By the time Argentina, 1985 starts, the nation’s civil-military dictatorship has already been deposed, and yet the odds are still stacked against public prosecutor Julio Strassera. Senior attorneys are wary of joining him in his efforts given the risk it would pose to their careers and families, thereby leaving him to approach predominantly young, inexperienced law graduates. On top of that, there is good reason for those safety concerns – his own children are made the target of several anonymous death threats, revealing the extent to which fascism still has its hooks in the culture at large.
Argentina, 1985 owes a lot to Hollywood’s 1970s political dramas in its suspenseful, high-stakes reckoning with an entire nation’s deep-seated corruption. Santiago Mitre is at the helm as director here, revealing a confidence in his storytelling and editing that reflects on this historical event as the first time any military dictatorship was convicted by law. As such, there is a concerted effort in this film to reframe Argentina’s political legacy, certainly accepting the failings of a historically oppressive government, though also emphasising the even greater significance of the democratic victory which overcame that tyranny.
On the first day of what would become known as the Trial of the Juntas, a bomb threat is called in which Strassera promptly dismisses as an attempt to postpone the tribunal. Nevertheless, his deputy prosecutor, Luis Ocampo, remains on edge. A briefcase that a spectator in the gallery suspiciously leaves behind catches his eye, and as formal proceedings continue in the background, Mitre’s camera suspensefully lingers on this tiny, potentially dangerous disruption. Eventually this tension is dispelled with a bang on a table sounding uneasily like a bomb, though our relief can only last so long before paranoia starts trickling back in. Argentina, 1985 never quite releases us from its anxiety-inducing grip until its end, leaving a lot of room to wade through the harrowing testimonies of those who suffered under the dictatorial National Reorganization Process.
In total, there are eight hundred witnesses who come forward with personal stories of persecution, introduced by a long take that Mitre skilfully tracks into the courtroom as the first of them takes the stand. Each story is utterly gut-wrenching in its own way, delivered with pathos by actors who rarely get more than few minutes of screen time, yet who still leave their mark. One woman recounts how she gave birth while captive and was immediately tortured after, leaving her to forcibly neglect her baby. Another tells of loved ones who disappeared without warning, and another still recalls watching their family killed in horrific manners. Mitre hangs on these testimonies long enough to let them land with impact, and yet his narrative also keeps propelling forward through montages of superimposed phone calls, newspapers, and archival footage linking it all back to a very real history and its immense scope.
Decades on, “Nunca más” is the phrase from this court case which would stand strongest in the memory of the public – “Never again.” It punctuates the end of Strassera’s closing argument as an assertion of Argentina’s steadfast unity against repeating past tragedies, and is imbued with passionate resolution in Ricardo Darín’s heartfelt delivery. Mitre takes creative liberties in dramatising these events, and yet the sincerity of his direction never wavers, imbuing it into every detail of production from his convincing ensemble to his authentic period décor. From this forthright compassion emerges a fresh, democratic hope for Argentina, striking a fine balance in its rumination over both the nation’s horrific failings and the strength of those who condemned them to history books.
Argentina, 1985 is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Childhood memories are often tragically limited in their perspective and accuracy, and yet these are all a grown-up Sophie has to reach some understanding of her father’s hidden struggles in Aftersun. Much of the film is based in these wistful ruminations, set sometime in the early 2000s when the two holidayed together at a Turkish resort to celebrate his 31st birthday. The home videos Sophie shot on a MiniDV camera are interspersed throughout, providing some tangible documentation of what we can only assume were his final days alive, but alone they are woefully insufficient. As Charlotte Wells’ elliptical narrative drifts by at the comfortable pace of a lazy summer vacation, a broader yet still incomplete picture begins to form of a relationship that Sophie can only make some retrospective sense of twenty years later, now finding herself standing in her father’s shoes.
The character work of Aftersun is built on incredible subtlety, and much of this comes down to Paul Mescal’s marvellously understated performance as Calum. He is a man capable of great warmth, offering Sophie a non-judgemental space to express personal feelings few other daughters would share with their fathers. Of all the ways he could have spent his birthday, it is telling that he chose to celebrate it with her, as within the insulated bubble of this setting she essentially becomes his entire world.
The hints of there being something not quite right though are teased out in restrained dramatic beats that one could easily glance over. Calum’s silent, tortured reaction when Sophie speaks of an emotional low he knows too well, his awkward stoicism when Sophie organises a crowd to sing an impromptu birthday song, and his guilty reckoning with the price of a Turkish rug are inconsequential enough on their own. But when they build to a cold rejection of his daughter’s request to sing karaoke with him and a night spend crying alone in the darkness, we are left to consider how much these stresses are simply the surface evidence of some deeper issues.
Wells’ filmmaking flourishes in these tiny moments of distraction, evoking the frivolity of memories that narrow in on strange, seemingly trivial details. There is a flock of paragliders that is seemingly always suspended in the air above the resort, forming delicate backdrops to Calum and Sophie’s poolside respites, and a later cutaway to the swirling surface of a mud bath brings with it a hypnotic break in the drama. While father and daughter chat on their last night about how they could stay there forever, Wells’ camera gently drifts towards the polaroid photo they just took. It is effectively a moment frozen in time, and as we watch it slowly process, the immense significance that Sophie will one day attach to it begins to settle.
It is ironically through this distance put between us and the characters that Aftersun develops such a formal sensitivity to the tiniest shifts in their emotional states, especially when we are positioned to watch them in the obscured reflections of rippling pools and darkened television screens. That said, there are still signs here that this is the work of a first-time director, at times leaving the emotional heavy lifting almost entirely up to her actors while her camera simply sits back, points, and shoots. It isn’t a damning weakness, but it is possible to imagine a stronger version of this film which weaves in its motifs with even greater purpose and consistency.
There is no criticising the final act of Aftersun though, when the time comes for the holiday to end and Sophie’s mind to return to the present day. It is a culmination of the brief flashforwards effortlessly integrated throughout the film, as well as the mysterious cutaways to a strobe-lit rave where she and her father stand apart. In this dark, subjective space, linear time falls away to a splintered remix of David Bowie and Queen’s ‘Under Pressure’, uniting the past’s trauma with the grief of the present in a melancholy embrace.
The final camera pan which gracefully merges Sophie’s current apartment with the airport where she last said goodbye to her father offers a pensive conclusiveness, once again pulling the two time periods apart at the moment of their intersection. While much of the film is dominated by Wells’ slice-of-life realism, this deliberate shift towards visually representing Sophie’s unsettled psychology makes for an incredibly poignant resolution. It would be impossible to fully grasp the man that Calum was, but through Wells’ deliberate accumulation of subtle character details, we can at least take off the rose-tinted glasses of Sophie’s childhood and piece together a fragmented portrait of his stifled, internal suffering.
