Category: 2000s

Michael Haneke | 2hr 24min

Michael Haneke continues his use of unsettling, open-ended mysteries to provoke both his characters and viewers into unresolved frustration in The White Ribbon, sending them on a search for answers that never materialise. It is a large ensemble that sprawls out across its bleak, restrained narrative, consisting of largely archetypal figures – most notably the Baron, the Priest, and the Doctor. These men represent wealth, religion, and intelligentsia, and together they enforce strict rules over the women, farmers, and children of the town.

We are first introduced to the narrative by the voiceover of an elderly schoolteacher describing a parable he isn’t sure reflects the truth in every detail, but which he believes may “cast a new light on the goings-on in this country.” The setting is a rural German village on the precipice of World War I. There is no need for any further contextual elaboration from the narrator.

At first the collection of unfortunate, unusual incidents that take place in the town seem like sheer bad luck. Maybe the wire that tripped the Doctor’s horse and sent him to hospital was supposed to be a harmless prank. Maybe the farmer’s wife who fell through rotten floorboards was just being careless. Some events can be more easily explained, like the grieving husband who hangs himself. But still, there is a strange aura of uncertainty around this village that only seems to grow. Suspicion is cast on the children, who exhibit strange behaviour. They leer at grown-ups accusingly, who then in turn deliver cruel, moralistic punishments. One girl seems to possess supernatural premonitions of these events – or perhaps she is really aware of some plot the adults don’t know about.

The Priest resolves that tying white ribbons around the arms of the children will remind them of their purity, a fruitless bid for them to remain innocent. Yet these meaningless symbols are at odds with the adults’ treatment of the children. A boy who steals another’s flute is violently beaten by his father. One boy who confesses to masturbating has his arms tied to his bed. Directly after this scene, we catch the Doctor in the act of adultery with the midwife. In truth, it is these men who are the hypocritical, self-righteous sinners of the town. The children’s innocence is under threat from no one but the men who claim they are trying to preserve it.

As the breakout of World War I marks the final act of the film, we are once again reminded of the larger global catastrophe that is mirroring the smaller ones taking place in this town. This war to end all wars was an act of violence by men in positions of power trying to protect their families and countrymen, but it only ended up hurting the innocent. This widespread destruction of innocence traumatised a generation of German youths who would grow up to cause an even greater conflict. Haneke doesn’t offer specific answers about who has been tearing the town apart from within, but he does suggest that these occurrences are a result of the adults’ corruption. A passage from the bible left at the scene of a vicious beating of a child paints this out clearly.

“For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sins of their parents’ sins to the third and fourth generation.”

Still, most of the men and women of this town go on in their harsh ways, refusing to accept the possibility that the children are learning cruelty, not discipline.

“Despite the strange events that had haunted the village, we thought of ourselves as united in the belief that life in our community was God’s will, and worth living.”

The few that do recognise the changing behaviours of the children usually go ignored. When the Baroness tells her husband she is taking his children away from these surroundings dominated by “malice, envy, apathy and brutality” and leaving him for another man, his only concern is whether she has slept with this new suitor yet. Later, the midwife learns the truth behind the atrocities, but she quickly disappears. The truth is powerless against whatever is working behind the scenes here. Perhaps we are better off not knowing.

As most of Haneke’s films are, The White Ribbon is formally rigorous in its multitude of motifs. The titular ribbons, the closed doors hiding acts too terrible to see, the parakeets as mirrors of the children’s trauma – Haneke uses symbols to hint at something truly insidious, but just as the film never plunges into the barbarism of World War I, he often leads us up to the doorstep of evil only to cut away at the last second. He keeps us at a distance from his characters. Whenever we do see something horrific, like a mutilated bird or a dead woman, we never get a reaction shot following it. Emotion never immediately spills to the surface, but the cumulative effect of this repression does inevitably burst out in angry, violent demonstrations.

