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.
“No hay banda,” warns the emcee at Club Silencio. “There is no band.” Everything we hear there is an illusion, played as a tape recording while musicians and singers move their hands and mouths. It doesn’t really matter how many times we are told this, or in how many languages. Every time a new piece of music begins, we find ourselves entranced by the haunting melodies reverberating across the theatre, then equally caught off guard when the sounds persist even after their apparent sources are gone.
Most affecting of all in this scene is the heartrending cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish by one club performer, sung entirely acapella. In the audience, our two leading women, Betty and Rita, cling to each other with tears in their eyes, unable to look away. Though it is Rita whose amnesia has kept her character at a distance from us, Betty is just as much of an enigma in her façade of superficial idealism. Here though, there seems to be a break in their reality. What it is exactly we aren’t too sure, but there is a profound sorrow in both the music and their reactions to it, as if they are mourning the impending expiration of something beautiful and fleeting.
Rebekah del Rio singing “Llorando” at Club Silencio. This may be the emotional lynchpin of the film, and yet at this point we may not even fully understand the context yet.
It is a skilful layering of illusions on top of illusions that David Lynch conducts in Mulholland Drive, removing us from reality by several levels until all we are left with is some primal, psychological rendition. This is the true power of cinema, according to him. It is only by studying the worlds that exist inside our minds that we can get close to understanding those feelings we bury deep into our subconscious, including the guilt, hope, love, and anger which aspiring Hollywood actress Diane Selwyn has let fester into putrid resentment. Mulholland Drive can be explained quite simply as a dark and occasionally whimsical nightmare conjured up in the final minutes before her suicide, but to seek hard logic in Lynch’s reason and plotting would be to defeat its purpose. It excels simply as a surreal melting pot of impressionistic images that translate the literal to the symbolic, asserting that such figurative representations are no less “real” than the places they come from.
Lynch smothering Diane in a heavy fog in this foreboding composition as she dreams.
More specifically, Mulholland Drive is Lynch’s own interrogation of the Hollywood dream as an empty, corrupt promise, drawing heavy parallels to Billy Wilder’s similarly street-titled film Sunset Boulevard. In Diane Selwyn and Norma Desmond, we see two women drawn in by the glamour of the movie industry, only to be left devastated when they are thoughtlessly discarded in favour of other more desirable women, forcing them to retreat into dream worlds of fame and glory. There are two key differences between these films though. Firstly, Diane has never had a taste of what it is like to be riding high on praise and adoration, unlike Norma. Secondly, we are not looking in at Diane’s dream from the outside. Instead, Lynch sinks us deep into this absurd labyrinth for two hours before he pulls back the curtain to reveal its source in the final act.
When we do eventually reach that point, we may at first barely even realise that this is what he is doing. But then tiny formal connections begin to arise. In the Winkies diner we have seen several times before, Diane singles in on the waitresses’ nametag, “Betty”, in an almost identical shot to one earlier in the film when Betty notices the name “Diane”. A hitman who amusingly bungled a murder in a standalone dream episode appears once again, meeting with Diane. He carries the blue key that Rita mysteriously kept in her purse, and tells Diane that when the job is done he will pass it on to her as a secret indicator. At that moment, she makes eye contact with another man in the diner. We have seen him before too in an isolated nightmare, confronting a horrific monster that lives behind Winkies. “I hope to never see that face outside a dream,” he fearfully expresses. Those iniquitous thoughts which linger beneath the surface of our consciousness are better kept out of sight, though this is a luxury that Diane can no longer afford.
A jump scare for the ages – fully earned, and not overdone. The appearance of the creature behind Winkies is terrifying, both on a visceral level and for what it represents.
Such an intricate web of parallels across dreamscapes and waking life makes for a wonderful piece of abstract formalism in Mulholland Drive, and one that only lulls us deeper into its soporific grip through hazy, wistful editing that slyly bridges one idea to the next. Long dissolves erode any sense of clear definition between scene transitions, blending them together to find striking collages in those indistinct, liminal spaces. Arguably the most iconic use of this technique in film history can be found here, imprinting a shot of Betty reclining backwards against a low angle of palm trees reaching up to the sky, delivering an illusion of idyllic serenity. Elsewhere, Lynch’s match cuts land on action beats, momentarily dispensing with the dreamy ambience to sharply leap through a broken timeline of incomplete memories.
Jaw-dropping imagery crafted in these long dissolves, dreamily passing from one scene to the next.
The lack of defining boundaries in Mulholland Drive even extends to Lynch’s characterisations of all four main women – or at least, the two women whose identities are as malleable as anything else in Diane’s dream. In the material world, she and Camilla are a pair of ex-lovers looking for fame in Hollywood. Where Diane is struggling to be noticed, Camilla’s star is on the rise, thanks to her winning a role that she may or may not have rightfully deserved.
The construct that Diane builds in her mind from guilt and idealism might as well be some sort of regret-driven wish fulfillment, playing out a fantasy where both women can start afresh under new circumstances, though with a considerable power imbalance in her favour. Diane thus becomes Betty, a bright-eyed actress with genuine talent, and Camilla becomes Rita, an amnesiac taking her name from Golden Age Hollywood star Rita Hayworth. To muddy the waters even further, other characters named Diane and Camilla exist in this intangible nightmare, though only as vague representations – one as a corpse foreshadowing Diane’s eventual suicide, the other taking the appearance of Camilla’s current girlfriend, and stealing movie roles she never earned. With identity-swapping as purposefully confounding as this, drawing parallels to Persona is inevitable, especially when Lynch lines up the faces of both women to appear as two halves of a whole in a Bergman-esque composition.