It is a tough promise to make that a film titled Women Talking will add up to more than the sum of its dialogue-heavy scenes, and yet Sarah Polley is no mere caretaker of weighty spiritual contemplations. Her screenplay is based on the 2018 novel of the same name, which itself was inspired by real events in the late 2000s, where eight men from an isolated Mennonite colony were discovered to have been drugging and raping dozens of their own women in their sleep over the course of five years. Any artistic reinterpretation of these devastating circumstances deserves more than just a straightforward recount, but rather something which cuts even deeper to the emotional and psychological reckoning of those affected. The text that Polley quotes from the novel and uses to open her film thus lays out her intentions.
“What follows is an act of female imagination.”
This wording is partially a nod to the blame that Mennonite elders laid at the feet of the “female imagination” when women started coming forward. The other part is a fantasy of what might have been possible had these women united in discussions over how to properly deal with their abusers. Polley recognises the need for a suspension of disbelief here, especially when considering the internalised misogyny that would have realistically been ingrained in these women by their ultraconservative, patriarchal culture. An early vote immediately rules out the option to ‘Stay silent’, leaving a tie between ‘Stay and fight’ and ‘Leave.’ With the majority of the community’s men away overseeing the bail of their arrested neighbours, the women are effectively given a deadline of two days to decide which course of action will be taken.
Polley puts together an impressive cast here that effectively brings layers of nuance to her screenplay’s conflicting moral arguments. Rooney Mara is cleverly cast against type as Ona, a beacon of hopeful optimism, while Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley both take turns furiously stealing scenes as Salome and Mariche, loaded with the rage of protective mothers and indignant wives. Men are scarce to be found in this ensemble, though Ben Whishaw still makes a sizeable impact as an ally tasked with taking the minutes of the meeting, while August Winter offers a compelling perspective as a trans male member of the community, disillusioned by its corruption and driven to take a vow of silence. If there is a knock against the film here, then it is a little disappointing to see how underused Frances McDormand is given her incredible screen presence, and neither does the retrospective voiceover by young actress Kate Hallett feel entirely integrated into the film beyond its pensive introduction and conclusion.
Despite these issues, Polley’s direction can’t be labelled anything less than confident. The first thing one will note about it is just how much she washes out colours from the fields, homes, and barns of this Mennonite colony, sinking her female characters into a desaturated despair that at times looks entirely black-and-white. Inside the hayloft where they meet in thoughtful deliberations, the darkness is only broken up by strips of sunlight pouring through the gaps between wooden slats, while every so often the giant hay door is opened onto a view of the grey farmlands just outside. The second thing which becomes apparent is just how precise Polley is with her blocking and camera movements, both of which lay out the divisions, commonalities, and idiosyncrasies contained within this ensemble.
It is especially in the recurring overhead shots of different women laying across blood-stained beds that Polley draws their stories together, revealing their shared experiences of a visceral horror. With the sparse floral patterns of their nightclothes matching their sheets, they often seem to disappear into their surroundings, overcome by the bleakness of their suffering. So too are they bound together by the wounds left on their bodies and minds, marking them with evidence of abuse that varies from person to person. An unhealed scar, a blinded eye, missing teeth, and bruises are the most visible injuries which garner empathy, though even among these women there is still a heavy stigma around mental illness. When Mejal is overcome by a crippling anxiety attack, Mariche lashes out, unfairly griping that she is making a bigger deal of her adversity despite having been hurt the same as everyone else. In this collection of complex characters though, Polley makes a fine point of the countless ways trauma can manifest in any given individual, and how it can shape them into entirely different people.
Quite significantly, the diversity of these experiences fuels the film’s open compassion, casting no judgement upon either side of the central debate. As Ona, Salome, Mariche, and others present their own perspectives, we often find Polley cutting away to their lives in the colony, rounding each of them out with backstories that justify their individual moral stances. There is strength in the damning silence of a mass exodus, just as there is power in a united battle for justice. So too though is there a universal uncertainty over what comes next, regardless of which path they choose. Women Talking is no plain retelling of historical facts or attempt at didactic message-making. Under Polley’s sensitive direction, it is a rich allegory of patriarchal exploitation at large, pushed to a terrifying tipping point and promised some form of drastic, unpredictable change.
Todd Field’s return to filmmaking comes as a painstakingly formal study of that complicated passion which has been such a burden on him during his sixteen-year hiatus. Struggling to have any of his previous visions financed since 2006’s Little Children, the culture of high art which orchestral composer and conductor Lydia Tár comfortably inhabits has long lingered just out of his reach. Even now as he finally arrives there with his major comeback though, he offers its industry neither condemnation nor loving adoration. Lydia has undoubtedly exploited its systematic corruption for many years, but this does not detract from the evidence of her own immense talent. Tár remains at a chilly distance from the casually cruel subject of its interrogation, and it is at this arm’s length from the audience where Cate Blanchett unleashes the full, daunting force of an undeniably gifted abuser, digging her nails into Lydia’s crumbling musical empire.
Clean lighting and angles in the mise-en-scène – the boxy room of the book launch, and the hanging lights in the board room giving shape to Lydia’s upper crust world.
In the lengthy interview which opens Tár, her impressive, carefully curated credentials are read out beneath a montage of her suiting up, and when questioned about her role as a conductor, she implicitly likens it to that of a god. Objective qualities like time obey the movement of her hand, and no sound can be made without her direction. This ego is something which echoes through to her personal life as well. In one scene, the incessant pen clicking of her assistant conductor Sebastian only ends when she forcefully snatches it away. Likewise, in the lecture theatre at Julliard School where she trains young musicians, the nervous bouncing of one student’s leg grinds away at her patience until she physically puts her hand on it.
Field efficiently lays the groundwork of Lydia’s ideals in this scene, offering her an adversary in the form of a queer, BIPOC pupil who asserts his distaste for Bach’s music, and justifies it via the composer’s identity as a white cis male. Blanchett’s deep voice resonates with confidence through her questioning of his beliefs, which then moves to a gentle demonstration of his erroneousness – “The narcissism of small differences can lead to the most boring conformity.” Finally, she brings her soliloquy to a close with a brutal evisceration of his identity politics, using Icelandic composer Anna S. Þorvaldsdóttir as the subject of her example.
“Now, can we agree on two pieces of observation. One, that Anna was born in Iceland, and two, that she is, in an older teacher kind of way, a super-hot young woman. Show of hands. Alright, now let’s turn our gaze back to the piano bench up there and see if we can square how any of those things possibly relate to the person we see seated before us.”
Easily one of the best shots of 2022, stretching out over the course of the 10-minute lecture scene. The camera movements don’t announce themselves loudly, but rather subtly glide from one frame to the next, reflecting the shifting power dynamic in Field’s deep focus staging.
