Category: Masterpiece

Roman Polanski | 1hr 45min

By the time Roman Polanski reached his second feature film Repulsion, he had already proved that shooting largely in a single location was no imposition on his creativity. In place of the sailing yacht where class tensions unravelled in Knife in the Water, here it is a London apartment which he distorts into disturbing hallucinations, revealing the chaotic psychological state of reclusive Belgian immigrant Carol Ledoux. The latter two instalments of his Apartment trilogy Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant would famously enter supernatural territory, but the deterioration of Carol’s mind in Repulsion needs no such influence from cults or demons. The visceral revulsion she feels towards even the vaguest notion of sex is instead enough to cripple her for days, confronting her with intimate violations of mind and body that seek to undermine her sense of personhood, and disintegrate her grip on reality.

Coming off her grand success leading Jacques Demy’s Technicolor musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Catherine Deneuve becomes the vessel through which Polanski examines an unstable, assaulted femininity in Repulsion, immediately proving her considerable range in the shocking contrast between both roles. Carol’s aloofness towards aspiring suitors in public hides the disgust that comes out more openly at home, specifically towards the boyfriend of her older sister, Helen. Even his habit of leaving his toothbrush in the same cup as hers invokes uneasy frustration, its placement taking on psychosexual significance as a figurative penetration, and the smell of his dirty clothes is enough to make her throw up. When she is left home alone for weeks without the company of another woman though, her obsessive paranoia expands uncontrollably in manic directions.

Deneuve’s performance is certainly helped as well by Polanski’s natural penchant for close-ups, isolating her disturbed reactions to the sound of Helen having sex in another room, and fragmenting her face with obstructions and shadows. This skilful framing of actors’ expressions is of course drawn directly from Ingmar Bergman’s playbook, though Polanski clearly favours it as a device to craft suspense and terror over subdued drama. Wide-angle lenses uncomfortably press us up against Deneuve’s face, invading her personal space within claustrophobic rooms, while the reflective surfaces of elevator mirrors and kettles create distorted, unsettling doubles in the mise-en-scene. Save for the epilogue which takes a step back into reality, Polanski hangs his subjective camera entirely on Deneuve and her erratic perspective, arousing an eerie discomfort from her vacant, wide-eyed gaze.

Quite crucially, the array of symbolic motifs that Polanski formally organises around this tortured woman gives sinister shape to her breakdown, keeping Repulsion from falling into meaningless chaos. If Carol’s apartment is an embodiment of the afflicted mind she is trapped inside, growing more shambolic with overflowing bathwater and rotting carcasses, then the fracturing walls that she hallucinates suggest a similar splintering of her psyche’s very foundations. The cracked pavement that inexplicably captures her attention long before this is one of many seemingly insignificant visual cues here that plants a seed in her mind early on and later flourishes as a monstrous expression of primal horror, though the most horrific instance of this doesn’t arrive until the landlord’s fatal visit.

Leading up to this point, Carol has been tormented by dreams of men breaking into her bedroom and viciously raping her, viscerally captured by Polanski’s handheld camera and set to nothing but the muted sound of a ticking clock. The first murder she commits out of extreme paranoia toward her unwanted suitor Colin seems to come as a direct result of those hallucinations, but when the landlord visits to collect rent money, attempts to take advantage of her, and brings her nightmare to life, we are given good reason to sympathise with her violent reaction. It is important to note that the razor she wields against him is in fact Michael’s, and thus she adopts its masculine power as she turns the tables on her attacker and slices him to death.

Not that this surge of retributive justice brings Carol any relief, or even an end to her rape dreams. If anything, her descent into madness only escalates from here, as she delusionally irons her clothes without power and lets the apartment sink into filthy disrepair. Where Polanski initially composes his oppressive shots in Repulsion with an Antonioni-like framing of interior architecture, his visuals evolve here into a surreal bombardment of avant-garde stylings, leading Carol down a corridor of protruding hands that forcefully grope at her body.

If we are to single out a visual motif that unlocks the key to Carol’s deepest trauma though, then we must look to the very final shot of Repulsion once Helen and Michael have returned from vacation, discovered the gruesome remnants of Carol’s murderous breakdown, and found her in a catatonic state. While panicked family and neighbours scramble to help, Polanski’s camera tracks in on the family photograph that our gaze has been drawn to multiple times throughout the film, and yet which only now reveals an insidious secret. Partially obscured by the surrounding mess, only two faces are now visible – that of an older male family member with a wide grin, and of a young girl staring at him with profound loathing. At the core of Polanski’s surreal, psychological horror, there is simply a wounded woman forced into a depraved repression, miserably trying to contain its resulting damage to her mind, home, and whatever men dare to cross the threshold into either.

