To Alfonso Cuarón, the story of Mexico’s political turbulence at the end of the twentieth century is not best understood through a historical epic or biopic. Y tu mamá también is far more interested in capturing its cultural and class tensions through the friendship of two teenage boys, completely indifferent to the dwindling power of the Industrial Revolutionary Party which held onto the presidency for the past 70 years, as well as the nation’s increasingly globalised economy. The world may be changing around them with wide-reaching implications, but they would much rather spend their time chasing women and upholding that self-devised, fraternal manifesto they claim is sacred, and yet so frequently stray from.
Despite their ignorance, Mexico’s modern politics are intimately intertwined with their personal relationships. After all, Tenoch’s upper-class background brings with it an air of superiority, seeing him use his foot to lift the toilet in Julio’s working-class home in much the same way he does at a shabby motel. Conversely, Julio is self-conscious at his friend’s more impressive house, lighting a match after using the bathroom. These adolescents may be hormonally aligned in their love for masturbation, sex, and all things masculine, but Y tu mamá también is acutely attentive to those differences that surface over the course of their beachbound road trip, specifically motivated by the prospect of charming their newest companion – the beautiful, 28-year-old Luisa.
Character detail in the tiniest actions, seeing Tenoch lift the toilet seat in the motel with his foot much the same way he does at Julio’s home. The framing of Julio in the mirror captures both boys in the shot too, drawing a division between them.Many marvellous long shots pushing the horizon to the bottom of the frame, revealing Mexico’s character through its landscapes.
By 2001, Cuarón had already established a solid filmmaking career moving from Mexico into Hollywood, and yet his greatest success to date comes here with a modest $5 million budget. In place of highly curated studio sets, beautiful long shots of rural Mexican countrysides, roads, and beaches connect us to the nation’s natural terrains and infrastructure, often placing the horizon towards the bottom of the frame while dusty blue skies and soft orange sunsets stretch out over detailed landscapes. His usual palette of murky greens is still occasionally present in his lighting and production design too, but Y tu mamá también is far more naturalistic than his previous films, opting for handheld camerawork that freely navigates scenes in long takes.
This is a specific sort of world-building that Cuarón would further explore in the smooth tracking shots of Children of Men and the steady pans of Roma, disengaging from his central characters to examine the details of their surrounding environments. In this instance, frivolous conversations remain audible even while our eyes wander elsewhere, drifting several times past family photos hanging on walls during phone calls, and elsewhere swinging inside a car to glance back at a pulled-over vehicle. Cuarón is sure to never quite sit long enough on these distractions to give us anything more than a vague glimpse – after all, Tenoch, Julio, or Luisa would much rather keep their heads down than consider their implications, though we are still left to wonder whether this traffic stop is a drug bust, an abuse of police power, or both.
Even with his turn to realism, Cuarón still finds the right moments to bring in his trademark green lighting and decor to brilliant effect.
Our travellers will encounter many more fragments of Mexico’s sprawling culture on their journey, some steeped in tradition with villagers stopping passing cars to pay a toll to their “little queen” dressed in bridal white, while others hint at widespread corruption. In a stroke of formal genius, Cuarón matches these diversions to the narration as well, frequently muting his diegetic sound before dropping in its commentary. These annotations are often as trivial as the camera’s fleeting observations too, offering brief cultural insights which mean little on their own, yet which together weave a textured landscape of poverty, celebration, and profound torment.
“If they had passed this spot 10 years earlier, they would have seen a couple of cages in the middle of the road… and then driven through a cloud of white feathers. Shortly after, more crushed cages, filled with bleeding chickens flapping their wings. Later on, an overturned truck, surrounded with smoke. Then they’d have seen two bodies on the road, one smaller than the other, barely covered by a jacket. And next to them, a woman crying inconsolably.”
Cuarón’s camera floats freely alongside the car during their road trip, listening in on their menial conversations. Every so often though, diegetic audio drops out to let the narration interrupt, making for a series of brilliant formal breaks.
On one level this narration positions us like readers of a novel, expanding the world through an omniscient literary voice, though this subversion of the narrative’s first-person continuity also bears great resemblance to Francois Truffaut’s formal experimentations during the French New Wave. The similarities to Jules and Jim especially are numerous, right down to the story of two friends being in love with one woman, and so it is also through Cuarón’s narration that we gain deeper insights into those thoughts they would rather keep hidden.
Y Tu Mamá También owes a lot of Truffaut’s carefree, rebellious style, but also lifts a lot from the love triangle of Jules and Jim with the two lovesick friends pining over one girl.
For the secretive Luisa, this is a particularly crucial conceit. As a funeral procession passes by, the narrator notes the existential concerns rising in her mind of how long she will be remembered after dying. We don’t know it at the time, but this is more relevant to her psychological state than we can imagine – she is suffering from terminal cancer, and this entire trip is one last hurrah to embrace life before it slips away. She may be more mature than her male companions, but she is just as adrift, and so it seems are many others they encounter. At one point, the narrator adopts future tense to reveal what is in store for a friendly fisherman who takes them in, and given the changing economic landscape, it does not look bright for him either.
“At the end of the year, Chuy and his family will have to leave their home, because a new luxury hotel will rise in San Bernabé. They will relocate to the outskirts of Santa María Colotepec. Chuy will attempt to give boat tours, but a collective of Acapulco boatmen supported by the local Tourism Board will block him. Two years later, he’ll end up as a janitor at the hotel. He will never fish again.”
It is evident that Luisa is facing her own secret tragedy in these brief asides, though the full context does not arrive until the end, bringing rich depths to a character that our protagonists initially view as a sexual conquest.Cuarón offers a glimpse into the future of a fisherman and his family, whose lives tangentially intersect with our protagonists. Their problems amount to very little in the broad scheme of things, but a tapestry is formally weaved from these tiny stories informing our view of an increasingly globalised, modern Mexico.A masterful use of natural lighting as the sun sets over this beachside paradise.
Tenoch and Julio might not see the point in contemplating the future, and yet Cuarón realises that their attempt at escapism is a political act in itself, refusing to acknowledge the complexities of the real world. As such, they are ill-equipped to face up to their own vulnerabilities and flaws as well. Their manifesto may forbid sleeping with each other’s girlfriends, and yet they do so anyway. They may openly share feelings for Luisa, but her first sexual encounter with Tenoch stings Julio all the same. Luisa might comfort Tenoch over his poor performance in bed, but he still takes it as a shameful weakness in his masculinity. In fact, almost any time some wedge is driven between these friends, sex is involved. Given the amount of it going on too, there is good reason for the constant conflict.
Only when these immature boys reach a point of self-acceptance and honesty does sex become pure, and perhaps the only straightforward thing in an incredibly complicated world. As they speak about their affairs for the first time without inhibition, Cuarón’s camera basks in the green glow of the seaside retreat, eventually following Luisa to the jukebox where she selects a song at random – the soft-rock ballad ‘Si No Te Hubieras Ido.’ Suddenly, she fixes her gaze right on the camera, intimately inviting us into their shared space as she begins to dance, with the boys soon joining her in a passionate embrace.
Luisa stares into the camera as she dances towards us, and is soon joined by Tenoch and Julio. Cuarón’s refusal to cut is remarkably effective, and key to the comfortable intimacy and love each character is feeling in this significant moment, wishing that it could last forever.This orgy momentarily erases the insecurity, ignorance, and masculine pretence that emotionally inhibits Julio and Tenoch, and for once sex is the least complicated thing in their lives.
There is no insecurity, ignorance, or masculine pretence in the orgy that soon consumes them. It won’t be long after this trip that Tenoch and Julio will go their separate ways, and Luisa will tragically pass away from cancer. So too will Mexican politics, culture, and economics continue to shift as the 21st century dawns, subtly contributing to this widening distance between old friends. Within this moment though, the ecstasy of the present is rightfully all that matters. Finally, there arises an equal affection in Y tu mamá también that neither insecurity, hierarchy, nor the uneasy advance of an early grave can suppress. The story of modern-day Mexico may vast, but this tiny coming-of-age chapter is just as formative to its identity as all those other lives caught in Cuarón’s expansive periphery.
The emotional intimacy of the past is once again repressed when Julio and Tenoch meet up in the future, having moved on with their lives. The memory of the past is both nostalgic and shameful, falling away to the pressures of modern day living, but it has still irrevocably changed them for the better.
Y Tu Mamá También can currently be bought on Amazon.
With The Lord of the Rings dominating so much of 21st century pop culture, it is easy to take for granted just how subversive J.R.R. Tolkien’s story was in the 1950s, even as he borrowed pieces of Greek, Nordic, and Germanic mythology. Our central hero is not some predestined Chosen One like Achilles, a legendary wizard such as Merlin, and does not possess the extraordinary physical strength of Beowulf, though these ancient archetypes certainly populate the narrative’s sidelines. Should any of these alternate characters attempt to fulfil the main quest at hand, they would be guaranteed almost certain failure. Humility and loyalty are far more important qualities here, neither of which are so easily corrupted by the One Ring that reaches into the minds of those with altruistic ambitions and twists them into selfish megalomaniacs.
As a result, Frodo Baggins the hobbit stands among the few figures uniquely capable of carrying and destroying this cursed artefact, and is consequently driven to separate himself from his Fellowship of powerful companions who may fall to its temptation. The Lord of the Rings stretches across an enormous span of land and time, yet by framing this ordinary creature who has never stepped far outside his home as our primary protagonist, Tolkien offers a fresh perspective that Peter Jackson gladly capitalises on in his cinematic adaptation.