The ten-minute long take which guides this scene serves multiple purposes in its examination of Lydia’s power play. Field’s deep focus lens keeps landing on elegant compositions all through its extensive duration, constantly underscoring the shifting dynamic. As teacher and student start on equal footing, the tiered auditorium rises behind them like a pyramid, assuredly centring them both in a dominant stance. Later, Lydia seats him in the audience and lets the orchestra fan out behind her, subtly taking the position where he stood just a few minutes ago. Gradually he becomes smaller in the frame until he storms out in fury, and she strikes him with one final, poisonous barb.
“The architect of your soul seems to be social media.”
The expert execution of this single shot and Lydia’s delivery of a proto-defence against the accusations she will suffer later are just the start of this scene’s formal acuity. The narrative economy demonstrated in its eventual return as an online video is simply remarkable, as its truth-twisting, spliced-up clips contrast with our initial real-time observations, where no editorial manipulation was present.
This performance means big things for Cate Blanchett – it could very well be her strongest to date, complete with a bold transformation, assured speechmaking, and quiet introspection.
Beyond this single confrontation, Field frequently returns to phone screens that we see covertly filming Lydia and texting unknown recipients, turning the constant surveillance of the modern world into a weapon of invasion and revenge. In this way, he leans heavily on his Michael Haneke influence, and specifically the driving tension of Cache where a series of anonymous recordings destabilise the lives of a wealthy couple.
To examine these similarities further, Tár’s psychological study of a disturbed musician makes for a fascinating companion piece to The Piano Teacher, and the bookcases which so often fill out Haneke’s mise-en-scène here line the walls of Lydia’s modern German apartment. Inside its vast concrete walls, narrow corridors, and sleek interiors, Field crafts the image of an austere woman who has fashioned her world to Brutalist perfection.
Lydia’s Berlin apartment is one of Brutalist architecture, narrow corridors, and bookshelves, but Field also plants this pink light in the middle of it all which he occasionally draws on for superb compositions.
Even in her concert hall, several storeys of angular, wood-panelled balconies surround the stage in some brilliantly off-kilter shots, matching the character to her impressively designed workplace. Quite curiously, it isn’t until an hour into the film that we even see her take the spotlight here and conduct for the first time. When the scene does finally arrive though, her arms violently bring in the sound of crashing thunder. From an extremely low angle, Blanchett aggressively throws her entire body into each beat and cue, like a dance that furiously produces its own musical accompaniment, and from there Field’s incredible camera placement only continues to trace the power of her movement.
The angles of Lydia’s concert hall make it a brilliant set piece, enclosing the stage in these symmetrical shapes.
On the other end of Lydia’s emotional journey, he brings equal Kubrickian precision to her gradual disintegration. Several key narrative beats unfold with the camera hanging on the back of her head, resisting the urge to cut to a close-up which might tempt us towards some kind of empathy. The trap she has found herself in is one of her own making, yet she still seeks multiple escapes from its confines. The repetition of scenes where she is simply running, boxing, and wandering around the house imply efforts at securing a stable mundanity, disconnected from the intensity of her work life.
A good amount of time is spent with Lydia procrastinating in her apartment. In one scene she tinkles a bit on the piano, then walks away to cut up a lemon – Field ensures this is dense with character detail in every moment.
And yet despite these attempts, this anxiety still slips its way into her mind. In one sequence frighteningly rendered as pure psychological horror, she winds up in a dark, abandoned building with a mysterious creature that pitter-patters across the wet ground and ferociously growls at her. When she finally emerges, she trips on the stairs and injures her face. How shocking it is to see this perfectly composed woman put a foot wrong, and when she faces up to her orchestra the next day, she deliberately avoids divulging the truth of her embarrassing misstep. With the time she spends editing her own Wikipedia page, and the coverup of her real birth name, Linda Tarr (note the plain ‘a’ instead of the accented ‘á’), bit by bit we start to see the importance she places on her own public image – far more than she previously let on in her diatribe against identity politics. In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that she was never really personally mentored by Leonard Bernstein at all.
Even more superbly formal patterns of her mental demise emerge at night-time. When Lydia is able to sleep, dreams of whispers and surreal images swirl around in her restless psyche. When she lies awake, it is usually because of a sound reverberating through the house, sensitively connected to her troubled conscience – a ticking metronome after failing to uncover the source of a woman’s guttural screams, or the hum of a fridge upon passing over her assistant for a promotion. Like the clicking of Sebastian’s pen, these relentless noises chip away at her sanity, reminding her that life is not an orchestra where every sound bows down to her whim.
Tár is so loaded with motifs, it would be a huge task to list them all. The warped dream visions and ceaseless noises around her apartment are a good start though, seeing her slowly unravel over the course of their formal repetition.
Is it guilt that Lydia is feeling in moments like these? Perhaps a paranoia of what may be coming to get her? Field is withholding when it comes to the details of her misdeeds, leaving a purposeful ambiguity around our own attitude towards this character. No doubt she can be utterly seductive at times, playing to Blanchett’s poised, assertive presence as an actor in complete control of her craft. For a time, we may even make excuses for her brusqueness, as the way she threatens her daughter’s school bully and calls herself Petra’s “father” has a slight edge of dark humour to it. For those who know her though, the respect she commands is tinged with fear. It is only when she lets go of old colleagues and acquaintances that they finally find the courage to question her authority, and therein lies the primary catalyst of her downfall.
The name Krista is tossed around with reservation a few times before we start to pick up on her significance in Lydia’s life. Our only glimpses of her are as an out-of-focus, red-head figure watching her old mentor from a distance, like a ghost ominously haunting her for mysterious, past transgressions. Their previous relationship is clarified a little when we start to see Lydia take a liking to young, Russian cellist Olga and begin to twist a few arms in her favour. Field is never explicit about what exactly goes on between her and her protégés, and so for a while it is tempting to question whether the allegations levelled against her are fully accurate, and yet at least one thing becomes absolutely apparent – Lydia Tár is not a good person.
What is there to make of her final scene that sends her plummeting from high to lowbrow culture? Field is cryptic with the look that one young prostitute gives her from within a line-up, astutely arranged in the formation of an orchestra. Like Olga, the one who makes eye contact is labelled number 5. There is something about this that churns Lydia’s guilty stomach. How much remorse does she have for her actions, and how much of that is purely selfish? Firm answers don’t come easily in Tár, leaving us to wonder whether a new cycle of abuse is about to begin as she stands in front of a new orchestral ensemble, significantly less revered than the Berlin Philharmonic. In that moment though, it barely matters. She pours every drop of musical passion she has remaining into it, once again deified by the act of boundless control. Lydia Tár’s new reign may be more menial than ever, but even now her ravenous ambition still approaches the smallest of jobs with an unflinching, formidable authority, patiently waiting for the day she moves back on up the ladder.
Tár is currently playing in theatres.
This is the most we ever see of Krista, but her name and legacy hang thick in the air all through Tár.
