It is evident that Joe Wright isn’t all that interested in creating a straight page-to-screen adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, as the 1995 BBC television miniseries is already there for anyone looking to scratch that itch. His cinematic interpretation of Jane Austen’s novel brings a stylistic and formal flair to Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy’s terse romance that we haven’t seen before, efficiently constructing the world of 19th century England in long takes that soar through lavish ballrooms, hallways, and mansions.
As we glide alongside his characters, we occasionally find ourselves detaching from one and hooking onto another, as if trying to eavesdrop on a little bit of every conversation going on. When we reach the ball scene, Wright’s camera sways and twirls around Elizabeth and Mr Darcy’s dance, binding them together in a whirlwind of tension that separates them from the rest of the crowd. By constantly adjusting our frame of reference Wright heightens the romantic impressionism of Elizabeth’s world, and keeps finding new ways to paint her and other characters within intricately blocked crowds and gorgeously adorned rooms.
Wright’s camera is just as much a part of the dance as Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, circling and swooning with them in this moment of unison.Mr Darcy’s country estate, Pemberley, is an especially attractive set piece. The painted murals as backdrops and opulent decor here make for striking imagery.
Given how much the literary format lends itself to directly conveying a character’s personal thoughts, there is a challenge that Wright takes on in visually establishing the coldness of our main couple’s relationship while imbuing it with a touch of sensuality and yearning. He emphasises Mr Darcy’s hands in cutaways, usually betraying some sort of emotion that he is too taciturn to express. When the two lovers dance together at the ball, Elizabeth is one of the few women to not be wearing gloves, accentuating the skin-to-skin contact taking place between them.
All of this comes to a head in the final profession of love between the two. As Mr Darcy emerges from the early morning fog, Wright refuses to the push the camera forward like he has in almost every other scene. Instead, it is Darcy who makes the decisive movement to approach us, signifying his momentous opening up. When he and Elizabeth finally embrace, she notes the coldness of his hands, tying off the motif that has finally turned from subtext to text.
Wright hangs on this shot for 45 seconds, for the first time letting Darcy approach the camera rather than the other way round.
One must certainly give credit to Jane Austen for providing Joe Wright such a rich piece of literature to begin with, but it is the extra dimension of cinematic world building that lets this adaptation of Pride and Prejudice flourish. No doubt there were plot points were removed or condensed to fit the entire novel into two hours, but considered on its own there is nothing here that feels incomplete or missing. This is a full-bodied period piece brimming with visual detail, from the rolling green hills of the English countryside to the 19th century ballrooms, and there is little that can detract from the power of its romanticism.
Pride and Prejudice is currently available to stream on Binge, and available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.
When young, affluent socialite Anna disappears on a boating holiday, little changes within her social circle. Her friend, Claudia, and lover, Sandro, wander the Sicilian coastline together, leisurely tracing any clues that might explain what happened, but this new gap that has opened up in their lives barely registers. The emptiness they feel has always been there; it is now just a little wider than before. They flirt and make love, trying to fill it in with something, anything. And yet everything they grasp at disintegrates in their fingers, leaving them nothing but a haunting, existential ennui through which they are paradoxically both isolated and unified.
In L’Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni’s characteristic use of architecture extends beyond the angular, modernist structures of the 1960s, as the breath-taking Aeolian Islands rise up into the scenery to permeate the landscape with rocky outcrops and cliffs. The metaphor of individuals as lonely islands in an expansive sea isn’t easily lost in the unambiguous dialogue, but its true power lies in the crisp, greyscale imagery. Harsh blacks and whites are almost non-existent, as Antonioni opts for low contrast photography which matches shades so closely that the permanently overcast sky virtually blends in with the sea.
An arresting greyscale palette in this harsh, coastal landscape.
When it comes to framing his affluent characters within these gorgeous compositions, his deep focus lens is the tool he returns to again and again, staggering bodies from the foreground to the background, turned in all different directions. For these men and women, merely the act of making eye contact requires mental effort. Instead, they are left to morosely wander through natural landforms and artificial structures, unable to find any connection to each other, let alone their lost friend.