Repulsion is available to purchase on Amazon.

Andrzej Żuławski | 2hr 4min

There is something growing in the apartment where Anna resides with her son, Bob, and it is plain to see that it isn’t quite human. The first time we meet the creature, it is a grotesque, writhing mass of tentacles, pulsing with life in her bathroom. “He’s very tired. He made love to me all night,” she tells the private investigator hired by her estranged husband Mark to watch her movements, before beating him to death a broken bottle. When we meet it again, it has since sprouted an elongated head with two beady eyes, and again later Mark witnesses it making love to his wife in the kitchen.

Whatever this Cronenbergian body horror may be, its arrival has coincided with a cataclysmic crisis in Anna and Mark’s marriage. Too long have they been living in a household of abuse, pushing Anna to seek out romance with drug dealer Heinrich while Mark disappears into his job as a West Berlin spy. Now as they stand on the precipice of divorce, a simmering mixture of revulsion, self-loathing, and perverted affection boils over into public displays of madness and cruelty, exposing the inhuman, mutated hearts torn apart by mutual disgust.

Though its title might suggest otherwise, Possession eludes attempts to nail its maddening course of events down to conventional explanations of ghosts or demons. Even that unholy aberration which Anna nurtures in her home cannot take responsibility for the strange trance that compels her and Mark to dispassionately cut into their skin with an electric knife, or the fact that their son’s teacher Helen bears an unsettling resemblance to her. If we are to identify a single catalyst for this absurd state of affairs, then it comes from within the souls breaking the holy matrimony that they are sworn under, transgressing laws of nature, morality, and social convention to act on their ugliest impulses.

From a stylistic perspective, Andrzej Żuławski uses every cinematic tool at his disposal to attack the sanity keeping Anna and Mark tethered to reality. The camera’s restless momentum is the first thing to be noticed from the outset, drifting forward, backward, and around the couple’s public argument at a consistently steady pace like an active observer. It is a bold creative choice that formally resonates all throughout Possession, conveying a perpetual instability during Mark’s work meetings in vast, empty offices and later as he maniacally lights Anna’s apartment on fire. The creeping paranoia that it imbues in urban spaces points to Roman Polanski’s Apartment trilogy as a key influence here, and one which Żuławski continues to reflect in his tremendous blocking that frequently use hard lines and tiny frames in the mise-en-scène to split this divided couple.

Even Possession’s setting right by the Berlin Wall in the early 80s offers great symbolic significance of a city cleaved right down the middle, with both halves co-existing in a state of unresolved tension. Although Mark works as a spy for West Berlin, Żuławski is largely using the era’s politics as a backdrop to this story of two sides vying for control of each other, and even going so far as to seek out their idealised doppelgangers. For Anna, this looks like a calmer version of Mark who loyally grows under her guidance, while for Mark, he need look no further than Helen. Similarly played by Isabelle Adjani, her cool, composed demeanour and soft features appear in stark contrast to Anna’s incredible volatility, and she also proves to be a stronger maternal presence for Bob.

To call Adjani’s performance anything less than a landmark of film acting would be an understatement. Where Sam Neill frequently pushes for artificial swings of emotion, Adjani’s twitchy, erratic physicality seems to emanate from a primal subconscious, and yet she also demonstrates tremendous control when reigning herself in. Her outward expression of Anna’s mental state varies wildly between tumultuous breakdowns, disconnecting from the world at her quietest so that she doesn’t even notice a homeless man steal her groceries, and physically torturing one of her ballet students at her most sadistic. Żuławski’s close-ups wield enormous power in moments like these, catching her haunted, wide-eyed gaze that frequently drifts off into the distance, and elsewhere pierces the fourth wall with a malicious, demonic grin.