Haneke is not known for his striking images, but the stark, monochrome beauty of The White Ribbon leaps out in practically every shot. Though he isn’t averse to close-ups, Haneke’s wide shots are worth marvelling at for their strong compositions of sharp black and white hues battling it out for dominance of the image. In one scene the darkness of the night smothers the frame, only to be pierced with the blinding light of a fire billowing out from the barn. In another, the narration recalls how the snowy landscape “hurt the eyes”, though dark silhouettes of farmers can still be seen trudging through it. There is detail in the mise-en-scène right down to the costumes, as the opposing shades will clutter tableaus of crowds in the village square, balancing each other out.

Though The White Ribbon is mostly without music, the single exception comes in the final scene set in the church, where the children’s choir sings a hymn. It is an appropriate end to a parable that hints at, without ever explaining, how evil is born through puritanical chastisement, hypocrisy, and apathy. Haneke’s masterpiece is full of tension between the pull of innocence and corruption, but its lack of clear resolution is precisely what continues to make it so compelling.

The White Ribbon is currently available to stream on Beamafilm and Shudder.

Todd Haynes | 1hr 47min

It is a bold move to revise and deconstruct an out-of-fashion film genre within a modern context, but bolder still to dig deeper into its antiquated conventions as Todd Haynes does here in Far From Heaven. There wasn’t exactly a market for tender-hearted melodramas in 2002, and yet within this narrative of 1950s suburban house parties, nuclear families, and neighbourhood gossip he steadfastly proceeds with a film that speaks sensitively to the deep-rooted prejudices of middle-class America. Perhaps this bucking of mainstream trends puts Haynes even more in line with his greatest cinematic influence than ever as well, as in the era of post-war America when Douglas Sirk’s films were being derisively written off as “women’s weepies”, the classic Hollywood director similarly used artistic empathy as a weapon to defiantly challenge social norms. 

As sentimental as Far From Heaven may be and as naïve as his characters are, any accusations of phoniness are unfounded. The heightening of emotions present is not intended to force compassion for Hayne’s characters, but rather to tune us into those repressed parts of their identities they struggle to face, and the subtleties of ordinary life that go entirely unnoticed. Praise must go to Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert who capture that tricky balance between internal worlds and external expressions as closeted family man, Frank, and African-American gardener, Raymond, both of whom rub up against the strict social order. But it is especially in the ways that Julianne Moore relates to them as Cathy Whitaker, a housewife torn between her social duty and genuine love, that we can fully grasp the strain of 1950s suburbia. After catching Frank, her husband, having an affair with another man and growing closer with Raymond, the pressures of her narrow-minded neighbourhood begin to close in, and cracks in her idealistic life begin to manifest. 

Thematically, Far From Heaven falls right alongside Sirk’s Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows in its delicate studies of class and race, although perhaps the single most transgressive aspect that gives it a modern grounding is its candour in approaching homosexuality – certainly a taboo topic in the days of Hollywood’s Production Code. The only barrier to Hayne’s prodding of the issue is the repression of his characters, who awkwardly stumble around discussions and confrontations with an uncomfortable clumsiness. Beyond the walls of the home, the eyes of judgemental neighbours are ubiquitous in low-angle cutaways, and when social convention is thrown out in sudden developments, Sirk tilts his camera in canted angles, destabilising Cathy’s entire world. 

Most of all though, it is in Hayne’s long dissolves, saturated colours, and autumnal suburban landscapes where Sirk’s stylistic influence elegantly seeps through, tying its worldly innocence to the emotional honesty and wholesomeness of those characters quietly confronting rigid communal structures. Rich hues burst from manicured green lawns and warmly lit domestic settings with vivid passion, these palettes shifting from scene to scene like expressionistic outpourings of these characters’ emotional states. When Frank grows frustrated with his inability to perform sexually for his wife, chilly blue day-for-night lighting takes over their living room, pierced only by Cathy’s bright red dress standing within it as icon of vibrant warmth. As he explores shady basement bars, a neon green glow drenches him in an unnatural shade of green, pulling him into a new, covert world that, while possessing an entirely distinct tone, remains just as boldly luminous as the rest of his life.