Disconnection through blocking. Staggered across layers of the image, and not a hint of eye contact.
At one point on their meaningless quest for answers, Claudia and Sandro venture to a church where ropes stretch across its rooftop balcony. With Anna no longer between them, the two are left to consider how their relationship may evolve from this point on, and upon this sacred ground the prospect of marriage is raised. It is an off-hand comment, thrown out with little thought, and the contemplation that follows only cheapens the spiritual union by appealing to it as nothing but a cure for their chronic loneliness. During this deliberation, Claudia leans on one of the ropes, and accidentally tolls a church bell. In response, church bells from across the city start chiming in response, and suddenly a wide, honest smile stretches across her face. Though it is brief and arbitrary, she rejoices in this connection, this small moment of belonging to the larger world holding more significance for her than any other relationship she has encountered.
Like his Italian contemporaries, Antonioni firmly roots his style in the neorealism of the 1940s and 50s, shooting on location to ground his settings in a world he and his viewers are familiar with. The primary difference here is that Antonioni’s focus isn’t on the struggles of the downtrodden, or the heartbreaking impact of war and poverty. Rather the direct opposite, in fact, as Claudia, Sandro, and their friends lack any experience of earth-shattering events that might justify their constant state of discontent. For the Italian bourgeoisie who sit untouched above the rest of society, there is such a thin line between existence and non-existence that the disappearance of a friend barely registers. The only tangible truths out there are those huge, material constructions which tower over the city, like odes to the superfluity of human progress.
Antonioni always believed that social problems should remain secondary to cinema itself, which would certainly earn him criticisms today of “style over substance”, if that accusation actually meant anything. The vapidity of his characters should certainly not be mistaken for a flat artistic vision, as L’Avventura poignantly expresses a broad dissatisfaction with society, modernity, and above all, the fact that one even feels dissatisfied in the first place.
An immaculate melding of both natural and artificial landforms in the final shot – lonely souls lost in a harsh, modern world. An all-time great ending.
L’Avventura is currently available to stream on Kanopy, Mubi Australia, and The Criterion Channel.
It is a worthy conversation to have regarding where the line between movies and television sits, but when it comes to film directors bringing their unique voices to a miniseries it is hard to argue that the art they create is anything but cinema. As for The Underground Railroad, it is tough to imagine any serious discussion of Barry Jenkins’ greatest artistic accomplishments that doesn’t touch on this 10-hour epic.
On one hand, the bleakness of the antebellum South is horrifyingly realised in the executions, massacres, and torture scenes ridden all throughout this series. But in Jenkins’ re-invention of the “underground railroad”, which was actually a network of secret routes and safe houses to help African Americans escape slavery, he injects a dose of magical realism into the setting. Rather than undercutting the authenticity of the Black struggle, the historical revisionism of the railroad manifests as a retro-futuristic gift of modern-day resources to those who worked in secret to free slaves. The curated selection of contemporary pop and hip-hop songs which close out each episode emphasise these anachronisms, further drawing the connection between the past and present of America’s Black innovators and artists.
Harsh, desolate landscapes. Jenkins has created powerful character drama before, but nothing as sprawling as this.
Where so many miniseries fall into the trap of stretching out a feature-length narrative into a multi-hour marathon, Cora’s escape from Joel Edgerton’s black-clad, drawling slave-catcher, Ridgeway, takes on appropriately epic proportions that could only ever be recounted in a project of this size. There are a couple of episodes which sag in their middle acts as they hit similar plot beats a few too many times, but these are minor given the ten hours of pure cinematic ambition and storytelling. In fact, certain episodes which divert from the main narrative and delve into the backgrounds of supporting characters often end up being among the strongest. Rather than feeling like interruptions, these allow us insight into Jenkins’ world beyond Cora’s immediate point-of-view, giving depth to the lives and experiences of several supporting players.