So ferociously uninhibited is Anna’s psychological disintegration that it is often hard to believe there is an actor inside that body. Comparisons to Gena Rowland’s harrowing depiction of mental illness in A Woman Under the Influence are well-earned as she tears at her hands and breaks out into panicked sweats, though Adjani’s physical performance takes up far more space in the frame, pairing especially well with Żuławski’s agitated tracking shots. We can’t quite tell at first what triggers her sudden unravelling in an empty subway station, though this is the scene that bears most resemblance to traditional possessions in horror movies, watching her scream in terror and violently throw her body around. She aggressively dashes her grocery bags against the wall until milk comes spilling out, yet still Żuławski’s camera continues orbiting her as deep, guttural gasps are forced from her throat. White fluids and blood pour from every orifice as she kneels on the ground, and it is finally at this point that we might start to recognise this as a truly hellish rendering of a miscarriage.

So explosive is Adjani’s embodiment of visceral suffering in Possession that it takes a little more straining to see the ruined world around her, mutating into an absurdist hellscape surrounding Anna and Mark’s bubble of hatred and co-dependency. Żuławski largely paints it out in drab, muted colours, only to rupture the monotony every now and again with a vibrant orange telephone or red train carriage, while the dissonant sounds of scratching, squeezing, and tapping infuse the heavily synthesised music score with an eerie practical quality. The murders that Anna commits barely go noticed for a long time, though given the strange behaviour of strangers who randomly chase people on the street and others who commit suicide with little warning, it would appear that such brutal insanity isn’t so out of place.

Whether through geopolitical, personal, or supernatural conflict, this world is ripping apart at the seams, yet still Mark and Anna try to force their arbitrary images of marital happiness through to the very end. Shot down by police and dying on a stairwell, their blood-soaked faces passionately kiss, while their apparently flawless doubles take their places as Bob’s new parents – though clearly not for long. Whether through murder, self-destruction, or the arrival of nuclear apocalypse, death eventually comes for all in Possession. In the end, Żuławski’s warring spouses only drive themselves mad with broken vows and hearts, feverishly seeking out a love that can’t even begin to thrive within such depraved, vile souls.

Possession is currently available to purchase on Blu-ray and DVD on Amazon.

Michelangelo Antonioni | 1hr 57min

Ever since young mother Giuliana was caught in a car collision that left her with lingering trauma, the world hasn’t seemed quite right. The industrial Italian town where she lives with her husband Ugo and son is an inhuman landscape of bizarre, alien structures, twisting steel beams and pipes around engines that never seem to stop churning, and chimneys that spit out blasts of fire. There is nothing vaguely hospitable about the harsh angles they impose on their environment, and neither is there any warmth to be found in strange beeps and clangs that constantly echo through polluted open spaces.

Still, under Michelangelo Antonioni’s dreamy direction we are left to question – how much of Red Desert is simply the perception of an unstable psyche, and how much is the real degradation of modern society? It is often difficult to discern where the cold, metallic sound design ends and where the synthesised score begins, ringing electronic wavelengths through the atmosphere to maddening effect. Few others who live here seem as disturbed by the ravaging of nature as Giuliana, who wanders its greasy factories and contaminated estuaries in a state of lonely discontent. She desperately desires the company of others, but even more than that she yearns for them to protect her from the sickness of the world, blocking it out like a barrier of empathy rather than steel or cement.

“I don’t know myself. I never get enough. Why must I always need other people? I must be an idiot. That’s why I can’t seem to manage. You know what I’d like? I’d like everyone who’s ever cared about me… here around me now, like a wall.”

For now though, all that surrounds Giuliana is the industrial “architecture of anxiety” as critic Andrew Sarris labels it, physically dominating her slight frame at every angle. Red Desert is visually distinct from Antonioni’s previous works as his first film shot in colour, but it is also very much a thematic continuation of his ‘Alienation’ trilogy, using the shapes and patterns of modern infrastructure to lose his characters in confusing, inhospitable environments. Rather than islands or cities though, Red Desert is primarily shot on location around the petrochemical plants and rustic docks of rural Italy, uncovering an awe-inspiring beauty in those manufactured structures that were not designed with aesthetics in mind. Instead, it is the purely functionality of these formations that Antonioni relishes, framing their spatial symmetries, parallel lines, and geometric configurations with rigorous precision in his astounding long shots, and carefully blocking his tiny human subjects among them.

Not content with limiting himself to the landscape’s natural colours though, Antonioni pushes his visuals even further with tints of vibrant artifice that break through the monotonous, desaturated greys. Proclaiming his desire to “paint the film as one paints the canvas,” the Italian filmmaker took to his mise-en-scène with literal cans of paint, subtly accentuating the scenery’s neutral tones while aggressively splashing lively reds across the frame.