It is fitting that this throwback to the 1950s marks the final score for classical Hollywood film composer Elmer Bernstein before his passing, his symphonic orchestra of woodwinds, strings, and piano floating through the film like a wistful, nostalgic dream. This dream though is one which is almost entirely artificial, constructed out of America’s naive mid-twentieth century ideals, and which motivates Haynes to go about puncturing it with sobering recognitions of its limitations. Through windows, Haynes often shoots Cathy within her home like a trapped creature, only beginning to consider her own role in perpetuating the same oppressive barriers she now nervously struggles against, and although she does not succeed in destroying them, she still ends her arc with far more self-awareness and compassion than ever before. Within every frame of Far From Heaven there seeps a beauty that makes an honest effort to understand each of its characters on that same level, drenched in the colourful expressions of a director not so much challenging well-worn conventions as he is playing right into their arms with loving affection.

Far From Heaven is currently available to stream on The Criterion Channel, and to buy in the Microsoft Store.

Pedro Almodóvar | 1hr 46min

Like all the best neo-noirs, truth isn’t easy to come by in Bad Education. The way a writer recalls a memory may differ entirely to the artistic rendering of it, and while both might be divorced from reality, unexpected revelations also emerge from the unlikeliest fabrications. This story is further complicated when fraudulent identities come to light, warping the transgressive melodrama of child sexual abuse and corrupt religious authorities into a twisted Hitchcockian tale of murder. Pedro Almodóvar remains as boldly colourful as ever in his patterned wallpapers and vibrant set dressing throughout this film, and yet Bad Education also marks one of his most confident narratives in its leaps between flashbacks, re-enactments, and the present reality.

The reunion of young film director Enrique with old childhood friend Angel (previously known as Ignacio) right in the opening brings with it a torrent of old ghosts from their days at a Catholic boarding school in 1964. The flame that once sparked between them is one such memory, as is Father Manolo, the priest whose molestation of Ignacio is channelled into the screenplay Angel is now asking Enrique to direct, “The Visit.” As Enrique sits down to read it, Almodóvar pulls his camera back from outside the criss-crossed window bars of his apartment, the striking composition punctured by a vivid red lamp sitting on a coffee table, and we dissolve into this smaller story nested within the larger one.

Later when “The Visit” is properly produced as a movie, the production appears almost identical to what we witnessed earlier, minus a few extra dramatisations. Quite ironically though, some of these attempts to embellish the truth wind up closer to reality than expected, and Almodóvar’s great artistic ethos regarding the value of artifice emerges in some of the most acutely affecting moments of Angel and Enrique’s emotional journeys.

It is easy to consistently point to the Douglas Sirk inspiration in virtually everything Almodóvar has ever created, but from film to film there has been significant variation in his influences, and the noirish conspiracy which Bad Education eventually takes a turn towards points quite directly to Double Indemnity. This is the film that two covert lovers and murder accomplices choose to watch to pass time not long after completing their dastardly act. “It’s as if those films are about us,” they fearfully mutter, walking by its poster hanging on a bright orange wall while leaving the theatre. Outside, it is dark and rainy, and Almodóvar fully embraces the noir convention here as his characters descend into paranoia, their relationship beginning to crumble.

It isn’t simply in spite of Almodóvar’s magnificent strokes of colour that Bad Education’s murky noir narrative flourishes, but rather because of it, as it is through his extravagant interiors that these elaborate plot developments become utterly believable. Venetian blinds are very much present here in his backdrops and framing of characters, serving a similar purpose to those more classic entries into the genre in creating an uneasy tension in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, bursts of reds in towels, deck chairs, and ornaments continue to spill forth an intense passion throughout this film, like expressions of the rich, inner lives of its characters. This painstaking curation of mise-en-scène rivals the old masters of cinematic expressionism, though the uniquely Almodóvarian trademarks are all there. Through its dazzling swings of tone, plot, and colour, there is a thrill to picking apart Bad Education’s elaborate representations of truth and fiction, and in its self-referential examinations of these very concepts the Spanish auteur’s lovingly artificial cinematic style feels more at home than ever.