The Lord of the Rings is one of the key texts that cannot be missed when talking about world building in either literature or cinema, and specifically in the film adaptations Jackson imbues his imagery with fantastical awe.
Through Frodo’s inexperienced eyes, we appreciate Middle Earth as one of the richest fictional worlds of literary history, complete with fully developed languages, genealogies, and cultures. While this film trilogy only touches on a small portion of Tolkien’s original creation, there is a wonder here that emerges from Jackson’s rendering of its extraordinary, almost imperceptible details. With enormous respect to the astonishing work of literature that had been placed in his hands, Jackson went about faithfully translating the written descriptions of great civilisations, creatures, and weapons to a visual medium, imbuing the design of each with a level of cultural and historical detail that takes multiple viewings to properly comprehend. Jackson realises that we do not need close-ups on the runes of Orc armour nor the embroidered textures of an Elven mourning dress to note their significance. Simply by including them in the frame, he viscerally conveys the sprawling authenticity of his intricately constructed world with minimal exposition, while occasionally compromising on the compositional beauty they may have offered with more precise framing.
Peter Jackson proves his mastery of long shots in The Lord of the Rings, crafting a vast world of astonishing beauty with the use of miniature models, matte paintings, and digital effects.
A huge portion of this fantastical visual style of course comes down to his fine synthesis of digital and practical effects too, more frequently relying on the latter with his matte paintings and miniature city models built into the side of imposing mountain ranges. Along with deserved comparisons to D.W. Griffith’s historical standard of epic filmmaking, Jackson makes a name for himself next to Georges Méliès with his in-camera illusions, shrinking hobbits and dwarves next to taller creatures with forced perspective angles. Meanwhile, CGI is judiciously used to elevate these practical effects rather than replace them, allowing an expressive motion-captured performance from Andy Serkis as Gollum that may have otherwise been limited beneath layers of prosthetics. As evidenced a decade later with The Hobbit trilogy, technological innovation does not equal art, but much like James Cameron and Christopher Nolan at their peaks, Jackson is primarily using it here as a tool for his grand storytelling and world-building.
Jackson uses forced perspective where he can to shoot actors in the same scene together when their characters have different heights – Elijah Wood is actually seated several feet behind Ian McKellen here.Another use of forced perspective to emphasise the ring in the foreground, using a specific version of the prop that was the size of a dinner plate.Some of the greatest motion-capture of modern cinema can be found in Andy Serkis’ performance as Gollum, tracing each facial expression that might have otherwise been lost beneath layers of prosthetics.
Even with all that stripped away though, there is no doubt to be had regarding the raw power of Tolkien’s narrative. In this epic battle between good and evil, there is a very simple objective uniting the Free Peoples of Middle Earth against Sauron, though it is often the smaller battles and personal motives which give a complex weight to this twelve-hour saga. The ensemble is huge, but the nuances of every relationship are worth savouring, from Aragorn’s love for the immortal Arwen, to Gandalf’s grandfatherly affection towards the hobbits. Even on repeat viewings, it still lands as a shock that his death takes place so early, foreshadowing the inevitable breaking of the Fellowship that splits the story into further subplots and develops individual characters through their isolation.
Jackson’s battle scenes are some of the greatest of cinema history for their clarity, editing, and geography, positioning The Lord of the Rings’ epic set pieces right next to D.W. Griffith’s.
Where Tolkien’s novels segmented each of these plotlines into individual parts, Jackson propels his narrative forward with brisk parallel editing, drawing heavily on the foundational rules of film language that D.W. Griffith developed in its earliest days. Much like the father of modern cinema, Jackson is both an artist and technician of staggeringly large set pieces, skilfully establishing the geography of fortresses and battlefields in sweeping long shots before cutting between the smaller conflicts within them. The orcs’ assault of Helm’s Deep with siege ladders and catapults is especially reminiscent of the fall of Babylon in Intolerance, while through the chaos Jackson continues tracing the movements of each key player, alleviating the tension with some friendly competition between Legolas and Gimli.
The helicopter shots are another brilliant variation on Jackson’s long shots, circling characters as they traverse New Zealand’s grand mountains and valleys.
Beyond the action as well, Jackson goes on to prove his mastery of epic visuals in the helicopter shots flying over New Zealand’s sprawling mountain ranges, while those static compositions overlooking lush panoramas and ancient cities often look like paintings in their spectacular beauty. Much like Griffith, there is also immense power in his expressive close-ups, framing Arwen like a stone statue beneath her mourning veil and teetering Frodo on the brink of obsessive madness at the Cracks of Doom.
Conversely, Jackson’s framing of faces in close-ups also bring an intimacy to this sprawling epic – a superb staggering of Aragorn and Legolas’ profiles here.An ethereal framing of Arwen beneath her mourning veil, posed like a stone statue.
This balance between the epic and the intimate is the foundation of not only The Lord of the Rings’ tremendous narrative, but also its core belief in the mighty influence of the tiniest creatures. This extends past our four central hobbits, as Gandalf wisely notes that Gollum may play a crucial part in determining the fate of Middle Earth too. This is true on two levels – not only is he incidentally responsible for the destruction of the One Ring at Mount Doom, but to Frodo he also serves as a reminder of the disaster in store should he similarly fall to its temptation. The two opposed voices that split Gollum right down the middle manifest as entirely different beings in Jackson’s editing, alternating the camera position between his left and right sides while they argue, and thereby revealing the quiet, fragile innocence that persists in the mind of this corrupted being. Though Frodo recognises how easily his sympathy for Gollum might be manipulated, he still hangs onto it as a tiny shred of hope for his own redemption.
“I have to believe he can come back.”
Gollum is a vision of Frodo’s future should he fail his mission, and Jackson composes our first glimpse of him beneath this beam of light with eerie beauty.
While Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are continuing their uphill struggle, Tolkien’s ‘David and Goliath’ metaphor also sees Merry ride into the Battle for Middle Earth and deliver a crippling blow to the Witch King, Pip save Faramir from certain death, and both spur the peaceful race of Ents to action through their words alone. Because of them, the forests of Middle Earth rise against the armies of the white wizard Saruman, recalling the primordial imagery of the Battle of Dunsinane from Macbeth. Not content that nature’s vengeance in Shakespeare’s play was merely an illusion though, Tolkien manifests it on a literal level in The Lord of the Rings, pitting the tree-like Ents against the Uruk-hai orcs that Jackson associates with modern forces of technology, industry, and the careless obliteration of life.
Nature itself joins the Free People of Middle Earth and rises up against evil, recalling the primordial imagery of Macbeth’s Battle of Dunsinane.
It takes more than just the fury of the natural world to save Middle Earth from Sauron’s terrible reign though, but also a righteous spiritual grace. Between our heroes of Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo, Tolkien essentially splits his Messiah into a trinity, each taking on key characteristics of Christ. After being constantly underestimated as a friend to the meek and lowly, Gandalf is resurrected with new powers, saving Theodon from his brainwashed servitude and vanquishing foes with a dazzling white light. By setting the souls of the suffering free, Aragorn saves Middle Earth from devastation and reigns as its new King, bringing in an age of peace and prosperity. Finally, left to carry the sins of the world around his neck, Frodo offers up the greatest sacrifice of them all, and heads towards what he can only assume will be certain death.
A trinity of Christ figures lead the ensemble of The Lord of the Rings, beginning with Gandalf facing off against a demonic beast, and then followed by his great sacrifice and divine resurrection.Aragorn is the prophesied King, destined to save the souls of the dead and usher in a new era of prosperity.Our final Christ figure is Frodo, bearing the sins of the world around his neck and prepared to give up everything he holds dear.
There is no doubt that Jackson recognises the biblical connotations of the flood washing away Saruman’s forces at Isengard too, or the original sin committed by Isildur that led to the fall of man, though he never underscores this theological symbolism so blatantly. These narrative archetypes largely speak for themselves, emerging organically in Jackson’s storytelling that finds new visual expressions for Tolkien’s mythology, and which continues to build on its classical influences through Howard Shore’s operatic film score. Just as Tolkien drew significant inspiration from the 19th century cycle of epic music dramas Der Ring des Nibelungen, so too does Shore borrow many of Richard Wagner’s classical instrumentations and techniques from that work, developing a rich assortment of leitmotifs that evolve with the narrative.
Saruman poses a mighty threat as he rallies the forces of industry and technology at Isengard, marked as the enemy of the modern world by Tolkien.
The very first of these we hear in the prologue is the Ring theme, played by a thin, double-reeded rhaita that slyly rises and falls along a harmonic minor scale, while Cate Blanchett’s deep, resonant voiceover informs us of its dark history. Because of this uneasy opening, we welcome the shift to the warm, sunny Shire with delight, and embrace the new motif led by a folksy tin whistle that, from this point on, will always remind us of home. Later when Frodo reunites with his uncle Bilbo at Rivendell, it matures with the elegant timbre of a clarinet, before breaking into destitute fragments when a partially corrupted Frodo pushes Sam away late in their quest. When the four hobbits do finally return to the Shire at the end of this colossal journey, the melody is mostly restored in its original form, and yet the flute which now takes over marks a melancholy evolution that keeps these four hobbits from recovering their lost innocence.
Picturesque visuals in the Shire pair sweetly with Howard Shore’s folksy tin whistle motif, which from this point will always remind us of home.