The strongest use of this palette comes in the radio telescope set piece, stretching an enormous length of crimson scaffolding far into the distance while workers climb its triangular trusses. Given its alien appearance, the structure’s purpose is not immediately obvious, though the explanation that it allows humans to “listen to the stars” makes sense. This is a culture with its eyes turned upwards rather than inwards, paying far more attention to the undiscovered ceiling of human progress than the quality of day-to-day living. While impressive leaps are made in astronomy and energy technologies, the Earth and its inhabitants waste away in silence, struck by physical and psychological illnesses that all originate from the same place.

As a result, the settings that Antonioni captures in Red Desert often border on apocalyptic. Piles of corroded debris obstruct shots of Giuliana’s aimless roaming in junkyards, and a brief retreat into a riverside shack with friends offers only temporary respite from the dense fog gathering outside. Antonioni’s blocking of bodies remains impressive even in medium shots here, tangling them around each other in lounging positions that look none too comfortable, and continuing to weave in his red palette through the tarnished wooden walls.

The moment a ship carrying diseased passengers drifts into shot through a window though, the brief comfort that Giuliana that found here immediately dissipates, and she reverts to the hysterical state that her nightmares have often brought on. Not only did she attempt suicide shortly after her car accident, but her following experience being hospitalised left her with a harrowing fear of “Streets, factories, colours, people,” and of course any illness that might once again render her helpless. The silhouetted figures of her friends staggered through the mist outside are more ominous than they are comforting under these circumstances, agitating her to the point that she tries to escape in a panic and nearly drives off the end of the wharf. The visual metaphor that Antonioni composes here of Giuliana’s car ready to tip over the edge of the world is devastatingly bleak, with the tall, unlit beacon tower diminishing her presence and the grey negative space eerily beckoning her into the void.

When Antonioni isn’t trapping Giuliana within wide open expanses and behind architectural obstructions, it is his shallow focus which softly detaches her from these surroundings, envisioning her subconscious defence mechanism. It is an unusual device for a filmmaker so attached to his crisp depth of field, and yet its formal introduction in the out-of-focus opening credits and emphasis on Monica Vitti’s subtly expressive face in close-ups is wielded with exceptional care, isolating her marvellous performance against red, liquefied backdrops. She is filled with an aching hunger to simply connect with another being, and yet the more she reaches out, the more lost she becomes. When she finally makes love to a man, Antonioni’s disjointed editing keeps their passion at a cold distance, and her attempt to communicate with a German sailor by the dockyard is painfully hindered by the language barrier between them.

Unfortunately, the emotion that Vitti pours into this role is not always reciprocated by Richard Harris as Corrado, her husband’s business associate and the one man she connects with on a personal level. Neither does the magical realist bedtime story interlude that whisks us away to a distant island paradise formally integrate so well with the rest of Red Desert’s grim naturalism. Still, Antonioni’s stark cinematic ambition cannot ultimately be overshadowed by these flaws as he works his obsession with rich pigments into Vitti’s capricious character.

Though she erratically claims to be scared of colour, she also dreams of filling her unopened ceramics shop with it, opting for light blues and greens in a subconscious reaction against the angry red steel of her outside environment. Whether it is the pink walls of her bedroom of the green décor of Corrado’s tidy living room, Antonioni often uses the soft palettes of his interiors to offset the vibrancy of his landscapes, though visually these amount to little against the sheer mass of the world’s barren greyness.

If our humanity is to break through at all, it is not in acts of individual expression, but the giant displays of human industry mounted on arid plains, spewing yellow smoke into the dirty air. Passing birds know not to fly there, Giuliana poignantly explains to her son, though it is a sad state of affairs to begin with that such innocent creatures must be taught to navigate manmade danger in a world that no longer has a place for them. At this point, there are no easy solutions to reverse society’s reckless pursuit of progress and profit, Antonioni realises. To live is to merely survive, and yet in though slow deterioration of Red Desert’s earth, air, and water, even that is dangerously at risk.

Red Desert is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the DVD or Blu-ray are available to purchase on Amazon.