Bad Education is not currently available to stream in Australia.

Alejandro Iñárritu | 2hr 34min

Amores Perros opens in media res with a car speeding through the streets of Mexico, a wounded dog bleeding to death in the backseat, and a yellow truck right on its tail. At this point in time, we know nothing about the men in the front seat, Octavio and Jorge – who they are, where they have come from, or where they are going. And then all of a sudden, just as we get our bearings in this frenzied chase, there is glass shattering, metal splintering, and smoke filling the air.

The places that Alejandro Iñárritu takes his debut film from here goes far beyond the immediate questions we might have about this car accident. Its effects spread out to strangers from across class boundaries, and bit by bit a landscape of violence, disloyalty, and abuse begins to form in this urban ecosystem of decay and moral depravity.

Though it is structured around three separate narrative threads, Amores Perros is not as rigidly segmented as one might initially assume. Iñárritu certainly makes good use of titles bearing the names of his characters to open new chapters where our focus dramatically shifts, but bits and pieces of each plotline also obtrusively bleed into the others. In the first, “Octavio y Susana” which follows an affair between a man and his sister-in-law, it is not immediately clear who the haggard, bearded man is that pursues and kills a stranger without hesitation, nor do we understand why Iñárritu keeps cutting to Daniel, a magazine publisher cheating on his wife with a supermodel. In time, the justification for the inclusion of both will be revealed in their own chapters, within which Octavio and Susana will appear in reduced capacity. But for now these two subplots remain unsolved mysteries, running beneath a more dominant narrative set in a working-class neighbourhood and an underground dog fighting ring.

When it comes to those depictions of animal abuse, Amores Perros proves itself to be a particularly confronting experience. Sure, there is a lot of vicious imagery to flinch at all across the board, especially in one shot where Iñárritu’s camera closes in tightly on a splash of fresh blood aggressively sizzling across an open grill. But the torture which is continuously inflicted upon dogs through all two and a half hours of its run time is truly testing, and much of the moral substance of these characters can be gaged by who we see inflicting it, who is trying to fight it, and who can do nothing but simply empathise with their pain.

In Octavio’s decision to let his dog, Cofi, fight another, Daniel’s choice to leave Valeria’s dog trapped beneath the floorboards, and her selfless attempts to rescue it, we witness this running metaphor become the source of some brilliant character work. Especially when considering canines not just as representations of innocence, but also as symbols of loyalty, a broader picture begins to form of a city that places such little value in any of these, with affairs and betrayals running rampant in virtually every relationship.

In reflecting this urban hellhole, the grittiness of Iñárritu’s rapid-fire editing and grainy visual style feels almost entirely inverse to those films from later in his career, Birdman and The Revenant. Both those movies flow smoothly in long takes even as they wrestle with similarly existential questions and, in the case of The Revenant, viscerally violent imagery. The masterclass of filmmaking in Amores Perros is of an entirely different kind though, in which he presents us with an environment of utter chaos, and then dedicates himself to sorting through the madness to find some sense in it. A skilful balance and wide scope is achieved not just in editing between each of the three main storylines, but even in the skilful parallel cutting contained within these individual strands, contrasting Octavio and Susana’s affair with the one her husband, Ramiro, is simultaneously conducting with a co-worker.

Through these constant juxtapositions between plot threads, Iñárritu constructs a pattern of deterioration brought about by selfishness and cruelty, which continues to reverberate outwards. Even Valeria, one of our most noble characters, is not immune to this, as her efforts to counteract Daniel’s malice simply worsens her condition, right up until she hits rock bottom with a leg amputation, cutting short her illustrious modelling career. In poignant correspondence, her perfume ads stuck up high on billboards around the city are similarly torn down, her fall from grace writ large in this wretched environment.