In the very first scene of Babylon, we find studio hand Manny trying to handle an elephant and transport it to a raucous party in the Hollywood hills. Later in the dusty night-time deserts of Los Angeles, ‘it girl’ Nellie squares up to a rattlesnake, ready to fight it in front of her fellow partygoers. Somewhere else in a sex dungeon that is hidden beneath the city, a chained alligator snaps at visitors, and a muscle-bound circus freak eats live rats.
That these people are constantly lowering themselves to the level of animals speaks multitudes about the bestial nature of their own humanity. As far as Damien Chazelle’s decadent vision of early Hollywood is concerned, there is little separating one from the other. Babylon swings as hard in its debauched maximalism as the pleasure-seeking characters populating its 1920s movie sets, and in doing so eagerly teases apart the connection between their pioneering genius and their self-gratifying depravity.
Chazelle commits to the debauchery of his party scenes, revelling in long takes and obscene acts.
Chazelle is no stranger to exploring the insurmountable ambition of artists, nor is he one to shirk that quality in his own work. Babylon writhes with excitement at cinema’s potential during the years of its own formation, inviting us into Nellie and Manny’s first days on set via long takes energetically tracking through the scorching Californian desert. There, silent dramas unfold on pop-up wooden stages, hundreds of extras in Medieval armour clash for giant epics, and full orchestras play off to the side for dramatic effect. Frivolous squabbles and lethal catastrophes are equally part of the job, although the petty threats of Nellie’s jealous co-star clearly hold greater weight than the accidental impalement of an actor during a chaotic battle scene.
Chazelle has a thorough dedication to filling the whole frame, building out the scope of the scene with extras all through the background.
This isn’t the only collateral death to take place in Babylon either. It is often only after the dust has cleared that bodies are discovered, whether in the heat of a frantic shoot or in the drug-fuelled parties where cast and crew blow off steam. They are little more than unfortunate sacrifices to the vast industry being built, likened in the film’s own title to the mighty ancient city of Babylon which rose to indulgent heights and subsequently fell from God’s grace. In a slightly more obscure reference, it is also a nod to the famously gigantic Babylon set from the monumental silent epic Intolerance, itself typifying the spectacle of early Hollywood filmmaking. Either way, Chazelle’s symbolic intentions are clear. This modern empire of innovation contains both the best and worst of humanity, not as warring factions, but rather as qualities paradoxically contained in each individual, simultaneously carving out new artistic paths and feeding their own hedonistic, gluttonous egos.
Much like his characters, Chazelle doesn’t hold back from bombarding us with displays of absolute excess either. In ornate, golden halls where exotic dancers and drunken partygoers run wild, he fills his shots with expressionistic clutter, adopting the cinematic language of Josef von Sternberg’s 1930s romantic dramas. In this manner, there is also a hint of silent comedy conventions at play which dedicate the entire frame to visual gags, interrupting conversations with someone suddenly falling through a window in the background, or having a car appearing out of nowhere to crash into a statue.
Unlike so many of these silent comedies though, Chazelle’s camera couldn’t be more liberated from the constraints of static tripods. It announces its vigour early on in a shot that spends several minutes flying in acrobatic movements through a party, swooping above the heads of guests and right into the band’s blaring trumpets. Whip pans and tracking shots blend perfectly with Babylon’s rhythmic montages, and later as we cut between multiple urgent missions on movie sets, Chazelle’s parallel editing delivers a propulsive sequence which itself draws on this era’s formal innovations. Whether unleashing ecstasy or hysteria though, his kinetic direction keeps Justin Hurwitz’s up-tempo jazz score bouncing along by its side, pounding out bright, brassy motifs that look ahead to the rock ‘n’ roll music of future decades.
Chazelle’s editing is often driven by rhythmic montages, thrumming along to Justin Hurwitz’s up-tempo jazz score.
Virtually everything here exudes the cinematic vigour you would expect from the director of Whiplash and La La Land, and yet Babylon is far more aggressive than either in both form and content. It skewers the pretensions of its artists with derisive cynicism, sharply identifying their uninhibited amorality and the necessity of such behaviour to let their professional ambitions flourish. The hubristic downfall of early Hollywood is especially delineated with clearer lines and richer nuances though when our focus is narrowed down to the central figures in Chazelle’s tale, which he attaches to archetypes of his historical setting.
Although relative newcomer Diego Calva is technically in the lead as aspiring producer and Mexican immigrant Manny, he is not given as much material to chew on as Margot Robbie or Brad Pitt, essentially serving as the link between their parallel character arcs. Still, he carries the strain of the part well, nervously sweating as he races to pick up a rented camera before sundown, and visibly on edge as he descends several circles of hell into the “asshole of Los Angeles” to pay off a debt with fake money.
For Robbie, her turn as actress Nellie LaRoy may be her single greatest performance yet, luminously drawing attention in crowds and simultaneously mouthing off in a noisy New Jersey accent. She is the definition of a self-made movie star, rising to fame through sheer charisma, talent, and a little bit of luck, while refusing to consider the long-term ramifications of her reckless lifestyle. Like Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, she represents the glory of a historical epoch, though Nellie evidently carries far greater emotional baggage. With more conservative attitudes developing in the 1930s and the restrictive Production Code looming on the horizon, her attempts to reform her party girl image fall flat – she is willing to put on an act for the camera, but never to compromise her own identity.
The camera lifts into this transcendent overhead shot of Margot Robbie luxuriating at the party – the aura she carries with her is mesmerising.
Nellie is a clear surrogate for silent movie star Clara Bow, but she is just one of several historical substitutes populating Babylon’s expansive ensemble. Cabaret singer Lady Fay Zhu asserts a magnetic presence, representing the real-life Anna May Wong as the first Chinese-American actress to gain international fame. Elsewhere, African-American bandleader Sidney Palmer parallels jazz drummer Curtis Mosby, finding himself contending with the industry’s systematic racism. There is a mythological quality to the legacy that each build during their times in the spotlight, standing in for an alternate vision of Hollywood not too distant from reality, though it is Pitt’s debonair film star Jack Conrad who wrestles with fame’s fleeting nature most directly.
Chazelle fills out his ensemble with these compelling minor characters, drawing inspiration from real historical figures.
Much like Douglas Fairbanks, Jack’s career takes a sizeable hit in the transition to sound films. He spies on audiences sniggering at his line deliveries, and an enlightening conversation with gossip columnist Elinor St. John forces a recognition of his own mortality within the ever-turning wheel of the film industry. A long take floating through his hotel brings his arc to a poignant end, but much like Nellie’s own ambiguous walk into darkness, there is an enduring indelibility attached to the image of his graceful exit.
Brad Pitt’s character arc moves parallel to Robbie’s, tracing the transition from one Hollywood era into the next.
