollywood ending, Griff,” the anonymous, postcard-sending stalker on the other end of the line replies, still very much alive. “If the price is right, you got it.”
There are clearly greater powers than art or morality at play in the dream machine of The Player. As Altman’s dark satire winds to a discomforting close, he identifies a quiet insidiousness that resides in Hollywood’s happy endings. By irreverently playing within these set rules, he effectively turns our eyes towards the source of those narratives that dominate the cultural mainstream, and use their status to tell audiences what sort of people deserve success and good fortune. It is certainly no coincidence either that these winners are so often the same wealthy, obnoxious jerks with the power to determine what exactly those narratives are.
Maybe the most depressing happy ending of any film, telling us exactly what sort of selfish, immoral people always win out.
The Player is currently streaming on SBS On Demand, Amazon Prime Video, and The Criterion Channel, is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, or you can buy the DVD or Blu-ray on Amazon.
As far as fated high school prom queen Laura Palmer is concerned, the only supernatural forces by her side as she suffers through her final days are those demons driving her towards a violent, degrading death. They hide in plain sight within the idyllic Washington town of Twin Peaks, masking an evil so insidiously manipulative that even its victims try to disassociate them from the images of warmth and comfort they project. If there are any guardian angels working to defend innocent civilians from their influence, then they certainly aren’t looking over Laura while she sinks into a deep pit of self-destruction. As she kicks back one weekend with her far more naïve friend Donna, she can’t resist inserting herself into the hypothetical question she is posed of whether one would slow down or accelerate while falling through space.
“Faster and faster. And for a long time, you wouldn’t feel anything. And then you’d burst into fire. Forever… And the angels wouldn’t help you. Because they’ve all gone away.”
The end of her life is near, and she can see almost exactly how it is going to unfold, with no chance of some saving grace arriving in the nick of time to save her. Still, even with this pessimistic clarity, there is still a shred of hope in her lingering glances to the angel picture that hangs on her wall. Salvation is but a distant dream in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, even as its shallow façade casts a sleepy spell over suburban America.
Small-town innocence represented in Lynch’s neat, curated designs, setting the frame here in an overhead shot with careful precision.Lynch uses angels as a subtle visual motif, hanging this picture up on Laura’s wall as an emblem of hope and spiritual salvation.
David Lynch’s prequel to his television series offers an alternate view of the titular town – one which has not yet pulled in FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper to investigate Laura’s inevitable murder, and that keeps its darkest secrets contained to a smaller group of characters. This is not to say that Kyle MacLachlan’s detective is absent though, as the thirty-minute Deer Meadows prologue effectively bridges the gap between him and Twin Peaks, sending him down the dead-end rabbit hole of a previous murder in a neighbouring town that bears striking similarities to Laura’s own demise.
The extension of these formal parallels between Laura and the late Teresa Banks is striking, and this is quite significantly not some piece of dramatic irony that escapes the attention of Lynch’s characters either. Though Laura and Cooper never meet in person, a mystical, psychic connection forms between the two, allowing both a prescient foresight of their destinies and specifically giving the latter an image of who the killer’s next victim will be – another blonde, sexually active high school girl with a drug problem, crying out for help. “You’re talking about half the high school girls in America,” his colleague teases, though he isn’t exactly wrong. The surreal portrait that Lynch is painting of the nation’s corrupted innocence reaches far across modern society, exposing the lie that its supposed moral safe havens are impenetrable, incorruptible defences for the nation’s youth.
Twin Peaks and the Lodge – two sides of one surreal coin, where mysterious figures are caught between life and death.
Further linking the detective and the subject of his future investigation is the limbo where both disappear to in dreams, encountering visions of each other along with a small assortment of bizarre figures. Lynch’s eye for eerie designs reaches a peak in this metaphysical plane referred to as the Lodge, enclosing its inhabitants on all sides with red curtains and laying out a black-and-white, zig-zag pattern on the floor beneath them. So too do his slow, long dissolves subtly emphasise the Lodge as the connective tissue between the two, fading from Laura to its red curtains and then onto Dale in one lethargic transition, and further inducing a soporific reverie through the formal repetition of this editing device. The lore of the Lodge runs much deeper than what is presented in Fire Walk with Me, but in essence it draws our two primary characters into another layer of existence between life and death, and occasionally hosts the demon whose presence has been haunting Laura since she was a child – Killer BOB.