Shore’s music continues to reach even deeper into Middle Earth’s mythology as well, using Tolkien’s constructed languages in choral arrangements as the Fellowship descends into the dwarven Mines of Moria, and as they enter the elven woodland realm of Lothlórien. So too does it serve a crucial role in connecting these characters to their respective cultures and legends, transposing poems from the books into diegetic songs sung by characters in moments of celebration and reflection, most notably in Pippin’s lyrical lament ‘The Edge of Night’. As his soft voices echoes through the cavernous halls of Gondor, Jackson reverberates it across a devastating montage of Faramir and his men riding towards their massacre, intercut with his cowardly father vulgarly ripping into a meal that drips blood-red juices down his chin.
“Home is behind,
The world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread,
Through shadow,
To the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight,
Mist and shadow,
Cloud and shade,
All shall fade,
All shall fade.”
Jackson’s intercutting between Pippin’s rendition of ‘The Edge of Night’ and Faramir’s brutal defeat at Osgiliath makes for one of the finest pieces of editing in the entire saga, revealing the massacre and tragedy which comes at the hands of cruel leaders like Denethor.
Even on a structural level, Shore integrates the mystical numerology of Middle Earth into his rhythms and notations, particularly using the number 9. There were nine rings created for Men, and nine heroes tasked with carrying the One Ring to Mordor, and so the musical leitmotif used in the themes for both the One Ring and the Fellowship are similarly composed of nine distinct notes. Somewhat poetically, that number also binds together the fates of Sauron and Frodo, with both eventually losing the Ring by having a finger severed and leaving them with only nine.
Nine rings for nine men – this number is sacred in The Lord of the Rings, and so Shore even works it into the music of his prologue and Fellowship theme.
It is in this repetition of history that The Lord of the Rings unfolds its second great subversion of the archetypal quest narrative – even after an immense journey across Middle Earth that has seen many give up their lives, our hero fails his mission. As Frodo turns to Sam atop the Cracks of Doom and chillingly claims the Ring as his own, he strikes a mirror image of Isildur doing the exact same many millennia before, finally falling to its corruptive influence. It would appear that no living entity can destroy Sauron, no matter how large or small they may be. There is only one force powerful enough to defeat an evil this powerful, and that is the evil itself, incidentally turning two of its own corrupted beings against each other in a jealous struggle and thereby sending the Ring plummeting into the lava from which it was forged. Should those who fight for all that is right fail in their mission, Tolkien is resoundingly optimistic that wickedness will collapse under its own unsustainable power.
A mirror image of failure at two separate ages, with both Isildur and Frodo falling to the Ring’s temptation at the crucial moment upon the Cracks of Doom.Gollum encased within the boundaries of the Ring in this superb frame, both their fates entwined in self-destruction.
Like his fellow hobbits, Gollum’s purpose has been found, though there is no path to redemption for him as there is for Frodo. Jackson’s ending to the final film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy has often been accused of long-windedness, though such an expansive story necessitates a conclusion with weight and patience behind it. Even with Sauron defeated, Frodo’s arc is not yet complete, and continues to draw him towards a peaceful resolution in the Undying Lands with Gandalf, Bilbo, and the Elves. How fitting that Tolkien imagined the future of Middle Earth as our present reality where magic has died out and Men have lived on, because at the end of all things, Jackson’s fantasy epic stands as a monumental tribute to their greatest qualities of ambition, endurance, and pure, ingenious creativity.
The Lord of the Rings is currently streaming on Netflix, Prime Video, Binge, and Paramount Plus, can be rented or bought on Apple TV, Amazon Video, or Google Play, and the Blu-ray or DVD can be bought on Amazon.
The downfall of civilisation in Steven Spielberg’s dark vision of the future comes not through machines seeking to displace biological humans, nor does it arrive with an apathetic dismissal of emotions. Not once do we doubt that the Mecha humanoid robot adopted by the Swinton family holds anything less than a sweet, innocent love of his new parents, despite his odd and occasionally dangerous behaviour. In their home of rippled windows and reflective surfaces, his image is distorted into unearthly appearances, driving his surrogate mother, Monica, deeper into her fear and mistrust. As his creator Professor Hobby explains, it is not a question of whether these artificial children can love.
“Isn’t the real conundrum, can you get a human to love them back?”
The philosophical mysteries wrapped up in this single line are vast, drawing this heartrending fable of parents and children back through millennia of human storytelling. “In the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?” the professor asks his colleagues, laying out a biblical framework for Spielberg’s narrative which sees extraordinary creations offer their creator an infinitely selfless love that can never entirely be reciprocated. Like a devoted believer craving a connection to their deity, the lifelike Mecha child David has an unquenchable longing for motherly affection, driving him to the edge of death just so he might finally know what it means to truly be loved, if only for one day.
Even before Spielberg’s futuristic world building expands beyond David’s family home, he warily shoots a young Haley Joel Osment like an alien, refracting his face through this rippled glass window.Underscoring David’s inhumanity by giving him four eyes in this reflection – he poses no physical threat, and yet there through his mother’s perspective, he is an outsider.Superb visual storytelling, keeping David on the outside of the family unit with his face reflected in the family photo.Again, excellent framing from Spielberg that totally isolates David from his uneasy family.
Most of all though, it is the fairy tale of Pinocchio which offers A.I. Artificial Intelligence its overarching narrative structure, as well as an intertextual guide that inspires David’s own journey. If he is the puppet wishing to be a “real boy,” then his companions, the robotic Teddy and fellow Mecha robot Gigolo Joe, fill in the Jiminy Cricket role as his conscience, leaving Professor Hobby as his Geppetto, and the Blue Fairy as a distant, ethereal promise of divine salvation. The Pleasure Island of Spielberg’s version is not a carnival that indulges the whims of naughty boys, but a Flesh Fair where humans express a violent, existential anger at their insignificance in a modern world by torturing and mutilating A.I. robots.
The Pinocchio allegory is right there in the text, motivating David to become a “real boy” – though with this sci-fi twist, we are also being led to question what exactly makes a real human.A terrifyingly violent set piece at the Flesh Fair, exposing the worst of humanity’s vices like Pleasure Island from Pinocchio. A gratuitous feast for the senses with the flashing lights and violent entertainment.
The conservative undertones to the Flesh Fair’s slogan “A Celebration of Life” are readily apparent in Spielberg’s critique of society’s regressive nostalgia, making it not in the least bit surprising that A.I. Artificial Intelligence was originally going to be directed by Stanley Kubrick. There may be no filmmaker with a greater distaste for humanity than the one whose emotional coldness lifted 2001: A Space Odyssey to transcendent heights, and who cast misanthropic aspersions on arbitrary historical traditions in Barry Lyndon. Humanity is overrated, he believed, and so it easy to see how cleanly this film’s admiration of the inhuman would have fit into his broader filmography.
Believing that there was no child actor good enough for its lead role though, and realising that the technology of the day was not yet advanced enough to create a computer-generated version of him, Kubrick passed the story along to Spielberg. Without seeing Kubrick’s finalised vision, it is impossible to assess whether it would have been greater than Spielberg’s or not, but it is tough to conceive it being so emotionally affecting.
Spielberg brings a much warmer touch to this tale than Kubrick would have, centring the sweet love a child has for his mother with gentle grace. This doesn’t make it better or worse than what we might have gotten otherwise – but it is honest to Spielberg’s artistic inclinations.
Of course, a large part of this has to do with Spielberg casting humans as his lead actors, rather than rendering them in CGI as Kubrick originally intended. Haley Joel Osment indeed delivers that child performance that Kubrick believed was impossible, exploring the existential depths of this artificial child coming to terms with a universe that created him and then left him to fend for himself. There is a particular poignancy in his performance as we edge towards the final act, where David discovers an entire factory of other Mecha products identical to his own design and recognises his true insignificance to his own creator. As he peers through the empty eye holes of a mask bearing resemblance to his own face, Spielberg distils his identity crisis down to a single, eerie image, revealing the heart and mind of a “real boy” trapped in the body of a machine.
Meanwhile, Jude Law’s turn as A.I. male prostitute Gigolo Joe offers David a warm camaraderie that is scarce to be found anywhere else, moving in energetic, dancelike movements inspired by Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Through both his and Osment’s performances, we find an expressive, vivid humanity in the film that has been lost in the biological humanoids around them.
David is just one of many identical models, bringing questions of identity and individuality into the mix as he peers through a mask of his own face.Jude Law is light on his feet as Gigolo Joe, basing his movements on Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly’s dancing. There is more humanity to be found in this Mecha robot than most other humans in this film.
Perhaps this is why David’s wish to be human is such a dauntingly impossible request when he finally meets his maker, given that source of his troubles lies not in his identity, but in everyone else. Human love naturally struggles to survive in a dystopian world of widespread moral corruption, and so the group of artificial outsiders who consistently outperform their natural counterparts become the perfect scapegoats. The settings that David must contend with are daunting in their tactile designs, setting an artistic challenge for Spielberg that plays to his strengths as a world builder and craftsman of powerful imagery. The cold blue lighting and isolating compositions of the first act set in the Swinton family home are carefully curated, but A.I. Artificial Intelligence truly lifts off when David is abruptly thrust into unfamiliar environments, where giant, glowing moons float through forests and sunken carnival attractions dwell in New York’s flooded depths.
With the iconic shot from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Spielberg clearly relishes his giant moon shots – total awe at the universe beyond Earth.A flooded New York City reveals another dystopian angle to this future society. A great failure on humanity’s part that has been totally abandoned.