At some point or another in Babylon, each major character finds peace in obscurity, finally allowing them an escape from the anarchy and copious bodily fluids of Hollywood’s incessant frenzy. Some of the drama here is not operating at the same level as many of the earlier scenes, slightly compromising the momentum Chazelle has built up, though the unadulterated experimentalism that he points his ending towards makes for a feverishly gratifying conclusion.
In its very last scene, Babylon steps beyond the confines of its own narrative, embracing the entirety of film history as an ongoing project of avant-garde invention, and involving each artist as an essential stepping stone along the way. They mix in playful, spontaneous patterns, much like the colourful dyes intercut throughout the manic montage, becoming part of something larger than any one of them. In this moment, Chazelle finally distils Babylon’s formal ambition into its most pure, self-aware state, all at once recognising the tragically human flaws of those who laid its foundations, and yet equally remaining steadfast in his intoxicated, eloquent expressions of love for the artform itself.
The false miracle which the impoverished O’Donnell family devote their entire lives to in The Wonder makes for a dangerous illusion. It would be comforting for many to imagine that God has blessed their young 11-year-old girl, Anna, with the ability to survive without food, especially given the recent trauma of the Great Famine which saw millions starve across Ireland. There are deeper wounds than that haunting the O’Donnells though, too troubling for them to address head-on without some religious justification. Belief is a prison for young Anna – or is it freedom, liberating her from the scars of abuse? Perspective is key to understanding the subjective nature of these delicate fantasies, suggests director Sebastián Lelio, whose direction takes a self-reflexive step back from this tale of desperate faith to examine it as an introspective metanarrative.
His Brechtian intentions are clear right too from the very first shot, where the film’s own soundstage stands with it sets all built, ready for shooting. As the camera pans across the scene, a narrator guides us in, encouraging a suspension of disbelief which itself will soon come under our own scrutiny.
“The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion. We are nothing without stories. And so we invite you to believe in this one.”
It’s a remarkably smooth tracking shot which joins these two settings, bridging the gap between reality and fiction as represented by the soundstage and the ship set.
It is a bold, postmodern swing from Lelio, and one that might rely a little too much on heavy-handed exposition in these opening lines. Very gradually, his camera drifts from the studio into a ship set where Florence Pugh’s English nurse, Lib, is en route to her station in rural Ireland, tasked with observing and reporting on young Anna’s miraculous fast. From this point on, Lelio weaves in his fourth wall breaks far more delicately, immersing us into his painstakingly accurate period detail so that we may forget the artifice that lies just outside the camera’s view.
The subsequent fourth wall breaks after the opening are subtler. The voiceover returns as Kitty is revealed to be the narrator, and later on Anna looks directly at the camera without speaking. All part of Lelio’s grand formal experiment.
Once we are fully absorbed into this historical setting, it quickly becomes apparent just how marvellous an achievement The Wonder is in its rusticated production design, with the green paint peeling off walls and rusticated décor speaking to the desperation of the era. Just as gorgeous are the beguiling tracking shots which roll through these candlelit interiors, and the Irish landscapes which consume the O’Donnell’s family cottage in a sea of rolling green hills and grey skies. It certainly helps having cinematographer Ari Wegner onboard too with her penchant for shooting natural light, which she only recently proved in The Power of the Dog. As much as this is a visually mesmerising experience though, The Wonder is also an eloquent deconstruction of its own fictitiousness, intermittently ripping us from the film’s verisimilitude to remind us of the fabricated psychodrama we have invested in.
Rusticated period decor with peeling green paint and firelit interiors – integral to our immersion in this world.Ari Wegner’s camera movement through Irish landscapes amasses great beauty in these exteriors.
During Lib’s stay with the O’Donnells she encounters William, another sceptic who has been drawn to this miracle and is now looking to expose it in the media. The two find common ground, both having lost family in tragic circumstances and now believing they are witnessing Anna’s own death through the neglect of her own parents. It his gift to the young girl which has the greatest metaphorical significance in this tale though – an optical illusion toy which, when spun, blends a picture of a bird and a cage together to form a single image. So then, is the bird trapped or free? “That’s for you to decide. Inside. Outside,” William answers her.
Lelio smoothly ties this visual conceit into his long dissolves, superimposing Anna’s slumber over Lib’s journey across a field in one glorious composition, but even more powerfully we find Pugh’s own face trapped inside that cage as the toy continues to spin. She may not be confined to any faith in the same way as Anna or her family, but the way she ritualistically plays with the tiny boots of her deceased baby, it appears that she is enslaved to a fantasy of a different kind.
Pugh framed like the bird in the cage through this long dissolve – a great visual conceit and metaphor tied together.A perfect graphic match cut, with the contours of Anna’s sleeping body lining up with the shape of the mountains.
And so too are we, Lelio reminds us, with the repeated mantra of “In. Out. In. Out,” reflecting our own cyclical shift in and out of this immersion. To simultaneously believe in a comforting lie and to understand its separation from reality is the balance that must be struck, and as Anna keeps growing sicker, the O’Donnells only dig deeper into their self-delusion, praying that she will at least be granted a sacred death.
Rebirth and baptism captured in this pair of nicely framed close-ups. This is a feather in the cap for Pugh after her magnificent breakthrough year in 2019.
The only way to find healing from the prison of old beliefs is to let them die and be reborn as new ones, and therein lies the only true salvation for those in The Wonder haunted by past traumas. These illusions need not be destructive, but as we see in Lib’s case, they can offer new opportunities for self-reflection and growth. Once again, Lelio turns that back on us with his bookended return to the film’s own soundstage. “In. Out. In. Out,” chants our narrator – quite curiously Anna’s own sister – asking us both to believe in and observe these events from afar. It is an unexpectedly provocative period drama he constructs here, purposefully dismantling its own form to examine the purpose it holds as a piece of metafiction, but it is through such profound introspection that he paradoxically draws us even deeper into its richly designed world of believers and sceptics.
Nicolas Winding Refn | 6 episodes (47 – 56 minutes)
Nicolas Winding Refn’s enigmatic odyssey through Copenhagen’s criminal underworld of sex traffickers, drug lords, and vampires is not the sort of Netflix series that flies by with propulsive momentum. It demands patience, a stomach for the grotesque, and a certain willingness to fall under its violent, neon-soaked trance, effectively playing to the same niche portion of viewers who could abide the icy detachment of Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon. Copenhagen Cowboy feels much more epic in scope than either of those films though, marking Refn’s second foray into television following 2019’s Too Old to Die Young, and his first in his native Danish language since 2005’s Pusher 3. Elements of the supernatural have certainly crept into his slow-burn thrillers before, but by centring the mysteriously superpowered Miu in his nocturnal vision of Denmark’s capital city, this Gothic neo-noir western effectively marks his most surreal venture into the paranormal yet.