Fire Walk with Me features some of Lynch’s greatest long dissolves, becoming a dominant editing choice in his piecing together of this uneasy dream.
Taking the form of long-haired, dishevelled man with a sinister smile, Bob projects the image of a man who anyone would easily believe sneaks into the rooms of teenagers at night, whispers his evil intentions in their ears, and takes advantage of them. That his nocturnal attack on Laura is accompanied by silent flashes of lightning without thunder should clue us into her numb detachment from reality, instinctually kicking in to preserve any remaining belief in evil as a foreign agent, and not a homegrown mutation of the familiar. After all, this is the image of malevolence that is easier to live for her to live with, even as it breeds a self-loathing which pushes her into underage sex work and substance abuse. Never one to address the psychological breakdowns of his characters through a literal lens though, Lynch’s subtextual implications begin to reveal themselves with the discovery of Bob’s true identity – or perhaps possessed victim is a more appropriate term. Laura’s own humble father, Leland, is the mortal through which this demon inflicts his sadistic cruelty on the world, but even upon learning this we are simply left to wonder: which man in this parasitic relationship is the true evil, and which is wearing the other’s face as a mask?
Kill Bob is as flatly evil a villain as one can imagine, sneaking into Laura’s room and raping her – the nuance comes in the reveal of his actual identity.
Given the occasional cruelty that Leland displays behind closed doors, it wouldn’t be hard to believe that he is more than just Bob’s puppet. At the dinner table, his torment of Laura starts with him shaming her for not washing her hands, though the implications of virginal purity don’t remain discreet for long once he starts calling her filthy for her promiscuity. Meanwhile in the corner, his wife is rendered powerless, incapable of protecting her daughter from his verbal rampage. Leland’s tearful yet shallow apology later sounds like the words of a man deeply struggling with his own psychological issues, yet unable to come to terms with how dangerously ingrained they are in his being. Within the seven days leading up to Laura’s death, she may finally grow cognisant of her father’s true threat, but to him these hostile outbursts might as well be the work of the spirit that has taken control of him.
Family trauma and insecurity passed from one generation to the next, laying the foundation of the uncomfortable dinner table scene where Leland drops the facade of the loving father and harasses his daughter.
In fact, this is the deluded narrative that most of Twin Peaks would want to preserve, and the perspective which Lynch adopts with his trademark surrealism. The peculiar townsfolk often speak in disjointed passages that dwell on insignificant matters, until they are interrupted by cryptic riddles which speak to some profound truth. When Laura approaches the Roadhouse bar one night, she is stopped by Margaret the Log Lady who feels her feverish forehead and offers an elusive warning of the teenager’s corrupted virtue.
“When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out… The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy.”
Inside the Roadhouse, her meaning is somewhat clarified. This is where Laura often meets her pimp Jacques, who exploits her illegal affairs with adult men. Its smoky haze is only pierced by Lynch’s red and blue stage lights, not unlike those used in Isabella Rossellini’s performance in Blue Velvet, and he even stages a similar musical act with Julee Cruise wistfully crooning ‘Questions in a World of Blue’.
Lynch recaptures the magic of Isabella Rossellini’s rendition of ‘Blue Velvet’ with this expressionistic lighting and hypnotic musical act.
The song is enough to move Laura to tears, briefly letting her mourn the loss of normalcy in her life before she picks herself back up to entreat a pair of clients. With Cruise’s melancholy song still playing in the background though, Lynch’s musical sound design continues to prove itself a crucial part of his psychological worldbuilding, underscoring her muted conversation with dreamy synths. Save for those moments that he is emphasising the emptiness of silence, he is often manipulating the blend of diegetic and non-diegetic noises around Laura, absorbing the low, steady thrum of a ceiling fan into Angelo Badalamenti’s droning score in one scene that suspensefully leads up to her discovery of Bob’s identity. On a broader level too, the main theme’s slow, lazy bass riff becomes a lethargic motif for the town in general, lulling us into a drowsy acceptance of its surreal mundanity.