Most of all though, it is in the populated urban centres of Rouge City where Spielberg is at the top of his visual game, with cinematographer Janusz Kamiński drawing heavy inspiration from Blade Runner both thematically and aesthetically. The light pollution emitted by the coloured neon signs and buildings that line the dingy urban streets is blinding, projecting flashy holograms into the night sky like a ceiling to keep out the darkness. Spielberg weaves a glossy palette of red, blue, purple, and black through the architecture and costumes of these environments, while the Flesh Fair establishes a grittier aesthetic in a stadium illuminated by bright roving spotlights and flashing bulbs. Every detail captured by Spielberg’s camera is dynamic and bursting with life, telling the story of a culture entangled in a moral predicament of grand proportions, unable to reconcile its humanity with its artificial creations.
Spielberg draws a great deal of inspiration from Blade Runner. Not just in the question of identity and being, but in the magnificent production design of crowded urban spaces and futurist architecture.
Spielberg does not shy away from the air of fated devastation that hangs over this civilisation either, eventually embracing visions of a future where humans have died out. A.I. Artificial Intelligence could have very well ended on a demoralising downbeat as David finds himself locked in an eternity of constant, unfulfilled wishes, and yet Spielberg’s gracious leap forward two thousand years into the future alleviates some of that misery for a more bittersweet conclusion. The evolution of Mecha has brought about a more advanced race of beings that are kinder and more peaceful than humans ever were. They claim that they are unable to grant his wish, and yet the validation he seeks is nevertheless fulfilled through their generous gift – one last day with his mother, free from any worldly distractions.
Those two thousand years may have vanished in the blank of an eye for David, and yet these hours spent experiencing true, maternal love become “the everlasting moment he had been waiting for,” seeming to stretch on forever. Before they both drift off into a sleep neither will wake from, Spielberg tugs on the heartstrings one last time, recognising the compassionate acceptance that this child has found in his mother’s arms. It is one thing to have the emotional capacity to love another person, he concludes, and yet only by feeling the warmth of that equal, unconditional love in return can any living being experience the full joy of being human.
Spielberg continues his narrative thousands of years into the future, revealing a total dilapidation in his enormous production design that also houses one last hope for David.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is currently streaming on Stan and Binge, and is available to rent or buy on Apple TV and Amazon Video.
Though often described as a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage, Saraband is not so much an interrogation of that famous relationship which saw divorce rates rise across Sweden as it is an observation of the imprint it has left on those younger generations left to carry its legacy. There are a couple of fresh faces present here in Börje Ahlstedt and Julia Dufvenius, while for Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson this film marks the end of an era. Not only is it their final collaboration with Ingmar Bergman, but for the celebrated Swedish director it is also his last work before he passed away in 2007, and a notable return to form after many years of creating less-than-admirable television movies.
Saraband may not be the first time he has contemplated regrets of old age, though compared to the pensive meditations of Wild Strawberries and Autumn Sonata, this screenplay is far more grounded in Bergman’s firsthand experience of the matter. Save for a few minor dreams and flashbacks, these narrative diversions are excised altogether, and instead this story of reunited ex-lovers is delivered through a series of ten chapters not unlike the six parts of Scenes from a Marriage.
Liv Ullmann breaks the fourth wall in the prologue and epilogue, pouring over a table of photographs capturing pieces of Marianne’s life.
The result is a film that takes the form of a written memoir, framing an aged Marianne as our first-person narrator who pours over photographs of her life, and whose direct addresses to the camera bookend the narrative in a prologue and epilogue. Her absence from so many chapters is not an oversight on Bergman’s part. Each scene in this chamber drama is purposefully written as a two-hander, crafting rich dynamics from all the possible pairings between our four central characters – Marianne, Johan, his estranged son Henrik, and his freedom-seeking granddaughter Karin. Among them, Marianne appears to be the only one who is most content with herself, having put her psychological demons evident in Scenes from a Marriage to rest many years ago. She does not seek to become an active part of Johan’s family drama, but instead she carries a largely observational and counselling presence, offering warm wisdom to those willing to listen.
Warm burgundy colours in the costume and production design when Marianne and Johan reunite after many years. Saraband’s main drama is not about them – they are at peace with their divorce.Contrary to what one might have assumed from Bergman’s last few projects, he has not lost his touch with these intimate close-ups. Neither has he apparently lost his penchant for disturbing relationship dynamics with Henrik’s sexual abuse of his daughter.
For an elderly Johan staring down the end of his life, Marianne’s impromptu visit couldn’t be timelier in helping him make peace with his own psychological troubles. It is somewhat surprising how little animosity there is between them, especially given how firmly he holds onto old grudges against Henrik which consequently left a broken family in their wake. In the absence of his alienated father and deceased wife Anna, Henrik has made the unsettling decision to attempt filling every role in his daughter’s life, thus not only positioning himself as her cello tutor, but also, quite disturbingly, as her lover.
It’s not quite The Seventh Seal or Winter Light, but there is an austere beauty to Bergman’s wide shots and tangential contemplations of religion.
The messiness of human entanglements has long been at the centre of Bergman’s writing, and sixty years after his early melodramas in the 1940s he is quite astonishingly still finding new angles on the jealousy and insecurity that hides within our most intimate relationships. Much like Johan and Marianne’s arguments in Scenes from a Marriage, Henrik’s seething expressions of acrid resentment reveal far more about his own spiteful soul than the target of his derision, taking perverted pleasure in the suffering he mentally projects on his father.
“I hate him in all possible dimensions of the word. I hate him so much, I would like to see him die from a horrible illness. I’d visit him every day, just to witness his torment.”
Ironically enough, it isn’t too hard to imagine Karin a few years down the track holding similar feelings towards the man who speaks these words. Bergman struggles to develop a strong visual aesthetic in Saraband, though the strained relationship between Henrik and Karin becomes abundantly clear in his trademark composition of their parallel faces lying horizontal in bed, as he desperately begs her to audition for a nearby music conservatory so she can stay close by his side.
That horizontal blocking of parallel faces appearing for the last time in Bergman’s filmography, and this time he hangs on the shot as the camera drifts between close-ups of both.
It isn’t until after speaking with Johan and Marianne individually that Karin finds the courage to set out on a new path, following her friend to Hamburg to perform in an orchestra, and thereby rebelling against her father’s isolative preference for her to pursue a career as a solo cellist. There is a beautiful synchronicity between this arc and the accompanying music too, ringing out the lonely lament of a single cello throughout much of the film, before growing into a full orchestral symphony as Karin envisions a future of her own choosing. Bergman is not a director who typically makes extensive use of film scores, though certainly his love of classical music has persisted through his work ever since 1950’s To Joy, elegantly expressing his characters’ deepest yearnings.
One of the very few breaks from reality in Saraband, escaping into this white void in Karin’s mind as she plays the cello, the whole world opening up to her.
Perhaps the most profound of all these longings though is for a figure who is almost completely absent in Saraband, represented only in the framed photographs that adorn Johan, Henrik, Karin, and even Marianne’s personal spaces. The grace that Anna brought to their lives is sorely missed, and it is only thanks to her that Karin ever really knew what it meant to feel the kind, unselfish love of a parent. Through Anna, Henrik was made fully aware of his failings as a father, and perhaps he might have even been able to fix them had she not passed away. As it is though, all she was able to leave him was a letter written shortly before her death, professing her love yet warning him against further wounding his relationship with Karin.
Anna is the fifth primary character, and yet is physically absent from Saraband having passed away long ago. She continues to leave a mark on those left behind though, each of them keeping a framed black-and-white photo close in their homes.
Unlike virtually everyone else in this ensemble though, Henrik cannot simply let go of those who are ready to move on without him. His failed suicide attempt after Karin’s departure for Berlin is the bleak conclusion to his story, though Bergman decides to sit a little longer with those two characters whose richness and authenticity secured his place in popular culture thirty years prior. As an anxious Johan finds comfort in Marianne’s arms after a night of restless sleep, the two bear their naked bodies to each other for the first time in decades, finding an intimate, humbling honesty that cuts through the existential terror of old age. In the last moments of Bergman’s last film, there are no vicious verbal attacks or extreme acts of spiritual desecration to be found. Much like Marianne, Bergman too finds peace in the act of introspective reminiscence, allowing him to finally appreciate the pure bond between lovers, parents, and children that transcends all other worldly distractions.
A raw, naked union of bodies under the sheets, these ex-lovers finding comfort in each other’s arms and accepting old age together.
For all the times that Charlie Kaufman’s characters cryptically declare that “The end is built into the beginning” in Synecdoche, New York, it wouldn’t be quite right to describe the film’s structure as circular. From the outside it looks far more like a mobius strip, forcing Philip Seymour Hoffman’s pitiful theatre director along paths that invert, double back on themselves, twist inside-out, and lead him back to the lonely, feeble life he has been trying to escape.
If anyone in this absurd universe has any power at all, then it is simply over the journey they will take to their inevitable grave. “It’s a big decision how one prefers to die,” one real estate agent glibly considers while selling a burning house destined to kill its buyer a few decades later, and indeed it may be the only decision that really matter. For Caden Cotard though, that is not enough. To create a piece of theatre that transcends life itself is to effectively become a self-autonomous god of one’s own artificial world, governing the rules of time and fate, and yet this construct is entirely hollow. Death is approaching, hastening with each passing day, and still he remains ignorant to what he believes is little more than a vague concept to be explored through actors and scripts. Kaufman’s mobius strip leads Caden everywhere he desires, only to remind him that he has always been the same sad, mortal being he was at the outset.
Kaufman’s world in Synecdoche, New York is his most absurd to date, shedding the burden of grounding it in any sort of reality with the house that is permanently on fire.