One notable flashback episode strives to understand how Ridgeway became the rotten, empty man he is today, and in a remarkable subversion we come to realise that his own corruption was not born of cruel parents or a difficult childhood, but of his own inherent weakness. His father employs freedmen on his farm and preaches about the “Great Spirit”, which he believes holds the universe together. Where Ridgeway fails to understand the concept, Mack, a young African-American boy, becomes invested in keeping it alive through a small, lit match. Even when Ridgeway’s envy and cruelty sends Mack to the bottom of a well, that flame still burns strong, lighting up the darkness with its tiny, warm glow.
Evoking images of the railroad in in its gold-and-black colour palette, this shot looking down into the well represents a mere microcosm of the underground network stretching across the southern states – a system of people who, like Mack, believe in some version of the “Great Spirit”, shining brightly even in the most smothering shadows. Jenkins has previously proven his flair for lighting in Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, but his warm illumination of the trains, tunnels, and lamps in the underground settings are entirely unique in his oeuvre, seeming to exist in a fantastical alternate world separated from the brutal reality above.
The warm, golden lighting of the railroad lends a tone of magical realism to this setting, offering a reprieve from the bleak horrors of the surface.
Jenkins effectively plays right into the surrealism of this imagery, at his most direct plaguing Cora’s sleep with uneasy dreams of her deceased mother and a flourishing underground station, and in quieter, subtler moments, cutting away to portraits of supporting and minor characters standing in open plantations, houses, and stations, staring down the lens of the camera. He calls this motif the “gaze”, and in these Dreyer-like tableaux we are given the chance to look right into their open, honest eyes, the fourth wall entirely non-existent. These aren’t quite flashbacks, but rather memories of people removed from time, acknowledging the presence of an audience looking back at their stories. While they remain motionless, Jenkins’ camera is constantly tracking in, out, and around his subjects, restlessly intrigued by their silent expressions.
The “gaze”, as Jenkins calls it. It is a haunting visual motif, inviting but also implicating, evoking a connection to those who lie just outside the periphery of this narrative’s boundary.
This dynamic camerawork doesn’t draw attention to itself in many insanely long takes, but Jenkins frequently makes the choice to move through scenes without cutting. In quiet moments, he will drift from face to face, underscoring the austere tension between characters. His framing of close-ups in intimate scenes is like so few others of his generation, at times peering right into the souls of characters with front-on angles, and at other times letting them peer right into ours. In more epic sequences the camera will rise off the ground in unbelievable crane shots, capturing the devastating scope of a village on fire, or a blooming vineyard stretching across acres of land. Wherever it moves, Jenkins’ powerful imagery is sure to be present, often sharply pinpointing a specific subject in shallow focus while everything else melds into soft, painterly backgrounds.
Few directors have been able to capture close-ups like Jenkins. A perfect combination of framing, shallow focus, lighting, and background scenery.
Despite its aesthetic beauty The Underground Railroad is far more confronting than Jenkins’ previous works, not just in its depiction of a grim era fuelled by foul beliefs, but in its sharp indictments of white folk whose “helpful” attitudes mask insidious intentions. Cora moves from town to town across southern America, each one governed by its own set of rules regarding the rights of African-American people, and each one thus posing a different, unique danger. In a South Carolinian city, freedmen are encouraged to “perform” their persecution as education for white people. In North Carolina, a cult-like village executes any person of colour who sets foot within its borders. Even an all-Black community which abides by self-determinist politics relies on the protection of a white judge living in the next town over. You can’t blame Cora for wondering whether there really is such thing as a safe space in this world. The only times we truly believe she is ever free from harm is when she is in the dark, sunken tunnels of the railroad.
The camera moves smoothly from the ground into this overhead shot of a burning village.
It wouldn’t be right to discuss The Underground Railroad and ignore the consistently excellent work of Nicholas Brittell, whose collaborations with Barry Jenkins have always brought out his most mature, affecting scores. His melodies here are as tenderly moving as ever, but the dominant motif of the series is a descending sequence of four notes, often rendered with intense tremolos on string instruments. It is usually tied directly to the railroad, musically painting out a descent into the unknown, though its versatility allows for lighter renditions to reveal its more fantastical side, offering an escape from the horrors of the surface.