The full extent of Miu’s skillset only really comes through gradual revelations though. Of this six-episode series, episode 1 may be the weakest overall, taking its time to set her up as a ‘lucky charm’ hired out by wealthy clientele. The first person we meet seeking this good fortune is Rosella, the middle-aged matriarch of a peculiar crime family, who wishes to fall pregnant with Miu’s assistance. At a house party, the androgynous young woman is passed around, stroked, and has snippets of her hair cut off by guests, effectively being objectified in a similar manner as the undocumented immigrants being pimped out from Rosella’s basement. The escape of one of these women, Cimona, in the final minutes of this episode sets in motion one of the series’ main plot threads, which sends her into the murderous hands of the blond, baby-faced Nicklas.
Parts of the first episode feel reminiscent of The Neon Demon with scenes in neon-lit change rooms and beautiful, stoic women.Miu’s first instance of payback ends episode 2 – a glorious, blazing set piece.
From here, Refn continues to develop Copenhagen Cowboy as a psychedelic battle between abusive patriarchal institutions and the women they exploit. In episode 2 we meet Mother Hulda, the owner of a Chinese restaurant who we later learn has had her daughter taken by local gangster Mr Chiang. Though Refn’s dialogue is impassive and his actors’ facial expressions are stoic to the point of being inhuman, the strongest connection between any two characters may be the one here between Hulda and Miu, who sets out on a mission to get her daughter back. Just as she can bless people, so too can she apparently bring bad luck to those who deserve it, and as a skilled martial artist and clairvoyant, she poses a threat formidable enough to take down one major villain in a ludicrously anticlimactic fight.
For all the slow pacing and long takes, Refn remains a very active editor, using long dissolves over Miu’s first direct interaction with Nicklas.
In essence, Miu is an avenging angel of sorts, even framed in one key shot preceding a significant showdown with a ring light around her head like a halo, and in another with eagle wings stretching out behind her. She keeps any strong emotions she might possess locked up under the blue tracksuit that she wears like armour, its stiff turtleneck reaching all the way up to her chin, and simply through her penetrating gaze she can bring Siberian gangsters crumbling to the floor, wracked with fear and regret.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m just looking at you.”
Inspired framing of the eagle wings and halo behind Miu’s head, setting her up as an avenging angel.
With what feels like several seconds of pause between each line of dialogue, Refn tunes us into the constant, synthesised ambience that fills the silences, thrumming and reverberating to the distorted rhythms crafted by Cliff Martinez and his team of composers. As is often the case with his and Refn’s collaborations, their work is a perfect formal match, soaking us in the ambience of electronic drones and vibrant neon lights that illuminate virtually every shady establishment in Copenhagen. These vivid fluorescent hues are often shaped through practical light sources built into Refn’s sets and making for some striking visual clashes, with Mother Hulda’s Chinese restaurant of red lanterns precisely arranged along green and blue curtains being a standout. As we come to understand Miu’s transcendent nature in more detail via a dream sequence as well, it almost appears as though these lights are radiantly pouring off her own skin and clothing, bathing her in an otherworldly glow colour against an entirely black background.
For a television series, this is loaded with these dead gorgeous colour compositions, laying out these red lanterns in the Chinese restaurant.Psychedelic dream sequences are everywhere, here emitting light from Miu’s body as her origins are revealed.Like every Refn film since Drive, this is soaked in his characteristic neon lighting – dogged commitment to an aesthetic.
Refn’s introduction to episode 5 also uses these vibrant contrasts to set up its gang war conceit particularly well, as he horizontally splits the screen and tracks his camera in opposite directions to examine both sides of the conflict – the blue half arranged in a tableau depicting the Last Supper, and the red posing on motorcycles. It is in those moments where rich displays of mise-en-scene and glacial camera movements combine that we feel fully immersed in his eerie environments, whether we are pointedly inching forward on character close-ups or floating around the golden apartment office of Miu’s old associate, Miroslav. Easily the most formally robust choice here though are Refn’s camera pans, frequently positioning us as distant, passive observers of Denmark’s urban underbelly.
A superb opening to episode 5 which focuses on a gang war, with the split screen, camera pans, and conflicting colour palettes.Manipulating the golden light in Miroslav’s apartment office to throw these shapes across the ceiling. The use of darkness and lamps is particularly reminiscent of Gordon Willis’ photography in The Godfather.
The other major motif weaved through Copenhagen Cowboy’s scenes of animalistic greed and brutality are the pigs. Rosella’s passive husband, Sven, barely utters a word besides the bestial snorts and squeals he emits when beaten by her brother, Andre. It is revealed in episode 3 that Mr Chiang disposes of bodies by having them fed to Mother Hulda’s swine. In a simple yet deft cut, Refn moves from this scene to Nicklas playing with his own pet pigs, which we also met in the series’ very first scene. These men are the lowest of humanity propping themselves up as the greatest through their wealth and influence, though in such direct comparisons Refn exposes them as creatures of thoughtless instinct, constantly seeking to fulfil their most base desires.
Refn’s world is unforgiving and twisted, and his pig motif is part of that, emphasising the worst of humanity as thoughtless animals.Refn stages tableaux with stillness and absolute attention to detail, leaving his camera as the only moving part of the scene.
Of these three men, it is Nicklas who is the most purely bone-chilling as an antagonist, possessing vampiric qualities that drive his bloodlust and make an enemy out of Miu. It is often in his house where Refn detaches from his neon aesthetic and turns to brighter, natural light, even offering a pastel, floral wallpaper backdrop to a Norman Bates-like monologue. He keeps a coffin in his basement too, and though one might initially presume that he sleeps in it, beneath its lid lie darker secrets which rear their head in Copenhagen Cowboy’s last two episodes.
The camera zoom and floral wallpaper in this shot frames Nicklas as an eerie figure.
The forest set piece where Nicklas’ surprise finally emerges to face Miu makes for a mesmerisingly surreal finale, shedding a dreamy natural light over a field of mysterious, tracksuited allies and her own terrified face, now showing emotion for the very first time. As Refn winds the ending towards a pair of cliff-hangers though, it is hard to not feel like we are being cheated of a final punch, leaving us wishing that this series was its own self-contained project. Still, as far as television goes, Copenhagen Cowboy is an exceptional cinematic triumph, traversing the psychological terrain of its otherworldly protagonist with disquieting stoicism and formal intensity. If Refn has another season of ideas in him to continue building out this hallucinatory Danish underworld, then let it be done. There’s nothing else on TV quite like it.
Even Refn’s natural light looks otherworldly, shedding a purple hue over this finale.
Copenhagen Cowboy is currently streaming on Netflix.
The closest that Wes Anderson has ever gotten to constructing a murder mystery in his pastel world of eccentric ensembles and dioramas would be The Grand Budapest Hotel, but director Tom George gives us the next best thing in the delightfully quirky See How They Run. It opens on the 100th performance of Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap on West End, and talks of adapting it into a Hollywood movie sees American director Leo Köpernick fly over to sign contracts, antagonise stakeholders, and ultimately die at the hands of a masked assailant. His post-mortem narration is keenly self-aware, criticising the trite conventions of whodunits as they play out before out before our eyes in flashbacks and character archetypes.