It isn’t that Kaufman had been particularly limited by his career as a screenwriter up to this point, but when compared to films like Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind it is clear to see just how much he had been itching to disengage his high-concept visions from any familiar reality. The formal ambition on display in Synecdoche, New York’s enormous, postmodern allegory for man’s self-obsessed ego is equal parts staggering and confounding, transporting us into a bizarre Kafkaesque reality that only gradually reveals its underlying insanity. Even in the opening moments depicting a seemingly ordinary morning in Caden’s family home, Kaufman applies an incredible attention to detail whenever the date is mentioned in the mail, newspaper, television, radio, or even on an expired milk bottle, seeing days invisibly slip by despite there being no breaks in the action. For now, Caden’s ignorance to the passage of time is relatively harmless, and yet its relentless acceleration will soon see his six-year-old daughter grow into a teenager in what feels like a few weeks, and years vanish overnight.
Time slips by seamlessly until we find Caden’s daughter grown up – an incredible formal stroke from Kaufman.
Maybe this is why he decides to create a simulacrum of reality within his untitled piece of theatre, funded by the grant he received for his acclaimed staging of Death of a Salesman. Time moves according to his will in this world that has been built entirely around him, allowing him to relive and dissect his past through actors who play out previous real-life scenes verbatim, while he starts and stops the action at his own whim. On one level, he is simply doing this to prove and glorify his intellect, but on another it is a narcissistic self-flagellation, viciously eviscerating himself on a public stage for the sake of his own ego.
“I will have someone play me to delve into the murky, cowardly depths of my lonely, fucked-up being. And he’ll get notes too, and those notes will correspond to the notes I truly receive every day from my god!”
Actors playing actors – Kaufman’s metafiction is keenly self-aware and self-critical.
Not that others need his artistic expression to see his flaws for what they are. If anything, he remains blindly ignorant to those insecurities that challenge his masculinity, refusing to confront his repressed homosexuality even as it is noted by multiple other characters, and convincing himself that his psychosomatic illnesses are real. Within the safety of the theatre, he can pick and choose which parts of himself are reflected in his art, making for some amusingly ironic encounters when he forces the self-realisation he is running from on his cast.
“Try to keep in mind that a young person playing Willie Loman thinks he’s only pretending to be at the end of a life full of despair. But the tragedy is that we know that you, the young actor, will end up in this very place of desolation.”
The self-awareness of Synecdoche, New York though continues to go far beyond Caden’s own consciousness – this entire project essentially boils down to Kaufman’s bitter confession of his own creative process, wrestling with his character flaws to create something honest at the expense of others’ time, patience, and sanity. This is nothing new for him, seeing as how he quite literally inserted himself as a character into Adaptation a few years prior, but of all his fictional self-representations Caden cuts the deepest. Part of this has to do with the remarkable formal complexity of his creation, completely blurring the line between reality and fiction as his actors play out seemingly genuine interactions in place of their real-life counterparts, though of course credit must also be given to Hoffman’s tortured, anxiety-ridden performance. Even within the context of his tremendous career, his portrayal of Kaufman’s self-loathing surrogate showcases some of his greatest acting, physically ageing into the body of an old man even as his mind remains stubbornly fixated on his vision of a world preserved in art.
Adele’s art is the formal inverse of Caden’s, shrinking smaller and letting viewers lean in, as his grows larger and dwarfs its own creator.
Kaufman’s scathing critique of an artist’s psychology though does not cast as wide a net with its cynical aspersions as one might expect, as while Caden’s sets of streets and buildings continue to sprawl out through his enormous warehouse, his ex-wife’s paintings progressively shrink in size. These creations are every bit the inverse of Caden’s play – tiny, delicate expressions of beauty and humility, not seeking to claim a large plot of real estate in this crowded world, but rather letting its spectators lean in with their magnifying glasses and become active participants in their aesthetic appreciation. This is far more than one could say about Caden’s play, which seems to exist in a permanent state of writing and rehearsal, and refuses to engage with any potential audiences. As far as he is concerned, this work of art serves no one but himself, representing his bloated ego in the expansion of post-it notes across tables and sprawling urban infrastructure through his New York City replica.
One of the few great compositions of the film, sprawling post-it notes across tables in an image of Caden’s expanding ego.
If there is anything that distinguishes Synecdoche, New York as the product of a screenwriter making their foray into film direction, then it is the fact that Kaufman’s achievement primarily lies in the intelligent formal construction of such an intricately absurd meta-reality, while neglecting the development of any binding aesthetic. Unlike his later work in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, his visual invention here never quite matches the peculiar world he has created until its final scenes, where Caden shrinks against a giant, grey city, and the limits of his ambition are confined under an industrial ceiling where one might expect to find a boundless sky.
A giant replica of New York City built within the confines of Caden’s warehouse, forever expanding yet limited by the artificial ceiling in place of a sky.
Decades continue to slip by in this space and Caden becomes an old man, yet it still barely matters to him that the real world outside has crumbled into apocalyptic dystopia, even as its corruptive influences infiltrate the dreary fantasy he has made his home. As one of its few remaining survivors, he wanders its bleak urban wasteland littered with burning cars and dead bodies, still delving layers deeper into his lonely existence – not as a vain, power-hungry director, but as an actor to be manipulated by another director superseding him. More specifically, he takes on the role of Ellen, his daughter’s custodian, while the actress who played her becomes his god, speaking directly into his mind. For what seems like the first time in Synecdoche, New York, Caden’s inner monologue is not just filled with regret for his own wasted time, but empathy for the misery of others.
“What was once before you – an exciting, mysterious future – is now behind you. Lived, understood, disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone’s everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meagre sadnesses are yours. All her loneliness. The grey, straw-like hair, her red raw hands. It’s yours. It is time for you to understand this.”
Caden becomes a ghost wandering the empty shell of his city, with the poetic voice of his director revealing the despair of his lonely, selfish existence.
Caden’s anguish is not unique, and never has been. His is the story of every human to have ever lived, following a path back to the state of non-existence which preceded their birth, and yet for some arrogant reason he has convinced himself that he is the orchestrator of his own fate. In his final seconds, as he considers what might as well be the hundredth potential title for his play, the voice of his indifferent god who continues to direct him right to the end cuts him off with a short, sharp instruction. There is little more to be said about his sad, solitary existence when that word is uttered, finally dooming him to the obscurity that he spent his entire life running from.
“Die.”
Synecdoche, New York is currently available to rent or buy on Google Play and YouTube.
The loss of innocence is no small tragedy in the final instalment of Park Chan-wook’s thematic Vengeance trilogy. Whether it is eroded over time as it is for ex-convict Lee Geum-ja, or instantly annihilated as we see in her old mentor’s sadistic murders of children, its erasure is a permanent fixture that no amount of retribution can restore. Equally though, the alternative of letting those who have perpetuated such soul-destroying misery go unpunished offers no real resolution either, denying any sort of catharsis to their victims. Geum-ja has many complex reasons driving her mission to track down serial kidnapper and killer Mr. Baek, but buried deep within all of them is a corrosive melancholia, represented here not through the cool, passive hues of so many other Park films, but rather by burning crimsons that stain her journey with raw, wounded anger.
Park’s formal dedication to setting these blood red tones against clean whites in his mise-en-scene emphasises this severity even further, greeting Geum-ja with its shocking visual contrast when she is granted an early prison release. Outside those concrete walls, a group of Christian church singers dressed in Santa outfits offer her a block of tofu, traditionally symbolic of one’s redemptive decision to become pure like the snow that falls lightly on their shoulders. Her cold rejection of their proposed salvation brusquely indicates the path she has chosen. She is not looking to restore her long-lost innocence, but to turn her cruelty against the man who taught it to her, applying a striking red eyeshadow to her face as she takes on the mantle that she has spent thirteen years in prison crafting – Lady Vengeance.
Rejecting the symbolic tofu of purity and innocence from the outset – redemption is the last thing on Geum-ja’s mind.Park’s films are not without good doses of humour, introducing the red and white colour palette through the group of singing Santas as Geum-ja exits prison.The red eyeshadow is a superb design choice, marking Geum-ja with the angry colour palette that surrounds her.
As dogged as Geum-ja is in her furious efforts to hunt down Mr. Baek, there is also an elegant restraint to her navigation of such personal traumas, captured in Lee Young-ae’s sublimely balanced performance that sits somewhere between angelic and diabolic. So too does it extend to Choi Seung-hyun’s baroque score of strings and harpsichord, relentlessly pulsing along to steady, staccato rhythms that only barely hide a muted fury and sorrow.
For a long time, the source of this anguish seems mysteriously distant, as Park chooses to hide the face of the man responsible like a painfully repressed memory. Through his narrative of tightly interwoven flashbacks, it often feels as if we are seeking some reason behind his cruelty and exploitation, especially given how effortlessly it hides behind shallow displays of kindness. When Geum-ja falls pregnant at the age of 20, Mr. Baek is the first person she goes to for support, falling so much under his spell that she readily supports his kidnapping racket and takes the fall for his ‘accidental’ killing of a young boy. Within this morbid plot lies an even darker truth though – this teacher specifically targets children at the schools he works at, satiating his sadistic hatred through torture and murder. Even before we meet him directly, Mr. Baek is thoroughly built up as one of Park’s most monstrous characters, so when he is revealed as a dumpy, bespectacled man, Lady Vengeance forces us into a chilling recognition of evil’s unassuming façade.
Maybe the most despicable character of any Park film, disguised as a small, dumpy, unassuming school teacher.
