Like a man ready to tear the world down with him on his way to hell, there is no real direction to Johnny’s intellectual bullying through London’s nocturnal streets in Naked, yet around him Mike Leigh constructs a character study of such immense nihilism that even he can’t escape the miserable darkness he emits.
Jonathan Demme’s camera is a vehicle of pure empathy in Philadelphia, as it is through his consistent yet versatile close-ups that he pulls such raw anger, melancholy, and yearning from Tom Hanks’ emotive performance, opening us up to the complicated struggle behind one gay man’s fight for justice against his prejudiced former employers.
The rich azure palette that pervades Three Colours: Blue in every shade imaginable beautifully sinks the film into a deep melancholy, as Krzysztof Kieslowski examines one young widow’s attempt to find emotional liberty from the ghosts of past traumas which continue to haunt her musically and psychologically.
Martin Scorsese feels surprisingly right at home in the vibrant, passionate yearning of The Age of Innocence, as he deftly tracks his camera through opulent mansions and flows from shot to shot in delicate long dissolves, presenting to us an invitation to interpret this era through a lens of subjective, impressionistic memory.
Without a voice to bridge the gap between her mind and the exterior world, it is instead Ada’s music which becomes her purest form of communication in The Piano, carrying a rich, full-bodied expression of the Scotswoman’s restless soul through the beaches, forests, and colonies of 19th century New Zealand.
With its tremendous narrative form in repetition as the basis for a rich character arc, Groundhog Day just keeps allowing for more surprising revelations on each rewatch, giving it, quite ironically, a “timeless” quality.