“You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all.”
There’s just a single problem here – for all its playful twists and techniques, this statement rings too true in See How They Run’s extraordinarily familiar plotting, lacking the originality of Rian Johnson’s captivating Knives Out series or the narrative intricacy of Agatha Christie’s novels. The Mousetrap becomes a template of sorts for Mark Chappell’s screenplay, which directly references and splits the play’s double-twist into two separate reveals, one of which is hilariously undermined as a false lead, and the other leaving us somewhat underwhelmed. Even in this star-studded cast of suspects, few are developed well enough for us to engage with the implications of their potential guilt.
Instead, it is our two leading detectives played by Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell who are the most compelling figures in See How They Run, forming a terrific comedic duo as the eager young constable and the jaded senior inspector. Their chemistry is impeccable, and their conflicting mannerisms are well-defined, leading them through misadventures which are often far more exciting than their actual investigation. With Ronan in a lead role and a smarmy Adrien Brody filling in the role of the doomed murder victim, Köpernick, George notably pulls in two of Wes Anderson’s regular collaborators to put their deadpan spin on the script’s witty dialogue, building a rhythm that pulses to the beat of the sharply-paced editing.
In fact, it is primarily in that self-conscious artifice of freeze frames, split screens, and neatly composed visuals that the film flourishes, seeing George borrow from Anderson’s stylistic repertoire. With symmetrical frames and the camera’s perpendicular angles frequently keeping us a distance from the actors, everything is set up perfectly for this meta-study of a classic genre, irreverently breaking it down into parts before assembling it again into a buddy cop mystery. There are whodunits out there which may be more sophisticated in their construction, but See How They Run still makes for a visually adventurous and hilariously fun entry into the canon.
See How They Run is currently streaming on Disney Plus, and is available to buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon Video.
For the staff working aboard the luxury yacht in Triangle of Sadness, there is no choice to offer anything but cheerful hospitality. For the affluent guests, a stuffy air of upper-class pretension must be upheld at all costs, no matter what the stormy ocean throws at them. For Carl, the model who gets free cruise tickets through his influencer girlfriend Yaya, that worry wrinkle which forms between his eyebrows is a blight on an otherwise handsome face, but thankfully it can be fixed with Botox. Swedish director and satirist Ruben Östlund takes the name one casting director colloquially attaches to that damning crease as the title of his film, and though his ensemble of eccentric millionaires and service workers do all they can to suppress the visible discomfort it betrays, their uncontrollable bodily fluids have other plans.
Östlund’s skewering of the ultra-wealthy comes in a year where other films such as Glass Onion and The Menu have covered similar ground, but where those respectively filtered their satire through murder mystery and horror genres, Triangle of Sadness is single-minded in its wry mockery. This is a black comedy in the vein of Luis Buñuel – perhaps not as sharp in its observations or as formally rigorous as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but still carrying on the same spirit of subversive wit, underscoring the incongruity between the world his characters believe they live in and the reality they can’t escape.
Divided into three chapters and a prologue that each take place in radically different settings, Östlund at times seems to be distracted by the sheer number of possible targets within his purview, introducing compelling characters late in the narrative and letting others disappear for periods of time without much consistency. Remarkably though, the hit-rate of his comedic vignettes is high all throughout, with his actors’ double-edged line deliveries being just as memorable as the riotously lowbrow set piece at the centre of the film.
It is the intersection of two ill-fated decisions made by Captain Thomas Smith and one deluded passenger, Vera, where this luxury cruise descend into hellish chaos. While in a drunken state, Thomas unwisely resolves to host the captain’s dinner on Thursday night when violent storms are forecast. Meanwhile, Vera’s vapid gesture of goodwill that forces a staff member to go swimming is only accepted with an anxious smile, and quickly leads to the overenthusiastic head of staff, Paula, ushering the rest of the crew down the waterslide. It is an absurd sight to see them all lining up for no real purpose, and as the cooks leave the kitchen to join them, we see the beginnings of a catastrophe about to unfold through the seafood they have left sitting in the warm air.
There is something off about the evening as it rolls around, and it isn’t just the raw fish. For virtually the entirety of these fine dining scenes, Östlund slowly rocks his set from side to side, inducing a seasickness on his audience as well as his high-flying characters who balance themselves at skewed angles. Thomas dutifully greets his guests and, like his subordinates, capitulates to their ludicrous demands (better to just assure them the non-existent sails will be cleaned than argue), while wine glasses and bottles roll along the floor. Östlund employs a few solid tracking shots through Triangle of Sadness, but perhaps his greatest comes here as we follow the silver dishes out into the dining hall, where an intermittent banging puts us on edge.
It is absurdly funny to see one woman, right after her first bout of vomiting, try to maintain her composure by washing it down with a glass of champagne. Funnier still is the drunk Russian oligarch, Dimitry, breaking into the captain’s cockpit during the confusion and mischievously announcing over the loudspeaker that the ship is sinking. Each time we are convinced that this cruise has hit rock bottom, Östlund torments his characters with another horrific development worse than the last, like a Gaspar Noé thriller veering hard into dark comedy. Even when we think it is finally over, it isn’t, and Triangle of Sadness suddenly launches into a final act which turns the power hierarchy of the service industry on its head.
How feeble Dimitry’s own capitalistic convictions must be for him to start spouting Marxist quotes the moment he is the one at the bottom of the ladder, especially when it was only the night before that he was obnoxiously battling the captain’s socialist musings with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher soundbites. So too does Abigail, the ship’s toilet manager, become a tyrannical dictator when the opportunity presents itself, choosing to domesticate the men and give special treatment to the women. Up to this point she has not played a particularly significant role, but Östlund has still been sure to underscore the disparity between Paula’s cheery, customer-facing staff above deck, and Abigail’s non-white labourers down below, thanklessly cleaning up the passengers’ vomit and overflowing toilets.
Though Carl and Yaya’s insecure relationship fades into the background through the middle of the film, their maddening disputes over money, feminism, and fidelity are eventually brought back towards its end. They are not as wealthy as their fellow holidaymakers, but in public they still confidently assert themselves as a young, attractive couple pretending they can pay for the opulence surrounding them. Despite being gluten intolerant, Yaya will snap photos with a forkful of pasta for her Instagram followers, while in the cramped backseat of a taxi Östlund frantically swings his camera between both sides of their superficial argument, as if watching a tennis match in close-up. Of all the self-conceited fools who populate Triangle of Sadness, it is not the rich, but those who pretend to be rich who most deserve our pity and scorn. It is ultimately on the lonely shores of their own vanity where these image-obsessed men and women dig their graves, falling to the natural, violent whims of a world that simply can’t be bought.
Triangle of Sadness is currently playing in theatres.