And then as Amores Perros reaches its finale act, “El Chivo y Maru”, there is an unexpected shift in Iñárritu’s pattern in the place we least expect. Where Octavio and Valeria are involved in the car crash out of pure bad luck, hitman El Chivo is simply a witness, and chooses to involve himself in rescuing Cofi from the wreckage. The bond that forms between the two is unlike any other human-pet relationship we have seen yet. Like El Chivo, Cofi has been trained to kill, though it is not in his nature – it is a learned instinct as a result of an environment that has told him it is the only way to survive.

From the great sorrow that El Chivo feels for this corrupted creature there emerges an indignant anger, but also a huge amount of remorse. Unlike Valeria, his deliberate reaction against the decay of the world is not directed outwards in attempts to fix it, but rather inwards to his soul, so that he may fix that which is broken in his own life. After all, it is from there that we have seen reverberations ripple outwards, dictating the paths of lives beyond these characters’ immediate understandings. And with just one extra force of goodness out there in this city, Iñárritu pensively leaves us with some shred of hope for its future.

Amores Perros is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes and Amazon Video.

Pedro Almodóvar | 1hr 52min

In the first scene of Talk to Her, two men sit side-by-side watching a dance performance in a theatre. Up on stage, two women glide through the space like blind sleepwalkers, while another man hurriedly moves furniture out of their way so as not to disturb their chaotic paths. As the spectator on the right begins to weep, the one on the left silently glances over. At this point in their lives Marco and Benigno are strangers, though this is not the last time their paths will cross. After suffering two strikingly similar twists of fate, twin storylines begin to emerge and intertwine in reflections of the dance that first brought them together, and a friendship takes form over a commonality in their unusual expressions of love.

There is no doubt something creepy about the way these men dote upon the two comatose women for whom they profess their love. But at times it is also endearingly sweet, as well as self-serving, and at one point morally repugnant – a mix of feelings as complex as the men themselves. Most interestingly, the emotionally expressive dynamics which Pedro Almodóvar typically reserves for his female characters take masculine form in Marco and Benigno, who continue to talk with and care for the targets of their affection. Marco is the more sympathetic figure between the two for several reasons, chief of all being the time Almodóvar spends in drawing out his relationship with his sweetheart, Lydia. Benigno is also prone to emotional sensitivity, but dangerously so, as his delusions around the love of an unconscious Alicia gradually consume his reality. Between the two, there is a thin line dividing love and obsession, and Almodóvar relishes every tiny formal parallel that binds them together.

This Spanish auteur is not one known for his subtlety, and indeed Talk to Her swells with broad strokes of saturated colours, like a Douglas Sirk melodrama with distinctly more flamboyantly transgressive sensibilities. Notions of rape, still birth, prison, and death play significant parts in this narrative, and although Almodóvar isn’t exactly undercutting the seriousness of his subject matter, these plot points always tend to be in service of the film’s expressions of sorrow and grief. Conversely, his bright décor builds out a world where life is still largely worth living in spite of it all, defined by its bold primary colours piercing through sumptuous, often symmetrical compositions. Even within the unusually green and yellow walls of the hospital, there is still a visual exuberance to be found that both complements these characters’ wild emotional journeys and effectively offsets the bleakness of their pain.

The unpredictable swings of these characters continue to emerge in the narrative’s numerous leaps through time, with titles letting us know we have flashed back “Four years earlier” or forwards “A month later.” The form of the piece is pushed even further in one section that seems to play out a metaphor of Benigno’s story writ large on silent film, though even this pastiche sequence still bears Almodóvar’s gaudy irreverence – a shrunken man crawling across the landscape of his lover’s naked body before slipping into her v****a, like a surreal, Bunuelian dream.

Almodóvar swings wildly across emotional extremes all through Talk to Her, but being the master of melodrama that he is, each moment remains under his careful control in its complex progression, right up until the final scene. There, we return the theatre from the opening with Marco, though this time it is a recovered Alicia he encounters rather than Benigno. Once again the interaction is tangential, though with both their counterparts missing, there is finally room for a sweet correspondence between them – a man and a woman with renewed abilities to respond to others, who are open to real connection, and are now ready to move on with their lives.

Talk to Her is not currently available to stream in Australia.