Robert Wise | 2hr 11min

Though the primary antagonist of The Andromeda Strain may be the extra-terrestrial organism described in its title, it isn’t too hard to see the wariness towards world governments lingering beneath the film’s doomsday warnings. As the scientists of the secret underground facility Wildfire note early on, the Andromeda bacteria may not even necessarily be deliberately hostile in its native environment, and its harmfulness to terrestrial lifeforms could very well be an incidental mismatch between their biological codes. Until it is brought into contact with humanity, its nature is not inherently good or evil. It only becomes a global hazard through its exploitation by political leaders, and our own arrogant belief that we can keep such unknown forces as these under control.

In short, The Andromeda Strain offers the perfect metaphor for widespread nuclear warfare at the dawn of the 1970s, falling into the same subgenre of paranoid political thrillers as so many other films of the era like The Conversation and The Parallax View. Though the atomic detonation built into Wildfire was designed as a safeguard, the eventual discovery that it may in fact fuel Andromeda with enough energy to end all life on Earth effectively turns a protective countermeasure into an apocalypse waiting to happen. That the lead scientists behind Wildfire believe this newly discovered organism can be used as a biological weapon is pure hubris, leaving only a small team of contracted experts to unravel Andromeda’s mysteries and defuse a potentially world-ending threat.

The realism that Robert Wise applies to The Andromeda Strain also speaks to a far more authentic feeling of insecurity too than the sensationalised Cold War allegories that pervaded the cinematic landscape up to this point, including his own 1951 adaptation of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Having been well-established in the industry since the 1940s, he is essentially a bridge between Old and New Hollywood, applying his talent for deep focus cinematography learned from Orson Welles to a more naturalistic aesthetic. More specifically, it is the split diopter lens that becomes the foundation of so many Wise’s greatest compositions, applying two different focuses at once to effectively allow for a close-up and wide shot within the same frame. Brian de Palma would be the director most associated with this technique in years to come, but not even he was so rigorously bound to the stylistic device as Wise is in The Andromeda Strain, which barely goes a minute without underscoring the dramatic irony disconnecting subjects in the foreground and background.

In this way, Wise uses the split diopter as a tool for suspense, particularly in the early scenes when we learn about the small, rural town of Piedmont whose entire population suddenly died without warning. When military police officers arrive at Dr Jeremy Stone’s home and urgently summon him to ground zero, the two greeting his wife at the door evenly frame the third restlessly pacing by the car behind them, astoundingly dividing the lens’ focus into three individual segments. Later when Stone arrives on site with Dr Mark Hall, their investigation is eerily laced with more of these shots, pressing the profile of a dead man right up against the camera while they anxiously observe from a distance.

The other purpose this deep focus serves during Stone and Hall’s reconnaissance mission is purely economical, loading the visuals with a great deal of information without needing to cut between multiple shots. The pacing here is slow but gripping, thoroughly earning each puzzle piece that gradually slots into place – the satellite that recently crashed in town, the clotting of human blood into a powdery substance, and the two sole survivors being a crying baby and the town drunk.

The mosaic use of split screens during this sequence consequently feels like a natural extension of the split diopter technique, drawing our eyes to multiple subjects in the frame while abundant evidence of an invisible alien invasion stacks up. On the left, Stone and Hall peer through windows of quiet houses, while on the right we are given the view of dead bodies inside. Similarly, their studies of Andromeda in the depths of Wildfire use these split screens in place of conventional montages, methodically drawing connections between different parts of their experiments without impatiently rushing through their painstaking processes. Along with the time stamps frequently marking the date and time of significant events, Wise’s precise visuals are effectively cataloguing this scientific study into a detailed presentation of exacting focus, desperately trying to apply hard logic to what remains impenetrably enigmatic.

With such remarkable formal precision guiding Wise’s direction, the Stanley Kubrick influence is clear, especially given the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey just three years prior. Just like that science-fiction masterpiece, accusations could be levelled at the dry jargon and cold characterisations of Nelson Gidding’s screenplay, though the clinical restraint displayed here is merely part of Wise’s sterile atmosphere. Instead of a small crew journeying into outer space, we watch four scientists descend deep into the Earth, yielding their humanity to the artificial technology that keeps them alive. To reach the main laboratory at its base, they must first pass through four sublevels of decontamination, with each room possessing the sort of intricate production design that wouldn’t be out of place in Kubrick’s spaceships. The crimson, silver, and yellow uniforms worn by these scientists vividly match the metallic walls of their respective floors, while the red warning lights on the bottom level pierce its polished grey surroundings with jarring urgency, though it is the laboratory’s central core which proves to be the most impressive set piece of them all in the heart-pumping climax.