Very much influenced by Bergman in the identity swapping, beautifully depicted in this blocking of faces.Multiple mirrors creating the sense of layered illusions as Rita picks out a name for herself.Secondary to Bergman are the Hitchcock parallels, with Betty modelling Rita into a blonde just as James Stewart does to Kim Novak in Vertigo.
It is a complex pair of performances that Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring put in here, as the pair of them come to represent both the glossy artifice and insidious darkness that underlies the American entertainment industry. The cheesy dubbing of their overdone line readings borders on unsettling, with both acting as if they are being forced into some conventional mystery movie about two girl detectives tracking down hidden truths about their pasts. Watts particularly shines as the duplicate versions of Diane, constantly breaking her identity up into pieces and choosing to play each as if they were individual characters. This also means that we are frequently taken unaware by sudden shifts in her performance, as we witness in the audition scene that sees her read badly written dialogue as a whispery, sensual seduction – an extreme contrast to the overwrought anger with she had previously rehearsed it.
A landmark performance for Naomi Watts playing several different versions of one woman, ranging from artificial to fully realistic.
Given the way Lynch often shoots Los Angeles like some sort of bizarre, alien environment crowded by towering palm trees, it isn’t hard to see why an outsider like Diane might psychologically disintegrate so easily. Though she imagines rooms cloaked with red curtains where nefarious men eavesdrop and pull strings, this is merely something to fill in the blank space of the unknown. In the grand scheme of things, they are nothing more than catalysts. The awful truth of Mulholland Drive’s existentialism rather comes from within, where Diane introspectively carves out new realities from the fragments of old ones, only to find herself arriving back at the same shame and self-loathing that she has tried so fruitlessly to escape.
Fog fills Lynch’s night-time exteriors, turning Los Angeles into an alien landscape of imposing palm trees and empty lots.
Mulholland Drive is currently streaming on Stan, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
While Hayao Miyazaki was leading the animation industry in the 1980s with his pantheistic, surrealist films Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and My Neighbour Totoro, Satoshi Kon was watching and learning, formulating his own style of surrealism that would soon place him among the great auteurs of animation. His visionary style of dreamlike absurdity is on brilliant display in Millennium Actress, though in his journey towards developing his own voice separate from Miyazaki’s, we witness him here picking at more existential questions regarding reality, fiction, and human purpose.
The documentary interview conceit of the film is simply a springboard for a magnificently collaged narrative that runs across several genres of Japanese cinema, as its subject, the elderly actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, recounts the story of her life. Or is it the story of the characters she has played? Such distinctions aren’t so easy to draw here, as these threads of truth and fiction interweave in a tapestry of history, touching on real events such as the Sino-Japanese war, and then forcing us to question the authenticity of this account as we follow her pursuit of an enigmatic artist through samurai stories, monster movies, period pieces, and science-fiction settings. Meanwhile, our documentarians – the fanatical interviewer Genya Tachibana and the confounded cameraman Kyoji Ida – remain present in the background, and although their slightly saturated colouring stands out in otherwise washed out flashbacks, their interactions with other characters inside these realms only further tests our belief in her objectivity.
Long dissolves used to create gorgeous imagery, as well as to bridge gaps between past and present, fiction and reality.
It is this demolishment of barriers between disparate historical accounts which Kon so joyously relishes in his narrative structure, particularly as it smoothly flows through time in match cuts dissolving between graphically corresponding shots, and edits in the action disguising crafty shifts in environments. In one scene we watch Chiyoko trip over as a samurai, but then as Kon cuts to the ground where she falls she suddenly becomes a geisha, this subtle transition taking place without so much as a pause for us to catch up. She has clearly lived many lives, as each role she plays ingrains itself in her own identity and drive to pursue a singular goal – to find the artist who gave her a mysterious key all those years ago, and who inspired her to become an actress. Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain makes for a suitable comparison here in the deft weaving together of separate realities, especially as Millennium Actress approaches its finale and disintegrates Chiyoko’s reality around her in a skilfully orchestrated montage that sees her run through each setting she has vicariously lived in, obsessively searching across all time and space for the missing man.
Smooth, inspired match cuts between strikingly similar compositions.
And yet even as her memories and imagination expand across all human history, she still remains under the sway of a reality far beyond her control. The collapse of her internal worlds mirrors an earthquake taking place in real time, and just as she departs life having made peace with her lack of resolution in her quest, so too does she blast off in a rocket from a planet somewhere deep in space, confessing her gratefulness for the life she led.
“What I really loved was the pursuit of him.”
Even on her death bed, Chiyoko continues to live in her imagination.
Such is the nature of celebrity that hordes of fans will pursue a seemingly unattainable figure, but even within this idealised icon of fame, that yearning desire still exists. All throughout Millennium Actress there remains an endless craving for more love, more life, more answers, or at least something greater than oneself, and Kon never fails to match that ambition in his own audaciously experimental narrative structure, blending together eras, genres, and settings in a loving dedication to humanity’s never-ending striving for greatness, even as that goal remains beyond the reach of both reality and imagination.
Fading from this dark highway into a hospital corridor with another inspired match cut.Kon proving he doesn’t need his editing to deliver some truly arresting compositions.
Millennium Actress is available to stream on The Criterion Channel.