David Fincher | 2hr 37min

While political cartoonist Robert Graysmith spends years digging into the details of the Zodiac murders across the west coast of 1960s and 70s America, we find David Fincher using Graysmith himself to conduct his own intensive examination of human obsession. How curious it is that the author of these accounts upon which this film is based becomes Fincher’s subject of scrutiny, his characteristic nuances and flaws often foregrounded over his book’s thrilling subject matter. While this true crime procedural moves at a steady, purposeful pace through all two and a half hours of its run time, leaving us to piece together loose tiles of an enigmatic puzzle with no fixed resolution, Graysmith is the real source of fascination at its centre, enslaved by his own compulsive desire for truth even as the world around him loses interest.

This fastidiousness is a trait echoed across both character and director, as Fincher similarly fixates on the details of the Zodiac killer investigation as a means to understand the mentality of Graysmith. The ambidexterity of one key suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, is hammered home as a potentially significant piece of evidence, as is his Zodiac branded wristwatch, and even when many of these details amount to little more than circumstantial, Fincher continues to remain glued to each new revelation. Just as Graysmith remains patient and willing to accept that such obsessiveness may not herald the answers or justice he desires, so too does Fincher revel in the journey of speculation and discovery, drawing narrative comparisons with All the President’s Men in his paranoid, fussy handling of this historical journalistic investigation.

Patience and deep concentration are qualities built into the very fabric of this narrative, carrying us along in Graysmith’s compulsive drive while keeping us at enough of a remove to recognise how these same traits are echoed in the criminal he is so doggedly pursuing. Each time we hear the Zodiac killer speak, it is from a different voice so as to throw us off any distinct identity, though his personality emerges clearly in his eerie letters and phone calls speaking of a haunted, troubled mind, plagued by urges he cannot escape. Remarkable form in characterisation is thus drawn between hero and villain, two men who fall victim to their own psychological impulses, and at least one of whom loses everything because of it. Though Graysmith’s passion may have attracted his future wife on their first date, it also becomes the cause for the disintegration of their marriage. While his associates are driven to exhaustion and substance abuse over the investigation, he remains persistently focused. Over the years his apartment turns into a cluttered study of boxes and papers, and Fincher sends a haggard Jake Gyllenhaal running through rainy streets at night in desperation, tying Graysmith’s physicality and environment to his own restless, obstinate mentality.

Such visual prowess continues to reveal itself in Fincher’s magnificent depth of field all throughout Zodiac, keeping every detail of this mustard-yellow period setting in crisp, sharp focus. Within the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom, slightly lowered camera angles turn the rows of yellow fluorescent lights into distinctive backgrounds against which the mysteries of the Zodiac letters unfold, while the journalists themselves are blocked across layers of the frame. Fincher’s trademark yellow lighting makes an especially atmospheric impact here in its bright, clean radiance through corporate interiors, while shady homes, streets, and restaurants are dimly illuminated with soft amber glows, allowing an uncanny darkness to overtake scenes of paranoia and doubt.

Calling Fincher a master of crafting tension may imply parallels to Alfred Hitchcock’s own sadistic fascinations, and yet there is something a little more ethereal about the suspense present here in Zodiac. Without an identifiable figure to pin these crimes to, Fincher’s evil is far more impressionistic than it is tangible, emerging just as much through his dingy, uncertain atmosphere is it does through its narrative. Such obscurity is made all the more frustrating by the pinpoint precision with which he attacks his plotting, cinematography, and characterisation, leaving us to question the productivity of such relentless obsession over impossible mysteries – and whether turning that intense focus inwards to our own humanity might bear a more fruitful life.

Zodiac is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

Satoshi Kon | 1hr 27min

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Millennium Actress is available to stream on The Criterion Channel.