And indeed, the railroad itself is a complex concept to fully wrap one’s head around. At times it seems to be a perfect, dreamlike utopia, existing completely separate to the white people above. At other times it is lonely and dark, and the only way through it is by a handcar that must be manually operated. Barry Jenkins’ vision of a world where a phenomenon such as this needs to exist is chilling, but even at the lowest points of Cora’s journey, there remains the hope that an opening into the underground network is near enough for her to reach safety again. This metaphor for supportive Black communities stands strong all throughout The Underground Railroad, and with this as his central tenet Jenkins crafts an immense, era-defining cinematic epic.
The Underground Railroad is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman | 1hr 56min
Just when we thought Pixar had knocked off its serious mainstream competition, a superhero movie from Sony astounded us all with an animation style unlike anything we had seen before. The comic book influence shines through in its split screens, panels, and onomatopoeia, and the urban street art styling raucously announces itself in its bold, at times even abstract, imagery. It is a perfectly curated aesthetic to accompany Miles Morales’ Brooklyn-based hero journey, which fittingly begins in an abandoned subway station scrawled with colourful graffiti. It is here that he is bitten by a radioactive spider, and it is also where that radioactivity starts to colour Miles’ world with vivid fluorescence.
An animated comic book, right down to the onomatopoeia, thought boxes, and Ben-Day dots.
There is no need to explain the existence of this radioactive spider in Spider-Verse, not just because it seems like such a natural phenomenon to emerge from this luminescent vision of Brooklyn, but also because the origin of Spider-Man is so baked into our culture, it has essentially taken on mythological significance. Of course, the path to becoming Spider-Man is just one template of the traditional hero’s arc, but Spider-Verse demonstrates how broadly its conventions can be applied to a huge range of culture and identities, tying them together under a common set of values.
Several times we see alternate versions of Spider-Man introduce themselves and their backgrounds in the same format, beginning with some variation of the line “Let’s do this one last time”, as if to assume their own story is the definitive one. Though each of their lives varied greatly before they took on the mantle, we recognise from the patterns in their introductions that they all share a set of characteristics which led them to becoming Spider-Man: a bite from a radioactive spider, the death of a loved one, and growth from that grief to become a fighter for justice. Establishing each of their identities in these theme-and-variation montages is an exceptionally imaginative way to bring form to this ensemble of characters, effectively defining their individual and shared traits without getting caught up in over-exposition.
Great form in repetition of the same origin story – not to mention the deviation in genre and animation styles.
With an outline of the journey to becoming Spider-Man effectively sketched out, a path is set for Miles. Likewise, a similar shadow path is set for Wilson Fisk, AKA Kingpin. He too is imbued with his own complete emotional arc motivated by the death of his loved ones, and in his struggle with grief he proves to be an effective foil to Miles. Here is a man who has suffered immensely, just like every iteration of Spider-Man out there, but rather than growing from it to defend others, he has let it fester into bitterness. He would tear apart New York City if it means getting his family back, and that indeed becomes his plan, but in the process of enacting it he unwittingly becomes the sort of violent, resentful monster that they would have despised.
Miles, on the other hand, comes to a similar crossroads when faced with his Uncle Aaron’s cold-blooded murder. Aaron is also a fully-developed character, complete with his own set of affable quirks and tragic flaws, but our discovery that he has a dark side only makes his death all the more impactful. “The hardest thing about this job is you can’t always save everybody,” Miles is told in his mourning. Learning this lesson is a rite of passage for the path Miles is on, and it is only when he falls into the pits of despair and builds himself back up from it that he is able to reach the final stage of his transformation into Spider-Man, becoming a mature, confident, and empathetic hero.
The following scene where Miles dives upside down into the shining lights of New York City is jaw-droppingly beautiful, but there is also a good reason for why this specific image feels like such a significant part of his journey. From the moment Miles first gets his powers and meets Peter Parker, the cinematography starts to get more experimental with its off-kilter angles and lack of orientation, at times losing all sense of up and down as Miles and Peter walks across walls and hang from ceilings. Without any gravity to hold Peter or the other Spider-Men down, they perceive an entirely new world, and it is in this moment when Miles finally embraces the title and responsibility of Spider-Man that he fully grasps it too, gliding weightlessly through the city, untethered from the Earth below.