Visually, the Roadhouse scene also develops the colour palette that Lynch formally has set out right from the Deer Meadows prologue with the blue rose and red shirt, and continues to weave into his costumes, lighting, and décor. The duality of this aesthetic is as cleanly divided as the moral binaries which govern this sheltered town, splitting good and evil right down the middle with no consideration for the space in between. Though it has entirely disintegrated within Laura, it takes everything in her power to preserve the spotless purity of those in her life who remain truly untainted. She is distraught to see Donna engage in the same debauched behaviour as her when they enter a sex club together, and later she breaks up with her secret lover James as she spirals faster than ever. “You don’t even know me. Your Laura disappeared. It’s just me now,” she ruefully asserts, recognising the hollowed-out shell of a woman she has become.
Blue and red in Lynch’s costume designs and neon lights – as stark as the difference between his thematic innocence and corruption.
Still, when death finally comes for her, she does not submit to the pressing darkness without a fight. Lynch is a proven master of formal symbolism, tying mysterious threads through the recurrence of Teresa’s green ring, the Lodge, and mysterious masked strangers, but it is when Laura witnesses an angel hovering over her fellow sex worker Ronnie as they are tied up that he affirms Fire Walk with Me’s most powerful metaphor. Blessed by this heavenly entity, Ronnie just manages to escape Bob’s violence, though just as Laura expected, there are no angels looking out for her.
At least, not in this world, which would much rather brush over the traumas of those who publicly take on the celebrated image of the all-American sweetheart. Only when she is freed from those constraints and is ushered into the Lodge does she find the symbol of divine salvation she has been holding out hope for all along, recognising the goodness in her which saved multiple others from her inner darkness. After all, this is what sets her apart from men like Leland, who divide themselves into separate beings so they may simultaneously inflict their misery on others and remain guiltless in the process. When all is said and done for this tragically fated prom queen, she finds solace in her own virtue at the end of a tortured life, turning tears to laughter as the faint imprint of her angel hovers overhead.
Fire Walk with Me makes a solid case as the best edited film of 1992, especially with this final shot of Laura’s angel hovering over her in a beautiful long dissolve – salvation has finally arrived.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to buy on YouTube.
When Lee Marvin’s villainous outlaw was killed in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, James Stewart was hailed as a hero. When Clint Eastwood won the climactic shootout of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, he projected victory merely from his cool, confident swagger. In Unforgiven, there is no glory to be found in deadly quests for vengeance, and those who see them through to their end are called out for what they are – murderers. Ex-outlaw and retired gunslinger Will Munny wears that label with shame, preferring to put his violent past behind him so his two motherless children can grow up in a safer, kinder world, though the temptation to dredge up old habits lie on the horizon. A bounty on two men who cruelly mutilated a prostitute offers easy money that he desperately needs, but in Eastwood’s self-assured direction and sensitively layered performance, he incisively undermines the Old West mythology and Hollywood conventions that he built his career on.
Eastwood taking a leaf out of John Ford’s playbook, hanging the horizon low in the frame.
In fact, virtually every tale of fortitude, skill, and machismo told in Unforgiven is as unstable as the lies they are built on, attempting to rewrite a history of America that is far more honourable than its reality. Having once personified and subsequently shied away from its egotistical sadism, Munny is among the few characters who has seen the ugly truth, though acting as a counterpoint to this we find Richard Harris’ haughty, foreign gunfighter, English Bob. So conceited is this man that he has even hired a biographer to follow him around and transcribe his exaggerated stories, choosing to build a legacy not through organic word-of-mouth, but through his own contrived fabrications. Even his own aristocratic Britishness is a front, with his upper-crust accent concealing Cockney origins, and thereby suggesting that his own move over from England was likely motivated by the empty allure of the American Dream he now wishes to propagate.
Compared to English Bob’s thunderous arrival in the gun-free town of Big Whiskey, Munny arrives with much less pomp and circumstance. Huddled inside his coat and hiding under his wide-brimmed hat, Eastwood appears small, weak, and closed-off, diminished beneath the huge stature of Gene Hackman’s iron-fisted local sheriff, Little Bill. Turning this ambassador of the law into the villain of the piece and setting him against Eastwood’s heroic outlaw makes for a smartly subversive role reversal, and the process of seeing the latter sharpen up his old skillset and adopt the familiar mentality of a cold-blooded killer consistently raises the tension leading up to their eventual showdown.