Jia Zhangke | 1hr 51min

An expansive concrete dam, a mossy green river, and a crumbling grey city – this is the setting for Jia Zhangke’s greatest cinematic experiment in neorealism since Platform, and its three-pronged geographic metaphor is absolutely devastating. At the start of Still Life, the village of Fengjie is already half-submerged in water, as the flow from the soon-to-be-completed Three Gorges Dam has partially flooded the valley. But this project isn’t done yet, and in order to finish it off, everything else in its path must be torn down as well. 
 
The tension between China’s fading history and the nation’s relentless pursuit of economic development has always been a critical target for Jia, but his use of architecture to reflect that has rarely been so stirring and visceral as it is here. Unlike Platform, we aren’t just watching a gradual decay, but rather the violent actions of an ancient village’s own inhabitants bringing about an apocalyptic vision of modernity. The layering of shots is especially important here, as Jia will often foreground quiet interactions against magnificent backgrounds of vast, hollow structures, and then aggressively rupture that tranquillity by collapsing those buildings before our eyes. It is arresting imagery, if not a little terrifying, and the impact is only intensified when we move in closer to montages of the deconstruction crews fiercely hammering away, taking the city apart brick by brick.

Just as impressive is Jia’s attention to the symmetrical, trifurcated narrative structure of Still Life, splitting the story of one man’s return to Fengjie to search for his long-lost wife into the first and third acts, and then paralleling that journey with a middle act which follows a woman’s search for her husband. Just like Wong Kar-wai’s mirrored narratives of Chungking Express, neither of these plotlines meet directly and yet they share crucial similarities – Han Sanming and Shen Hong are both coming from the Shanxi province, are confronted by the destruction of a city that their memories are intertwined with, and must grapple with uncertain relationships being repressed by social changes. Even more remarkably, both bear witness to the most bizarre breaking of realism that Jia has attempted in any of his films thus far, as he transitions from Han’s story to Shen’s through their silent observation of a flying saucer flying above the city. As Jia himself puts it:

“Such a quick destruction of a 2000-year-old town is simply unimaginable. It’s as if there was an alien invasion.” 

Perhaps it’s all the same to the locals who witness this destruction every day, but to these two outsiders, it is an absurd sight to behold. Jia digs even further into this metaphor in continually returning to a shot of a building that looks a little out of place in its uneven design, and then, the final time we visit it, suddenly blasting it off into space. Elsewhere, workers in hazmat suits comb through the city’s ruins, looking uncannily like extra-terrestrial visitors, while droning, futuristic synths underscore it all. The Antonioni influence goes far beyond Jia’s extraordinary use of architecture to define his characters and their relationships – his overt blending of science-fiction tones with an otherwise realistic narrative and visuals strongly evokes a similar atmosphere captured in the final scene of L’Eclisse, where another ghost town vacated of its humanity is filled with an eerie, otherworldly emptiness.  

Of course, it is important to remember that much of this ancient village has already been well and truly forgotten by its own citizens. When Han goes looking for his old house where he hopes to find his wife, he instead finds that it is submerged beneath the lake that ferries now lightly skim over, unmindful of the lost history that lies beneath the surface. Beyond its metaphorical implications, this flooding also practically complicates Han’s quest to reconnect to his own past, as he finds it has also erased many of the links that might have helped him find his way back. The motif of China burying its humanity is reflected in one especially cruel instance where a worker is crushed beneath a falling pile of rubble, and is nearly forgotten and lost completely until his colleagues hear his ringing phone. And as Jia reminds us by framing the Three Gorges Dam construction site in the background of Shen’s eventual breakup with her cheating, greedy husband, all of this cultural and personal devastation is wreaked by China’s inexorable economic ambitions.

Much of Han and Shen’s wandering through this dying city is permeated by a sickly, green haze that seems to cling to the river and forested mountains, simultaneously suffocating its remaining residents while bringing an ethereal beauty to its scenes of rapid decay. Nestled in a peaceful valley, geographically cut off from the rest of the world, this setting might have once been a quiet retreat from the industrial progress of modern China. But now, with the violent, aberrant influence of globalisation invading the far corners of the nation’s most sacred regions, the Fengjie of Still Life is a ghost town both utterly disconnected from its cultural identity and actively destructive of its own history.