The entire history of war movies is filled with pacifist statements rendered through violent horror, and Edward Berger’s recent adaptation of the 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front is no different in this aspect. Similar ground has certainly been covered in the 1930 film based on the same source material, though where that was a Hollywood production interpreting a specifically German experience of World War I, there is an aching, historical authenticity infused in Berger’s interpretation that speaks to his nation’s guilt and trauma. For the soldiers on the frontlines in the war’s final days, it matters very little that they are losing to the Allies, and whatever fiery patriotism they once felt for the ‘Fatherland’ is gone. All they have to do is survive long enough to see 11am on November 11. Whatever shame they face when they return home will be negligible compared to their relief of being away from the Western Front.
Before we meet any of our main characters though, Berger presages the horrors that await them with a haunting prologue tracking the uniforms that they will soon wear. His editing is patient, lingering on the deathly silence of a forest shrouded in blue mist, its tall trees reaching for the sky, and a battlefield strewn with the bodies of lifeless men. As the camera slowly levels out from an overhead shot to reveal the soul-crushing expanse of the devastation, it picks up on the movement of one German soldier crawling over the top of the trenches, heading towards his death. These opening minutes are completely void of music, until we cut to a mortifying wide shot of coffins being packed tightly together in a pit, and we are blasted with an angry, diminished triad of distorted synths. This simple motif will persist all through All Quiet on the Western Front, but it is especially as the soldiers’ uniforms are trucked off to a factory, washed, repaired, and sent to the next round of recruits that it sounds like an apocalyptic warning to Paul Bäumer and his friends.
A quiet, haunting prologue to what will be an otherwise loud and brutal 2 and a half hours, introducing us to the Western Front via some of the year’s most beautiful landscape photography.This could be straight out of The Thin Red Line, except here there is a bleakness in the colours and overcast sky you don’t find in Malick’s work.Mirroring the shot looking up at the trees with a shot looking down at the ground where dozens of dead soldiers lay. Slowly, the camera tracks down and then levels out with the horizon, devastatingly revealing the expanse of the carnage.
The lie fed to these young men that great glory awaits them on the battlefield can be easily traced down to a single piece of dramatic irony that Paul very nearly picks up on – the name tag of his uniform’s previous owner stitched into the fabric. That’s just a leftover from another recruit who didn’t fit the measurements, he is told, before the officer rips it off and drops it in a pile of other names that have been so thoughtlessly discarded. The disheartening implications are clear: these men are considered more expendable than even the clothes they wear.
The first time anyone notes that “this isn’t how I imagined it” comes on the very first night, when they are forced to bucket water out of the trenches just so they have somewhere to lie down. It is a minor inconvenience compared to what other adversities they are yet to suffer, but it doesn’t take long for them to recognise its triviality when the first of these men to die, Ludwig, befalls his fate a mere few hours later. The idea that one can simply ‘ease into’ these conditions is hopeless.
Fields are graded in cool blues, stripping the land of all its warmth.Fire, smoke, and burnt-out scenery – Berger’s visual craft here is incredible.
Like The Thin Red Line before it, the bleak beauty that All Quiet on the Western Front instils in such total carnage paints out this grisly battle between the German and French as a stain on nature, lingering on frosty blue fields, withering vegetation, and landscapes ruined by the besmirchment of warfare. The flickering of bright, yellow flares up in the sky breaks this aesthetic up in one scene that feels almost spiritual in its meditative tranquillity, illuminating a desolate expanse of burnt-out trees and the silhouette of a fallen soldier tangled in a web of barbed wire, while his fellow troops gaze at the burning balls of light in awestruck wonder.
An almost spiritual interlude as flares are sent up into the sky, offering what might be one of the only warm light sources in the film.
Beyond this brief interlude though, Berger is committed to his harrowing imagery, working with a huge number of extras stretching into the distance to shoot their impending deaths like a horror film. In one scene, he lands a demoralising weight with the discovery of sixty missing German soldiers lying dead in an abandoned building, revealing that they were gassed after taking their masks off too early. Even more terrifying is the Germans’ successful assault on the French, which quickly turns against them when tanks emerge from the fog like monsters mercilessly mowing down everything in their path. As airplanes and flamethrowers join the fight, Berger adds fire and smoke to his dreary mise-en-scene, silhouetting Paul’s friend, Albert, in a disturbingly grim composition that sees him unsuccessfully beg for mercy on his knees.
This entire sequence plays out like a horror film with the tanks emerging out of the sick, yellow mist, and Albert’s hopeless surrender.These close-ups put us in a weary headspace like that which Come and See evokes, revealing the visceral impact of war in the transformation of one young man’s face.
The sheer fluidity with which we navigate the action only adds to the visual accomplishment here as well, rolling the camera through trenches much like Stanley Kubrick did in Paths of Glory, and traversing the battlefield in long takes as we saw in 1917. The impact is visceral, refusing to let us escape from the ongoing chaos until we move into the parallel storyline of negotiations between German and Allied officials. The interior, period décor of these scenes is stunning in their soft lighting and design, noting a huge separation between those giving the orders and the ones carrying them out, though some tightness in the pacing is sacrificed in the intercutting between both.
Tracking shots across battlefields and through trenches like 1917 and Paths of Glory.The scenes set around the negotiations of authorities make for a nice tonal contrast, revealing the gaping chasm between those making the decisions and the soldiers carrying them out.
Still, Berger does effectively manage to build these storylines to a unifying climax in the final act, raising our hopes for Paul and his remaining friends’ survival right before they are commanded to attack the French in one last show of German strength and dignity, fifteen minutes before the armistice at 11am. Paul has made some real friendships with other men while on the Western Front, and Berger spends a lot of time building out the sensitivity and warmth of these connections as the sole pleasures to be found in wartime, yet as we wind towards the end, even these companionships feel ultimately pointless. They aren’t enough to stop one soldier from killing himself out of fear of being permanently crippled, and perhaps even Paul himself could be held partly responsible for the chilling murder of his friend, Kat, by the son of a farmer they have been stealing from.
Immense compositional beauty as Kat faces up to the consequences of his thieving, set in this forest of towering, black trees and soft, blue mist.
The implication of there being quiet on the Western Front is put forward in the bookends of Berger’s film as a pair of fateful tragedies, recognising the cruel irony that only when its occupants are dead can there ever be true silence across its muddy fields and burnt forests. His direction does not hold back from demonstrating the haunting chill of these scenes either, certainly in the audio that whispers quiet breezes through the trenches, but also in the visuals which position the camera as the only moving thing in this environment. The sounds of gunshots, explosions, and screams may be confronting to hear, but All Quiet on the Western Front recognises that the true misery of war emerges in the still, lifeless aftermath, where an insurmountable grief is born.
A quiet bookend to the start of the film, returning to still, natural landscapes.
All Quiet on the Western Front is currently streaming on Netflix.