To draw that 2001: A Space Odyssey connection even deeper, Wise’s decision to hire special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull pays off in the green computerised depictions of Andromeda itself, dynamically visualising its mutations into different variants. This rapid evolution may be its greatest weapon against human analysis, granting itself the power to disintegrate the plastic and rubber keeping it contained, though it is equally the fast thinking of scientists which at least temporarily defuses the situation. The threat in the film’s final act is a little contrived, counting down to an apocalyptic nuclear detonation, but Wise’s deft editing paces the tension perfectly right to the final seconds. An uneasy stalemate is the only solution which guarantees survival for both species, and may be the best anyone can hope for given their immense powers of mutual destruction. In an era so fraught with mistrust between neighbours, the pursuit of greater knowledge is nothing more than a path to existential insecurity in The Andromeda Strain, forcing civilians to grasp the fragility of their own blissfully ignorant lives.

The Andromeda Strain is currently available to rent or on Apple TV, YouTube, and Amazon Video, and the Blu-ray can be bought on Amazon.

John Ford | 1hr 37min

Even before directing My Darling Clementine, it was clear that John Ford never had any qualms around twisting historical truth into cinematic reconstructions, especially putting his talents to use as a documentarian and propagandist in the United States military during World War II. When he returned to Hollywood in 1946, the focus of his storytelling shifted, but his intentions did not. In his skilled hands, the famous western shootout at Tombstone’s O.K. Corral between lawman Wyatt Earp and the nefarious Cowboys becomes a tale of heroic courage and sacrifice, departing from the truth in too many ways to count. The fact that the Earp brothers were never cattle drivers, that Doc Holliday actually survived the climactic gunfight, and that our main antagonist Old Man Clanton had been killed several months before is negligible to Ford’s proud mythologising. As James Stewart would be told many years later in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

This is the central tenet upon which Ford establishes his belief in America’s tenacious spirit, recognising the necessity of these folktales to revive the cultural identity that was slowly losing relevance in a cynical, post-war nation. Through this lens, the rambunctious rural town of Tombstone becomes a landscape of America in disarray, needing a strong leader to restore order to its chaos. As such, My Darling Clementine does not centre a hot-headed maverick like John Wayne, but rather a stoic, reserved Henry Fonda who faithfully abides by laws greater than himself.

With his Chevron moustache and humourless demeanour, Fonda characterises the famed Wyatt Earp as a quiet, pragmatic introvert, only taking up the position of town marshal when his brother is murdered in cold blood by unknown assailants. His gaze is intensely focused, refusing to make eye contact with local saloon singer Chihuahua when she briefly directs her performance to him, and often surveying the dusty rural plains from his porch as he leans back in a wooden chair. Here, Ford frames him as a guardian of civilisation, drawing a visual divide through the vertical posts separating the rustic town from Monument Valley’s wild landscapes of colossal sandstone buttes.

Wyatt is unyielding in his defence of civil order, holding his neighbours to a rigorously high standard, and regarding those morally ambiguous troublemakers like Doc Holliday with suspicion. Right from their first meeting, tension underlies almost every interaction between these two rivals, with Ford using a row of gaslights in the local saloon to split them right down the middle. Behind them, the town watches on with nervous anticipation, vividly captured in a crisp depth of field while slightly obscured by the thick smoke hanging in the air.

It is the Clanton family who Ford reserves his most daunting staging for though, uniting them as an indomitable force when Wyatt begins pursuing a clue to the identity of his brother’s killer. As Fonda questions the saloon’s owner, five Clanton brothers silently enter the foreground and line up along the bar one-by-one, piercing Wyatt with silent, threatening stares. Ford’s lighting frequently verges on expressionism in compositions like these too, casting characters in shadow to cynically illustrate the dark corruption that thrives in Tombstone’s shady establishments.

Of course, this is only one dimension of a complex, dynamic town, layered with colourful personalities and cultural traditions. At night Tombstone is rowdy with gamblers and outlaws, but there is also a robust community living here that Ford relishes blocking through every corner of his frame, using its height as flamboyant stage actor Mr Thorndyke recites Shakespeare atop a table, and gathering eager crowds at the base of a tall, scaffolded structure – the town’s first church established by Wyatt himself. Its meagre facade does little to dampen the spirits of its excited parish as they join together in a hymn, celebrating the unity that their new marshal has cultivated.