Still Life is available to stream on Stan, Binge, Foxtel Now, and The Criterion Channel.

Jia Zhangke | 2hr 23min

Despite scepticism that cooperating with the Chinese Film Bureau would compromise his creative processes and incisive cultural commentary, Jia Zhangke remains as sharp as ever in his fourth feature film, The World. With greater recognition comes greater funding, and this evidently reveals itself in his masterful choice of shooting location – Beijing World Park, a theme park which showcases miniature replicas of famous international landmarks. Though this imagery it isn’t quite as whimsical as that which would appear later in his career, there is a beautiful surrealism to the use of such diverse, recognisable architecture. With a single pan Jia shifts from a view of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to the Parthenon, to Rome’s Mouth of Truth, these clean, pristine edifices existing in stark contrast to the dirtied interiors where the onsite staff live and interact with each other.

At this point in his career, Jia is fully embracing the Michelangelo Antonioni influence in his framing of lonely, wandering souls against such visually impressive architecture. If his previous film, Unknown Pleasures, felt like a sequential extension of Platform, then he only pushes that notion further here in The World, where he examines the new Chinese society born out of the 1980s era of economic reform and opening up to foreign investments. The results are plain to see – western and Chinese identities have meshed into a globalised amalgamation of cultural influences, and both are cheapened in the process. “The Twin Towers were bombed on September 11. We still have them,” boasts one park worker overlooking a replica of the Manhattan cityscape, simultaneously brushing over this integral part of New York’s history while taking ownership of its untarnished aesthetic.
 
Rather than building themselves up through their own ambitious creations, this corner of modern China has shrunk the rest of the world down to its level, and the effect is twofold. On one hand these people look like giants roaming around a park where everything they could want to see is condensed into a single place; on the other, they look pitifully small, opting for cheap imitations devoid of the artistic craft and culture attached to the original monuments. China certainly has its own historical landmarks to be proud of, but the nation that Jia is reflecting in The World has grown uninspired with time, trying to own everything and yet ending up with nothing.

Outside these imitations of architectural achievements, there is dedication on Jia’s behalf to the even the most ordinary infrastructure of Beijing’s Fengtai District. Much like Antonioni, his concrete and metallic divisions in the mise-en-scène are layered all through the foreground and background, separating our disaffected heroine, Tao, from those around her. Her boyfriend’s push for them to have sex drives them further apart, her one real friend speaks an entirely different language, and when she tries to make conversation with Chen, a new worker, their hopeful connection persists at odds with their harsh surroundings, adjacent to a construction site. Tall, concrete blocks with metallic spokes line up neatly in rows across an open plain of cement, and though the practical function of these formations is unclear, the emotional impact is alienating as they visually split this interaction right down the middle. As the two converse, a plane flies overhead, and Tao wistfully recognises that she doesn’t know anyone who has travelled by air.

Perhaps that is why she is so drawn to the Eiffel Tower replica which stands tall over the rest of the park, even while being a mere third the size of the real one. Jia recognises the power of its imagery, using the same stunning landscape shot of the monument overlooking a small lake as a formal motif to mark the passage of time, but Tao’s attraction to it has more to do with her own dissatisfaction with being grounded. Each time she returns to the site we watch her ride up the elevator, gazing out at the highest views she ever expects to see in her life.

Bit by bit over his career, Jia has been stepping further outside the realm of pure neorealism by introducing artificial elements to his narratives, and he pulls it off here with mixed results. The animated interludes simply don’t gel aesthetically with everything around them, lacking the beauty, meaning, and finesse with which Jia frames so many of his live-action images. Where it works much better is in the surreal, haunting ending in which two characters do finally find a melancholy connection with each other, their final words asserting in a dreamlike voiceover that “This is just the beginning.” Tao, like so many others, has been told to be satisfied with the shrunken husk of a world she has been handed, but her discovery of something which transcends the worldly structures and barriers of modern-day China makes for an especially stirring payoff to her discontent, restless wandering.

The World is available to stream on The Criterion Channel.