This is a very different Western performance for Eastwood compared to the Man With No Name. There is deep-seated shame in his physicality, hunched over and shivering in his coat.
Within this ensemble of morally grey characters, the nihilism of Sergio Leone cynically asserts itself as a significant influence, and consequently so too does his fusion of magnificent blocking, camerawork, and dusty palettes that pervade Unforgiven’s mise-en-scène. Although predominantly shot in Alberta, the gorgeous scenery of dry grass, forests, and mountains form spectacular rural landscapes representing Wyoming and Kansas. When horizons hang low in the frame, Eastwood relishes isolating his characters against the wide-open skies, at times capturing it at magic hour when its setting sun burns a bright orange. When our attention turns to the action on the ground, he crafts some superbly staggered compositions out of his actors, staging the prostitutes seeking the bounty together as a cohesive unit, while low angles and guns hem in those at the mercy of Little Bill’s henchmen.
Masterful blocking from Eastwood, using wooden beams to draw lines in the frame and lining the prostitutes into the background from this low angle.Gene Hackman in a position of power, backed up by dozens of men in the background, and then shrinking Richard Harris in the frame, closing enemies in around him.
Tracking shots are used a little more sparsely in Unforgiven, and yet they still intermittently bring a thick immersion into the action and suspense, whether we are following Munny in a quick getaway or adopting his perspective during his vengeful return to Big Whiskey. Outside the saloon, his old friend Ned lays dead in a coffin with a warning sign for all those looking to cause further trouble, though he is not even slightly fazed. The same rage and vindictiveness which fuelled his life of crime decades earlier have returned darker than ever, seemingly bringing with it an angry storm that mercilessly beats down on the town and unnervingly accompanies his daunting monologue to Little Bill and his henchmen.
“I’ve killed women and children. I’ve killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I’m here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned.”
A slow tracking shot through town……and a low angle tracking shot in on Eastwood’s powerful stature, meeting him at his darkest point.
The camera tracks in on him from a low angle and thunder reverberates in the background, presaging what we expect to be a thrilling, drawn-out confrontation between these hard-bitten adversaries. The massacre that Eastwood delivers instead is no great struggle for Munny, whose calm composure and quick draw instantly mows down Little Bill and his men, and yet this doesn’t feel like a victory. As he previously told his younger, bounty-hunting companion, the Schofield Kid:
“It’s a hell of a thing killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”
This is a lesson the Kid only learns when he experiences it himself for the first time, shooting his quarry who he finds sitting defenceless on a toilet. There is nothing bold or courageous about this murder, and we see a pitiful change take place in this boy who, like English Bob, had built his entire reputation on the lie of being a fearsome gunslinger. Only when he becomes exactly that can he see the utter shame of it, and much like Munny, choose to walk away from the life he had always revered.
A superb arrangement of the rickety set design with the snowy landscape of mountains in the background.Eastwood’s split diopter lens catching both characters at different depths in the frame.
Still, murder leaves a mark on these men which can’t simply be shaken off. It haunts them long after the deed is done with the guilty knowledge of what they will always be capable of – a heartless evil as easily recalled as horse riding or shooting targets. Unforgiven is not a new story for a man like Munny, so used to taking lives with no regard for what they truly “deserve”, but in Eastwood’s brilliantly cutting genre subversions, it emerges as a horrific reminder of what lies dormant beneath America’s prideful history, ready to rear its head again at any time.
Unforgiven is currently streaming on Binge, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon Video.
Between the two lonely, embittered night workers of Light Sleeper and Taxi Driver who resentfully lament the decay of New York City yet actively contribute to its moral degradation, it is notable how distinctly Paul Schrader writes both on inverted paths. Where Travis Bickle’s discontent manifests as a dark irony simmering through deluded voiceovers, here it becomes a hopeless, self-aware melancholy for Willem Dafoe’s drug dealing insomniac, John LeTour, reconsidering the unsavoury direction his life has taken. Years ago, he was among those helpless addicts itching for their next hit, but while he was able to eventually sober up, he was not able to depart from that world entirely. Now, he and his supplier, Ann, run a steady but shady trade, dreaming of turning it into a cosmetics business that might pull them out of the squalid pits of American society.