If such burning hatred exists within a man as seemingly gentle as Mr. Baek, then it stands to reason that his groomed pupil is equally capable of extraordinary violence despite her youthful beauty. It is a perversion of everything we are led to believe about good and evil, even inciting a media storm that cannot reconcile the two extremes in a single person when she initially confesses to Mr. Baek’s crimes. Even beyond this dichotomy drawn through Park’s red-and-white colour palette, it also manifests in the formal relation between his grotesque subject matter and the stylish grace with which he navigates it, fluidly transitioning into flashbacks with graphic match cuts and floating the camera through scenes of brutal torture. Geum-ja cannot be solely defined by either her purity or retributive anger, but much like an avenging angel sent to deliver uncompromising, righteous justice, she is an indivisible composite of both.
Park’s visual style is elegant in its lighting, framing, colour, and camera movement, even as it runs up against its disturbing subject matter.
It is not just the thirteen years lost in prison while her daughter Jenny was growing up that she mourns, but the guilt of knowing she is responsible for her abandonment issues plagues her as well. It takes a huge amount of humility then on her part to realise that despite all this, her suffering may be the least of all Mr. Baek’s surviving victims. While she can at least accept some responsibility for it, the parents of the children he killed spend every day wrestling with the incomprehensibility and randomness of their tragedy. This revenge mission belongs not just to her, but to a whole community of mothers and fathers, now being given the ultimate decision of how to deal with the monster of their nightmares.
Split screens between Geum-ja and her daughter in the letter scene, while Park keeps formally tying in that red colour scheme.
What are any of them to take from this violent reprisal though? Going off Park’s previous film Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, one might almost expect their bloodthirst to be judged with more scepticism that they are solving anything at all by perpetuating further suffering. He doesn’t entirely reject that idea here, but there is at least some therapeutic salvation in these characters deliberating the futility of their actions – no amount of vigilante justice will ever return their children. Still, they line up outside the classroom that Geum-ja has tied Mr. Baek up inside all the same, taking turns to inflict physical representations of their emotional agony on him, and confront the pitiful mortality of its source. Evil is not some invisible, demonic force, they discover, but entirely human, as regrettably intrinsic to our being as the innocence it destroys.
Creative framing and colouring as Park positions us beneath the blood-drenched plastic sheet, gazing up at Geum-ja.
Then again, perhaps there is also the potential for it to serve a more protective purpose as well. Only when Geum-ja’s innocence is gone does she appreciate its real value, and further seek to preserve it in her daughter before the psychological damage she has done becomes irreversible. As she stands with Jenny on a snowy street, she is once again gifted the symbolic tofu in the form of a white cake, offering a purification of her soul. This time, she does not brush it off, but given the heaviness of her sins, neither can she accept it. Instead, all she can do is bury her face in its soft layers, longing for the redemption that her vindictive mission has failed to deliver, despite it playing out exactly as she intended. For Geum-ja, there is no total victory in the battle between purity and corruption. Just a prolonged battle to protect one by vengefully enacting the other.
Geum-ja’s vengeance comes to an end, wiping off the red eyeshadow in this gorgeous bathroom set.Still unable to accept the symbolic tofu, Geum-ja is simply left to bury her face in its soft layers – redemption is still out of reach, even as she longs for it.
Lady Vengeance is not currently streaming in Australia.
Given that the title Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance could refer to either one of its two main characters, the challenge it poses is particularly fraught with self-contradictions. To have sympathy for the deaf-mute factory worker Ryu is to recognise the desperate circumstances he has found himself in with a group of dishonest black-market organ dealers, driving him to raise money for his sister’s kidney transplant by taking take a young girl hostage. Even if his actions are cruel, his motivations are reasonable, though such nuances are irrelevant to wealthy business owner Park Dong-jin. After all, it is his daughter who has been targeted, and now he too is set on a path of retribution against her kidnapper.
Expressing sympathy for both men is a tricky balance to strike, but it is one which Park Chan-wook achieves by transmuting it into a new feeling – pity. Of all the films in his Vengeance trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance may be the purest distillation of his nihilistic ethos, recognising humanity’s innate yet self-destructive need for violent anger in its formal mirroring between two angry, wounded men at odds with each other.
One could draw parallels between Park and his Austrian contemporary Michael Haneke in their icy, detached depictions of violence, often sitting in remote wide shots that distance us from both aggrieved tormentors and victims, yet there is a very clear division in their aesthetics. Where Haneke is rigorously committed to the humourless minimalism of such acts, Park injects them with a wry sardonicism, relishing the elegant grotesqueness of a white shirt slowly turning red from attempted seppuku, or the clouds of blood left behind a body being pulled through running water.
Death and violence may have never looked more beautiful as it does in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, with Park always finding the most unconventional compositions to disturb and entrance us.
The riverbank set piece we return to multiple times might even be interpreted as a sacrificial altar of sorts given that it hosts much of the film’s body count. If there is any god being served here though, then maybe it is our own human desire to see suffering dealt out as a form of justice. In that sense, Park’s recurring overhead shots serve a brilliant formal purpose in placing us above these characters, like divine witnesses to the dramatic irony playing out across Ryu and Dong-jin’s parallel plotlines. The gentle stream of water, the loose stones, and the curved rock platforms of the river look breathtaking from these high angles, compelling us to revel in the perverse beauty of cold, dead bodies returning to nature.
Park returns to these overhead shots at the riverbed multiple times like a gods-eye view – but where is the god in this senseless world?Park chooses his set pieces well, returning to this river multiple times as the site for murders, accidental deaths, and burials, turning it into a sacrificial altar of sorts.
Through this godlike, omniscient perspective, Park expands the world of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance to a magnificent extent. While Dong-jin comes from the prestigious upper end of Korean society, Ryu is confined to a small, messy apartment that shares a wall with four other young men, denying any of them the right to privacy. At some points the shifting of Park’s camera between various points-of-view underscores a dark dramatic irony, positioning us with the neighbours who masturbate to what they interpret as screams of pleasure, before physically crossing the barrier to show Ryu’s sister crying in pain from her kidney infection. Later, Park formally recalls this moment in reverse when Dong-jin presses his ear against the wall to hear what he believes is an investigator speaking to neighbours, while the camera dollies to the other side and reveals the source as a radio news report.
Silhouettes of Ryu ascending the steps with the black-market organ dealers to the site of his betrayal, cloaked in silhouette,
Under Park’s idiosyncratic direction, such keen visual storytelling is precisely choreographed and thrillingly executed, eschewing dialogue for large stretches of time while we cut between this pair of lone wolves doggedly hunting down their prey. His editing and camera movements are measured as this narrative unfolds to the sounds of the Uhuhboo Project’s experimental score, but virtually every shot he lands on possesses its own visual eccentricity too in wide-angle lenses, unconventional framing, and one of the greatest modern uses of deep focus photography.
Deep focus and wide-angle lenses allow for shots like these, noting the torturer in the background and his victim dominating the right third of the foreground.Upside-down and canted angles shot through stairwells – Park is endlessly creative with his shot choices.
Perhaps the most astoundingly rigorous of all Park’s creative choices though is the palette of murky greens that this morally tainted culture is so steeped in. This is a level of world building akin to Krzysztof Kieslowski, deeply engaged with the metaphysical connections between strangers united within common circumstances, and tonally expressed in a set of formally binding aesthetics. Here, green tones light up Ryu’s dyed hair like a mint-coloured beacon and verdantly illuminate his shabby apartment, while on Dong-jin’s side they accompany him through up-class urban environments and into the crematory where he mournfully bids farewell to his daughter. While we suffer one gut punch after another with these characters and watch them fall into retaliatory anger, Park’s cool tones and sustained pacing maintain a calm, chilly composure.
Rigorous attention to detail – green is the major visual motif Park keeps returning to all throughout his film, binding his parallel plot lines together within a murky aesthetic before finally bringing them together.
It is the perfect stylistic match for the film’s visceral, pessimistic humour too, predominantly keeping us at a distance while intermittently making us flinch. For what is supposedly a godless universe, it certainly enjoys rubbing each character’s reckless mistakes in their faces, opening a spot for Ryu’s sister on the hospital waitlist almost immediately after he loses his money to the black-market, and later incidentally landing him next to the sheet-covered corpse of his girlfriend, Yeong-me, on an elevator. It isn’t that he and Dong-jin are ineffective in accomplishing their quests for revenge, but both are victims of their own short-sightedness, refusing to see the long-term consequences of their actions. Especially for Dong-jin, the warning of his comeuppance is right there in front of him when a half-dead Yeong-me begs for mercy.
“If anything happens to me, my organisation is a terrorist group. They’ll kill you. For sure. I gave them your picture. If you want to live, just leave me. This is for your sake.”
This is also the threat which haunts him in the final scene after his vicious murder of Ryu at the river, materialising in a daunting composition of four resolute faces staggered into the background, knowingly staring at him. Retribution is not a solution in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, but an endless chain of victims seeking mutually assured destruction, foolish enough to believe that they might escape the destinies they have chosen. Then again, maybe we can find some pity for these poor creatures governed by their basic human instincts, futilely hoping that it might satiate their innate, bloodthirsty hunger for justice.
A superb blocking of faces as Dong-jin faces his comeuppance – every quest for revenge is a link in an infinite chain, and this is his part of it coming to an end.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is not currently streaming in Australia.