Like a gardener reaping the rewards of his own efforts, Wyatt also begins to sprout a mature vulnerability from the same fertile environment he has been tending to, motivated by the arrival of outsider Clementine in town. The significance of their romantic musical motif is instantly apparent. All through the film, instrumental variations of ‘Oh, My Darling Clementine’ are weaved naturally through strings, flutes, and Fonda’s whistling, immortalising his love in a ballad which would spread across America in years to come.

By linking Wyatt to a nostalgic, recognisable piece of Americana, Ford is effectively offsetting the more violent nature of his real legacy. Historically, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral encapsulates the tensions between law enforcement and outlaws during the United States’ formative years, and Ford’s staging of it here certifies Wyatt as an icon of cultural progress. As he strides down the main road of Tombstone towards the location of his great victory, the camera captures him at a low angle that radiates power, though this is not a conflict he gladly embraces. Wyatt gives Old Man Clanton multiple chances to avoid bloodshed, announcing the warrant for his arrest before the inevitable gunfight, and only landing the killing shot when his adversary tries to shoot him in the back.

Whether or not this is true to the character of the real Earp is completely irrelevant to Ford. As far as he is concerned, Earp not only brought order to chaos in the Old West, but also originated a romantic folk song that has since become a famous expression of romantic love. The Greeks had Achilles, the Anglo-Saxons had Beowulf, and through Ford’s cinematic storytelling Wyatt Earp becomes a mythical hero of the American frontier, paving the path of moral virtue and honour to our modern civilisation.

My Darling Clementine is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, is available to buy on Apple TV, and the DVD or Blu-ray can be bought on Amazon.

Francis Ford Coppola | 1hr 34min

The legendary Motorcycle Boy may not be our protagonist in Rumble Fish, though this doesn’t keep Francis Ford Coppola from filtering the urban landscapes of 1960s Oklahoma through his eyes. Whatever visual restrictions are imposed by the greaser’s colour blindness are drastically offset by the dreamy expressionism elongating every angle, the timelapse footage slipping through hours in a few seconds, and perhaps most significantly, those tiny splashes of blue and red swimming through the local pet shop’s aquarium.

It isn’t that these vivid Siamese fighting fish are somehow exceptions to the Motorcycle Boy’s optical deficiency, but they occupy his attention like nothing else in this world. As he peers through the glass with his little brother Rusty James, Coppola’s camera traps both men and fish inside the same tank, drawing an oppressive visual comparison to the confinement and aggression of their fellow juvenile delinquents. Freedom is distant, but if they are to find peace with themselves and stop fighting their own reflections, it may be their only hope.

“They belong in the river. I don’t think that they would fight if they were in the river. If they had the room to live.”

Some time ago the Motorcycle Boy was a notorious gang leader, and the graffiti that bears his name all over town is a testament to that larger-than-life reputation. Having recently returned from his vagrant travels, he has experienced a taste of the liberation that he now desires for these fish. His emotional transformation is unmistakable in Mickey Rourke’s mellow, tender performance. He is not looking to vent any pent-up frustration, as so many other boys are. He brushes off accusations of madness with a gentle smile, and speaks with a soft voice that quells the frenzied fury around him. Twice in Rumble Fish do we watch him nurse a wounded Rusty James back to health, modelling a sensitive masculinity that seeks to heal rather than destroy, and very gradually he inspires his brother to follow him down a similar path. His colourblind view of the world is not a restriction, we come to realise, but perceives far more of its beauty than anyone else can imagine.

Coming out on the heels of The Outsiders in 1983, Rumble Fish was the second S.E. Hinton adaptation to be released that year. Both stories are based in the same setting of 1960s Tulsa, exploring the emotional depths of young greasers looking to escape the violence surrounding them, and yet the sheer gap in artistic quality between the two is so shocking that it is hard to believe Coppola directed them in consecutive shoots. The Outsiders was the greater commercial success and is far more accessible to mainstream audiences looking for an easy watch. Rumble Fish may have been more polarising, but it is also the far greater cinematic accomplishment on every level, bringing an augmented visual aesthetic to Hinton’s writing that resonates deeply with its paradoxical adolescent yearning for both excitement and stability.