Matching Schrader’s austere character study is a dedication to darkly lit environments and grimy textures painting every surface of this city, illuminated only by the white beams of headlights and streetlamps that glance off rain-glazed windows. The choice to shoot on location imbues the setting with an unmistakably authentic urban grit, which is only further underscored by the piles of trash mounting on kerbsides as monuments to human filth. Like Taxi Driver, Light Sleeper is set at the peak of a garbage strike, leading us to consider what poor working and social conditions reach across the lowest rungs of society beyond LeTour’s immediate view. Corruption runs deep in Schrader’s superb visual direction, wrapping up these characters in a foul, contaminated bubble that sees a steady decline in any possibility of escape or, at the very least, regained honour.
Schrader highlights the dinginess of New York City in its harsh street lighting, decor, and textures – a true visual accomplishment to go with his superb screenplay.
Stuck in a rut of self-disgust, it takes a chance meeting with his ex-wife for LeTour to start climbing his way out of his mental grind. Years ago, he and Marianne shared an intensely unhealthy relationship, both hooked on every drug they could get their hands on, and now with their paths crossing again, old feelings and habits begin to resurface. Given the way he records her name on her voicemail and plays it on repeat like an addiction, we can understand the sort of co-dependency that they once shared, and which now threatens to rear its head again. Still, there is no getting past the giant barrier which lies between them, which Schrader manifests visually in the architecture of a hospital café where they meet, dividing the frame right down its centre with a wide pillar that situates them on opposite sides.
Direct inspiration from Antonioni’s L’Eclisse in this visual divider dominating the frame with a huge mass of negative space.
DaFoe’s usually expressive face is notably sullen here as LeTour, tempered by years of soul-sucking routine and little to show for his work. Like the few other actors fortunate enough to have landed a lead role in a Schrader-written film, he is given a wealth of emotional complexity and substance to work with, especially in voiceovers that sprout melancholic reflections from his diary entries. From within a messy apartment, he sits and writes under the dim light of a lamp, spilling out those private confessions and deliberations in voiceovers while we watch his interactions with clients and associates.
This is one in a long line of Schrader character studies picking apart masculinity, guilt, and corruption. Robert De Niro, Ethan Hawke, and Oscar Isaac have all given some of their best performances with his intelligent screenplays, and Willem DaFoe is no different in Light Sleeper.
Schrader goes on to layer LeTour’s characterisation even further with a sharp intuition as well, not just in the faith he puts in the guidance of spiritualists, but also in his observations of others’ behaviours. The camera matches this with its own focused tracking shots moving through scenes like an acutely observant eye, studying the details of each environment and informing his gut instincts. Early on he picks out one undercover cop at a bar with ease, and later when a tragic death is officially ruled as a suicide, his suspicion that the blame lays at the feet of one his clients saves his life in a deadly confrontation.
The framing of the doorway paired with the blocking and lighting, projecting rays down from the ceiling – a thoughtful composition directing our eyes to DaFoe in the background.This soft, natural light washing over New York’s graffitied walls and dirty streets could be a shot straight out of The French Connection.
As sharp as LeTour’s mind is though, Schrader hangs a constant cloud of drowsiness hangs over his head, with a lonely saxophone haunting Michael Been’s music score and long dissolves blurring transitions between scenes. It takes something drastic to motivate him to make any sort of move that might break this detachment from reality, but when it does arrive the moment is heralded with a new day dawning, and the garbage strike coming to an end. Quite literally, the streets are being cleansed of its scum, just as LeTour comes to a decisive conclusion about the course of action he must take. Travis Bickle might have come to a similar conclusion in Taxi Driver, but in place of corruption darkening LeTour’s soul, Schrader earns his protagonist a redemption arc that delivers the spiritual and moral resolution he seeks, even as he is damned in the eyes of the public.
Long dissolves transitioning between scenes, creating dreamy imagery like this – New York City contained within LeTour’s diary.
Like the ending to Schrader’s later film, The Card Counter, the physical prison that his protagonist winds up in is insignificant compared to the emotional freedom he has won, and the close-up he holds on through the closing credits does well to illustrate the purity of that. Though not explicit within the text, Schrader’s Christian faith underlies the grace of LeTour’s redemption, recognising it not as a singular act but rather a process of constant atonement. The New York City of Light Sleeper may be caught in mindless cycles of transgression and shame, but for as long as there is the motivation of love to set things right, the path to reformation is always open.