The word ‘abortion’ is not spoken until thirty-five minutes into 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, but even with all the awkward side-stepping around the point, Cristian Mungiu still forms a clear, excruciating picture of the harrowing ordeal at hand. In fact, it is more often through those details purposefully kept out of view that this story progresses, and the formal justification of this withholding, minimalist style is powerful. Living in 1987 Communist Romania, university students Otilia and Găbița would be threatened with lengthy prison sentences if their plans to terminate an unwanted pregnancy were to get out, and so it is precisely in their covert conduct that we can surmise their unspoken motives and profound discomfort. Leading the peak of the Romanian New Wave, Mungiu turns his government’s historic oppression into a pervasive, unseen antagonist, haunting the claustrophobic silences of this naturalistic thriller with cold, passive cruelty.
Though it is Găbița who is pregnant, Mungiu wisely sticks us in the perspective of her friend, Otilia, tasking her with finding an illegal abortionist, booking a hotel room for the procedure, and eventually disposing of the foetus. Anamaria Marinca consequently does most of the speaking in this cast, and yet it is her silent, expressive acting which is her most impressive ability, kept at a distance in medium and wide shots. Duration is one of Mungiu’s greatest tools here, both in the confined time span of 24 hours that instil the film with pressing urgency, and in uncomfortably long takes which let us feel those minutes tangibly slip by. Slotted in between the abortion-centric scenes, Otilia finds the low-stakes mundanity of everyday life creeping in, and as she sits at a crowded table where her boyfriend’s mother is celebrating her birthday, Mungiu hangs on her face for close to eight minutes. Tedious conversation, hands, and dishes move all around her, she is briefly chided by a guest for smoking, and in her anxious, detached expression we can see that this is the last place she wants to be after everything that has just gone down.
Crowded blocking of Otilia’s awkward dinner party, which Mungiu holds on for close to eight minutes.
Otilia often finds herself centred in Mungiu’s compositions all throughout the film, as earlier in the hotel room where the surly abortionist, Mr Bebe, informs, warns, and patronises the two women, she is staged between him and Găbița like the mediator in this transaction. Of course, her role goes far beyond that though. She is also a confidant, an advisor, and an agent acting on her friend’s behalf when she is too nervous. There is no word to explain the role Otilia is forced to play though when it comes to light that they do not have the money for the whole procedure, as Mr Bebe darkly reveals the price that must be paid to go through with it.
“I’ll go in the bathroom. When I come out, you give me your answer. If it’s yes, tell me who goes first. If it’s no, I get up and go.”
Sex is currency in this seedy underworld, and for this particular transaction to go ahead, both women must contribute. Mungiu’s camera stays in the bathroom throughout this sequence, first with Găbița as she turns on the tap to block out the noise and fearfully waits for her turn, and then with Otilia as she enters and immediately starts scrubbing herself clean.
Otilia blocked between Mr Bebe and Găbița – the third party in this deeply uncomfortable transaction.One of Mungiu’s single strongest shots with the blue bathroom tiles, Otilia’s green top, and her head turned away from the camera in shame.
Even in these drably realistic settings, there is a precision to Mungiu’s staging, as immediately following the abortion he sits his camera at the head of the bed where Mr Bebe and Otilia continue to dominate the image, while all that is visible of Găbița are her legs poking into the frame. When we get the reverse shot as well, she is still shoved right down to its bottom-centre, leading our eyes first to Otilia as the largest presence, and secondly to the dreary still life painting hanging above the bed – a meagre flourish of beauty in this bleak hotel room. As if forcing Găbița to the edges of her own story, Otilia’s guilty resentment spills outwards into these visuals, angrily directed at her friend’s lack of independence that has partially offloaded her trauma onto others. After all they have gone through, perhaps it is this tragic wedge driven between them which will affect their relationship most deeply.
Shot and reverse shot in the hotel bedroom, shrinking Găbița in the bottom of the frame and letting Otilia dominate as the largest force.
It is a rigorous, unforgiving aesthetic which Mungiu commits to, comparable to Michael Haneke’s films in the chilling severity of its long, distant takes, though far more embracing of handheld camerawork to build an almost Hitchcockian suspense through tracking shots. As we walk with Otilia through the streets, we both get a fright as children playing nearby kick a ball against a car. When it’s time to bring this slow-burn tension to an end and pull back the curtains on the horror, he doesn’t hold back there either, lingering on the image of the expelled foetus and sucking all remaining mystery out of the daunting procedure.
At times like these, we desperately hang onto the few answers Mungiu gives us, trying to use those to fill the void of questions he has purposefully avoided addressing. Who is the father of Găbița’s unborn baby? What were the circumstances of the pregnancy, and the decision to abort? Who exactly is Romana, the woman who recommended Mr Bebe? With as bare bones an attitude to storytelling as Mungiu displays here, such details are extraneous and don’t figure into the kind of unconditional empathy he evokes for these two women. It is rather in the smothering silences, distant camerawork, and careful staging that we feel the Communist state’s stranglehold over its citizens’ intimate lives, and where this cinematic cornerstone of social realism holds us in its own tight, uncompromising grip.
Mungiu’s gritty location shooting in the streets of Romania grounds this in a tangible reality, crowded with drab, worn infrastructure.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is not currently available to stream in Australia.
Perspective is a tricky, volatile thing in Atonement, fuelled by the whims of an individual’s fickle biases, yet wielding the power to manifest as reality and change the course of entire lives. Some are inherently more valuable than others too, especially given that the word of a young girl speaking to a subject as weighty as sexual assault is inherently treated with more gravity than the man she is accusing. Perhaps rightfully so, though it is hard to ignore how their disparate class backgrounds might have something to do with the ease with which the blame is pinned on him. Joe Wright studies the eyes of 13-year-old Briony Tallis in extreme close-up, catching the piercing blue of her irises and her sharp, perceptive squint, but these are also the vessel through which he interprets the apparent guilt of Robbie Turner, the son of her family’s housekeeper, thereby setting in motion a cascade of heartbreaking misfortunes.
Extreme close-ups on Saorise Ronan’s blue eyes – the perspective through which this story is filtered, and which ruins Robbie’s life.
Beyond Briony’s subjective experiences though, there is another story closer to the truth which clears up our confusion. Robbie’s interactions with her older sister, Cecilia, aren’t nearly as scandalous as they appear when we are given the full context of their romance, and throughout the first half of the film Wright delights in nimbly shifting between his and Briony’s points-of-view. Almost as if a reset button is being hit, multiple scenes play out twice over in succession, constantly challenging our own beliefs about whether Cecilia’s dip into the fountain was as erotic as it looked from a distance, or whether the shocking sight of her and Robbie splayed out across a bookshelf was actually rape. It is a stroke of formal genius from Wright to structure his narrative in this way, alternating between misunderstandings and reality, so that by the time Briony witnesses the brutal crime committed against her cousin, Lola, we can simultaneously understand how justified she feels in her accusation, and how completely wrong she is.
Beautiful form in the repetition of scenes from alternate perspectives.Shock and confusion as Wright lands this shot, with Cecilia and Robbie’s limbs splayed out across the bookcase.
Saoirse Ronan is a revelation here at the young age of 12, delivering a performance that stands among the strongest any child has put to film, even while only taking up half the full screentime. It makes for an interesting comparison when we leap years into the future and see Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave take over the role, as even though we can see the mounting guilt on their faces, neither come close to capturing the heartbreak of Ronan’s bitter immaturity. As she faces up to the adults in the room and asserts her false conviction, we can see the wheels spinning fabrications in her mind, quickly turning “I know it was him” into “I saw him with my own eyes.”
Aside from being an innocent child and the daughter of wealthy parents, perhaps it is also Briony’s knack for storytelling which earns her the trust of others, allowing her to exert influence over their minds. As a child, she writes plays on her typewriter, and Dario Marianelli’s urgent rhythmic score of strings and piano skilfully works its percussive keys in like a constant reminder of her ability to produce destructive propaganda as easily as she can create imaginative fairy tales. Often paired with this persistent tapping is some surprisingly sharp editing too, breaking up Wright’s long, elegant takes with cuts that feel like abrupt disturbances inside Briony’s confused mind.
Wright has always been more engaged with his long takes and sweeping camerawork than his editing, but Atonement has a sharp rhythm that clicks along with the typewriter sound effects.
For the most part though, Atonement’s visuals are a brilliantly virtuosic display of the floating camerawork and lavish production design that Wright debuted two years earlier in Pride and Prejudice, crafting some delicate compositions out of pre-war British period décor. On sunny days before everything goes to hell, reflections gently ripple in ponds and pastel wallpapers form backdrops to Briony’s innocence, languishing in the excitement of her crush on Robbie. The four-year leap into the future does not dispense with this exquisite beauty, but the colours are just that little bit darker and more melancholy, situating us in the hospitals and battlegrounds of World War II. Robbie’s early release from prison comes with the caveat that he joins the British army, and although the two sisters have taken up nursing in London, there is a wedge driven between them which cannot be reconciled.
Joe Wright’s cinematography is the best it has ever been, creating delicate compositions from lavish interiors and dainty gardens.
Though the narrative urgency falls away a little at this point with dreams and flashbacks taking over, Wright’s visual style continues in vivid expressions of longing and regret, poured out most evocatively in the five-and-a-half minute long take navigating the beach of Dunkirk where Robbie finds himself stranded. As a symbol in European history, this famous event represents great hope, though as we run over a hill and the masses of soldiers come into view, all we can feel is the sort of despair one faces at the end of the world when all options are exhausted. Eventually, this shot detaches from Robbie and continues to explore the bleak setting on its own, watching men camp, sing hymns, put down horses, and play on rides left over from some nearby fair. A Ferris wheel looms far away against a golden sky at magic hour, but with smoke filling the air, there is no joy to be found here. The only film that captures this moment in history with as much sorrowful beauty is Dunkirk itself, but even that opts for an entirely different kind of artistic magnificence with its exacting montages and epic IMAX photography.