Weightless, powerful imagery meeting Miles’ embrace of his new identity.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a rare breed of non-auteur driven film that displays a genuine affection for the art form, and producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller can be given much of the credit for that. Their dedication to constructing its style from a blend of traditional and computer animation pays off immensely in the final product, lifting from conventional comic book styles while reinvigorating them with the sort of dynamic movement and effects that could only ever be rendered digitally. With one foot in the past and one in the future, Spider-Verse reflects its own deconstruction of the hero in its visual artistry, examining the patterns and core values which transcend cultures and generations to bind together those who engage in a common fight for justice.
The fluorescent colours in this finale – jaw-dropping pop art.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is currently available to stream on Netflix Australia, and available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.
No doubt a landmark of visual effects, but even if all of these were taken out (and I would hate to imagine doing so), Inception would still be Christopher Nolan’s greatest achievement in mise-en-scène. He had already established himself as a master of experimental narrative form by this point, and he continues to demonstrate that here in exploring the internal dream worlds of his characters through a nesting doll-like structure. But it wasn’t until he combined this with the sort of epic, ambitious visual style he first fully displayed in The Dark Knight that he became a generation-defining filmmaker, shaking the world with this mind-bending exercise in sheer imagination.
Clean, luxurious architecture and lighting. No doubt Nolan’s most beautiful film to date.
The lighting and set dressing of Nolan’s interiors are as sharply arranged as ever, announcing themselves loudly right from the start in a conference room lit by rows of hanging lanterns and translucent golden walls, providing a sullen backdrop to the meeting between Cobb and Saito. The two men and their surroundings are reflected in a giant, glass table, consuming them in this sleek, angular modernist architecture which continues to define the rest of the film’s luxurious aesthetic. It also helps us through some stretches of exposition, demonstrating the complex rules of the dream world in practical, reality-bending illusions not unlike those that Stanley Kubrick innovated in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Kubrickian illusions, bending reality to create action sequences unlike anything else in modern cinema.
Nolan doesn’t stop there though. The epic establishing shots of Inception are among the best of his career, if not the decade, and the fact that this narrative just keeps moving from one expansive, detailed setting to the next gives him the perfect opportunity to keep building fully-detailed worlds in large-scale compositions. A military fortress on a snowy mountainside, a high-end hotel, an empty, crumbling city – as disparate as these locations are, Nolan continues to bind them all together with the parallel editing he has always possessed such a fine control over, and yet up until this point had never executed nearly as well.
The “kick” is an especially effective conceit that allows his intercutting to reveal the interactions between each dream layer, whereby obstacles in one echo further down the line. Nolan draws a direct line of impact from a car falling off a bridge, to a weightless fight in a hotel corridor, and further along to an avalanche erupting from a mountaintop, formally earning his set pieces by establishing the interconnectedness between them. On top of this, Nolan demonstrates the variable progression of time between each dream layer in playing out some of these set pieces in gorgeous slow-motion, stretching and manipulating time to let some plot threads take a backseat while new ones emerge, and eventually wrap back up in reverse order.
Gorgeous slow-motion, stretching and compressing time between parallel narrative threads.
Just as the smaller, more personal narrative thread concerning Cobb’s deceased wife, Mal, serves the larger story in making his unresolved trauma a constant threat to his team’s mission, so too does it bring personal stakes to the act of inception, revealing the catastrophic damage that can be done in altering others’ subconscious. Nolan hasn’t always poised the personal against the epic so masterfully, but when he strikes that balance we get something just as moving as it is dazzling. As the growing number of plot threads of Inception emerge and intertwine, Nolan continues to keep his surreal vision of worlds existing within worlds all under precise control, thereby crafting the sort of imaginative, ambitious cinematic concept that only he could have pulled off.
Rows upon rows of golden lights in this beautiful opening set piece.
Inception is currently available to stream on Netflix Australia, and available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.