Lingering on this final shot as the credits roll, not in a freeze frame, but rather letting the actors hold the pose – an image of redemption through love.
Light Sleeper is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes.
Orlando slips through identities with nonchalant grace, about as effortlessly as Sally Potter flits through the centuries that her narrative is set over. Time barely leaves a scratch on our young protagonist, and so rather than marking years solely with numbers, themes are instead embedded in chapter titles as a means to separate one period of Orlando’s life from the next. “1600 Death” delivers a lesson in mortality with the passing of Queen Elizabeth I. “1650 Poetry” sees a blossoming interest in the writing of sonnets and verses. “1750 Society” is the period within which they fully comprehend the gendered politics of human civilisation, when they suddenly transform from a man into a woman. While it is a change that causes great confusion within the rigid boundaries of English society, Orlando’s reception of it goes by with little fanfare.
“Same person, no difference at all. Just a different sex.”
Tilda Swinton’s androgynous presentation has never been put to as brilliant use as it is here, playing both male and female identities of a single character.
It isn’t hard to see why this particular Virginia Woolf novel was considered nearly impossible to adapt to the screen. The difficulty isn’t just in the need for intricate and elaborate production design that shifts dramatically with each new chapter, but also in the lead actor’s ability and confidence to convincingly pull off the many layers of Orlando’s characterisation, including that pivotal sex change. Potter accomplishes the former with magnificent flair, collaborating with costume designer Sandy Powell to curate the deep, royal reds of Queen Elizabeth I’s bejewelled court, as well as the many colours of Orlando’s dynamic self-expression. The achievement of the latter though belongs largely to Tilda Swinton, whose striking androgynous style has rarely found a better fit than it does here.
Potter curates superb production design in each era, starting here in Queen Elizabeth I’s court with the rich red and gold colour palette, and crowding out the mise-en-scène with flowers and candles.Even without relying on the period decor Potter crafts some some stunning compositions, here emphasising the blacks and whites of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral.The use of colours always feels like an expression of Orlando’s shifting identity through the decades and centuries.
It is a wonder why so many other directors she has worked with haven’t recognised the great potential of close-ups in capturing her sharp facial features as well as Potter does here, as she always seems to find the most perfect meld of lighting, angles, and framing to form a direct connection between Swinton’s face and the camera. Every time she whips her eyes towards us, the impact is electrifying, as with each new incarnation there is a change in her iris colour that pierces the fourth wall with blues, ambers, browns, and greens. This fixation on Orlando’s physical appearance continues to extend to the rest of their body as well, as in one scene Potter’s camera traces the outline of their naked legs, hips, and torso in tight close-up against a black background, studying each curve with utter enthralment, as if trying to decipher the key to their eternal youth.
Swinton’s face seems meant for Potter’s close-ups, always using the lighting and framing to emphasise her striking eye colours.
Perhaps we might find more answers in Orlando’s direct addresses to the audience though, which contribute addendums to their own voiceover, revealing a person fully conscious of their unique place in history, though lacking any desire to assert themselves as anything more than an open-minded human. They move through time like an embodiment of time itself, though one that is trapped in a human body and subject to the petty judgements of society.
Orlando’s journey through the film is largely defined by its restlessness and acceptance of an unpredictable future, forever living like a young person with their whole life ahead of them, and Potter’s energetic synth score blends tremendously with this characterisation, invitingly beckoning them into the future. As they run into a magnificent hedge maze after rejecting a proposal, her music propels them down its narrow, green trails, this set piece becoming a tremendous visual metaphor of their navigation through the complicated labyrinth of human history. They disappear around corners and into clouds of fog with great urgency, trying to find an exit, but even in the frustratingly limited options laid out for them there is a still joyous freedom in the ability to choose their own path. Orlando may be a being of fluidity with an indestructible youth and vigour, and yet through the ever-shifting annals of human history that Potter so smoothly flips through, they are also ironically the only constant.
A labyrinth of endless corners and thick fog, an apt visual metaphor for Orlando’s navigation through human history if there ever was one.
Orlando is currently available to stream on Stan and Mubi.