A five-and-a-half-minute long take traversing Dunkirk beach at magic hour. Like Robbie, we feel like we are at the end of the world, watching soldiers make the most of their last few days alive.
Meanwhile, the incriminating tapping of Briony’s typewriter continues to underscore her storyline in the harsh, sterile wards of St Thomas’ Hospital, where nurses walk down green hallways in symmetrical formations and tend to wounded soldiers. Reflecting on the shame of her false allegation, her flair for lying takes a more redemptive turn when one patient with a head injury mistakes her for his wife, and while on his deathbed, finds comfort in her presence. Even into her old age it remains her defining character trait, with Wright eventually pulling out a double twist – she has been the narrator of this story, and as a result, her trademark fabrications are riddled throughout it.
Green, sterile interiors at St Thomas’ Hospital where an older Briony works during the war.
In an ideal world, Robbie and Cecilia would be reunited after the war, and Briony would come forward with the truth to clear his name. They might still hold her in contempt and even go on to sever ties with her completely, but simply putting things right would be enough to set her mind at ease. Like all those who believed her the first time around, we are completely fooled into thinking that her version of events is the truth, without considering her ulterior motives – in this case, the desire to create her own fantasy redemption. Robbie’s death at Dunkirk on the last day of evacuation and Cecilia’s drowning in the London Blitz may still be on her conscience, but there is certainly at least some poetry in her using the same gift which denied them full, happy lives to immortalise them in history as committed lovers beating all odds. Whether that’s enough for genuine atonement is the provocative question that Briony may never find an answer for, and in Wright’s bold, ever-shifting structure, we too find it eerily winding its way all through this formal puzzle of lies, truths, and alternate perspectives.
Atonement is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon Video.
There are few films that have had as contentious a spot at the top of the box office as Avatar, financially topping James Cameron’s previous record-breaking epic, Titanic, facing backlash from those claiming it’s nothing but empty spectacle, and then in more recent years finding renewed support in the backlash to the backlash. There’s no doubt that it is a technological marvel as well, though when this metric is used as the sole arbiter of success then naturally it is easy to see how quickly such films can grow outdated – one simply needs to look at the latter half of Robert Zemeckis’ career to see how this prioritising of scientific innovation over art does not instil a movie with great longevity. Cameron may be uniquely suited to the ideal synthesis of both, recognising how the creation of photorealistic visual effects is not an end unto itself, but simply serves an incredible visual aesthetic that even the most CGI-heavy blockbusters of the past decade have failed to live up to. He has pulled off this smooth integration before in the Terminator franchise and Titanic, and Avatar belongs right alongside those as monumental achievements of genre filmmaking and world-building.
It is no wonder that it took Cameron fifteen years to develop the fictional creation of Pandora, given how exceedingly detailed and complex it is. Rather than writing out lengthy historical chronicles as J.R.R. Tolkien did with The Lord of the Rings, he developed field guides around the alien ecosystem of the moon populated by the Na’vi. What we see in Avatar only covers a small percentage of that material, focusing predominantly on the Omatikaya clan and their surrounding jungle habitat, though the film’s immersive environment thrives on the small, otherworldly pieces hanging on the periphery which hint at a richer world than we can imagine. A blue, Jupiter-like planet dominates the sky, dotted with several other moons in orbit, and setting a gorgeous celestial backdrop that feels at least partially inspired by the dual suns of Tatooine in Star Wars. On the forest floor, the plant life is extremely sensitive to physical touch, withdrawing into pods and pulsating with light as characters run across its surface. Exposition is heavy in the opening, though once we are done with this Avatar’s visual filmmaking takes over, immersing us in its colonialist fable that regards the interconnectedness of all life with great, mystical reverence.
Celestial backdrops hanging in the sky. These aren’t just throwaway images – this is world building at its finest, and integral to our immersion in Pandora.
Cameron’s entire career is built on the mythological storytelling of historical legends and genre archetypes, so it is no outrageous statement that his talents as a writer are superseded by his bold direction. The flaws in the screenplay are evident, giving heavy-handed names like ‘unobtanium’ to significant plot devices and at times rejecting subtlety in favour of on-the-nose dialogue, but these are far from dealbreakers. This story is predominantly a visual one, representing the three main human characters outside of former Marine Jake Sully as icons of war, business, and science, and sending them to Pandora to invade the deeply spiritual Na’vi. It is telling that of those three figureheads, it is Sigourney Weaver’s exobiologist, Grace, who ends up siding with Jake in his defection to the native people, suggesting a harmony between science and faith which purely self-interested human endeavours cannot understand.
“There’s some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora … That’s more connections than the human brain. You get it? It’s a network – a global network.”
What Grace expresses as technical jargon here is something Cameron has already formally laid out formally in his world-building though, establishing the foundation upon which the entire setting of Pandora exists. On Jake’s first night stranded in the moon’s jungle, he discovers an ethereal elegance that stems from its sentient plant life, floating tiny, jellyfish-like spores through the air and settling them on his body – an auspicious sign in Na’vi culture, given that they are considered pure, sacred spirits. Even more visually astounding is the bioluminescence which lights up Pandora’s forests with a blue, green, and purple glow, not just demonstrating Cameron’s incredible talent for creating aesthetic beauty from purely digital effects, but demonstrating a greater point as well in humanity’s blindness. The artificial lights of the invaders’ machines have always drowned out this natural splendour, and it isn’t until native Neytiri puts out Jake’s fire that he can see it too, opening his eyes to the symbiotic relationship between the land and its inhabitants.
The bioluminescent forests of Pandora are more than just impressive displays of technology. Cameron aestheticises his digital effects in a way that few other CGI-heavy films capture in the same way, composing his night-time sets according to a gorgeous neon palette.
In opposition to the Na’vi, we have the RDA – a human corporation looking to rip up their gigantic ‘Hometree’ for the precious resources that lie beneath. Instead of gorgeous alien scenery, they are defined by heavy machinery and sterile, blue interiors, harshly imposing on Jake in its own bleak way. To the Na’vi, humans are simply “sky people”, inferring a race that is disconnected from the land and which positions themselves as gods looking down on those below. Their attempts to contact the native people involve assuming their form to avoid frightening them, though the journey that Jake goes on in understanding their philosophy turns the ‘avatar’ into a metaphor of a different kind.
The spaceship interiors aren’t what we remember most from Avatar, but even parts of these make for some visually impressive set pieces.
Between Jake’s two bodies, Cameron draws a distinction between his physical and spiritual self. One is limited in its movement, the other can run, ride, and fly animals. One is bound to a confined ship, the other can form a deep connection with an entire network of organisms. When he begins to neglect the material needs of one, he nurtures the other. Inside his mind, there is an awakening taking place that positions his avatar as his authentic self, leading to his eventual confession of the feeling that “Out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.” It is this duality that is the core tenet of so many tribal religions across the world, though in taking pieces of these and remixing them into alien culture, Cameron develops a philosophy that feels both rooted in familiar traditions and entirely unique to the ecological quirks of Pandora.
Unity and connection formally reflected in the imagery and traditions of the Na’vi.
Chief among these idiosyncrasies is the neural queue shared by many organisms in the moon’s ecosystems, enabling intimate connections that vary from psychic to sexual. Beneath the Tree of Souls where Jake and Neytira join their queues as an expression of love, Cameron drapes them in its glowing vines, shedding a delicate blue and purple light upon this significant development in Jake’s journey to enlightenment. At another milestone where he learns to bond with a flying banshee via his queue, Cameron brings another display of immense visual style in an even grander set piece – the jaw-dropping Floating Mountains, hanging suspended in the atmosphere with waterfalls cascading into the sky below. Much like the wondrous helicopter shots that fly across New Zealand’s glaciers and fields in The Lord of the Rings, Cameron’s cinematography expresses its own visual wonder at the impossible scenery, instilling in us a transcendent awe at every step of Jake’s transformative pilgrimage.
The Floating Mountains make for a dizzying, mind-bending set piece – a hugely inspired use of spectacle to inform Jake’s spiritual journey.Just one visual highlight after the next, draping Jake and Neytiri in the glowing vines of the Tree of Souls.
With so much time spent immersed in Na’vi culture, the RDA’s destruction of Hometree feels all the more devastating, rendered as an apocalyptic disaster akin to the sinking of the Titanic. Not since we have been inside the human spaceship have we seen a palette so washed out as the aftermath, settling white ash across the burnt ground and leeching all colour from the once-vibrant jungle. Alongside the Na’vi retaliation though comes a resounding pay-off to their universalist philosophy, seeing Pandora itself come alive through the natural instincts of its native fauna uniting to defend its ecosystem – much like, as Grace might put it, a giant biological system activating its immune response.
This scene almost looks entirely black-and-white next to the bright vibrancy of everything else, desaturating the landscape at Jake’s lowest point.
Transposing familiar stories onto exciting new settings has always been Cameron’s strength, crafting classical redemption arcs, sweeping romances, and clashes of good and evil against spectacular canvases, and although Avatar may not be his most consistently flawless work, it is certainly at least his most purely ambitious. Such immense artistic aspiration is rare among directors with as large an interest in technological capabilities as him, but it is in his use of digital effects to create bold entertainment alongside rich, allegorical artistry that he fully realises its immense artistic potential more than any other working filmmaker.
Avatar is currently streaming on Disney Plus, and is available to buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon Video.
Scene by Green 