Adding onto that uncertainty a sense of urgency pressing these young people to sort their lives out before growing up, and the world at large seems to be working against them at every turn. Coppola weaves in his timelapse photography as a powerfully formal representation of this, cutting away to clouds racing across reflective surfaces and shadows rapidly stretching along the ground, while Stewart Copeland’s percussive score ticks and beats out propulsive rhythms in the background. The clocks that Coppola lays all throughout his mise-en-scène continue this poetic exploration of time invisibly passing by, even using a giant one as a backdrop to Rusty James’ confrontation with a police officer, and calling back to the dream sequence of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries with its eerie lack of hour and minute hands. As teenagers, abstract concepts like time aren’t exactly at the forefront of their thoughts, yet local barkeeper Benny offers a sharp perspective in his voiceover that acutely pinpoints the transience of their youth.

“Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item. You see when you’re young, you’re a kid, you got time, you got nothing but time. Throw a couple of years here, a couple of years there, it doesn’t matter. The older you get you say ‘Jesus how much I got, I got 35 summers left.’ Think about it – 35 summers.”

For the young men and women of Tulsa who are not yet facing their mortality though, this irrational distortion of time is not to be pondered, but revelled in. Coppola is not one to exclude us from its subjectivity either – everyday life in Tulsa is visually heightened to an incredible degree, warping the proportions of the city’s infrastructure with an incredibly deep focus, canted angles, and split diopter lenses. Coppola’s world is in a perpetual state of commotion and contortion that verges on film noir, flooding scenes with smoke, flashing lights, and spraying water that serve no other purpose than to create incredibly dynamic imagery, and navigating these elements in long, evocative tracking shots. The dreamy atmosphere is laid on thick, loosely detaching us from reality as Rusty James envisions scantily clad women lying on classroom shelves, and deliriously hallucinates his spirit flying from his body and across town to observe the flattering grief left in wake of his imaginary death.

In essence, Coppola transforms a setting that most people would view as a monotonous into a fantasy land, dreamed up by mavericks wishing to break free of convention and conformity. To many small-minded locals, this eccentricity is something to be shunned, though there is a wisdom to be found in those who see its value. Rusty James’ father may be drunk and idle, but he is still among the few who sees his eldest son’s open-mindedness as a gift.

“Every now and then a person comes along, has a different view of the world than a usual person. Doesn’t make ‘em crazy. I mean, an acute perception, that doesn’t make you crazy.”

Right after Dennis Hopper slurs his way through this counsel though, he adds a caveat, drawing a very thin line in his precise wording.

“However, sometimes… it can drive you crazy, an acute perception.”

In this same conversation, we begin to understand where he gained this insight, and where the Motorcycle Boy might have inherited his personality – not from his father, but from his mother who abandoned her children while they were still young. Outsiders like these can only be contained in their loneliness for so long before drastically breaking free, frustrated by others’ narrow thinking. The Motorcycle Boy could have easily followed in his mother’s footsteps and run away a second time, but his enormous empathy turns him down another path instead, roping Rusty James into his mission to let the Siamese fighting fish swim free into the river.

If there is one mark that Motorcycle Boy wants to leave on the world though, it is not the liberation of these vibrant red and blue fish, but the liberation of Tulsa’s restless youth – or at the very least Rusty James. He does not seek to uphold any personal legacy, and yet it nevertheless forms in his absence, keeping his pacificist principles alive while his persecution by a prejudiced society is taken to its bitterly logical end. A single police gunshot cuts off the score’s pounding beat at the moment it takes his life, leaving only Rusty James to pick up the fish now flopping on the grass, and finish what his brother had started. The communal mourning that he once imagined in a dream manifests at last, though this time not for him, as Coppola’s sombre long take floats along a line of familiar faces gazing upon the Motorcycle Boy’s body with sorrow and horror.

The final shot of Rumble Fish does not announce itself with the same audacious energy of Coppola’s expressionistic angles or timelapse footage, and yet the tranquil stillness of Rusty James’ arrival at the coast his brother always longed for marks a subtle departure from the chaos of Tulsa. For once there is very little depth to Coppola’s photography, as a telephoto lens instead flattens the liberated teenager’s silhouette against a vast, endless ocean, and time seems to slow down. The world of Rumble Fish may not be meant for those unusually perceptive misfits living far outside the status quo, but the best the rest of us can do is follow in their footsteps, boldly journeying beyond the borders and standards of a modern society slowly driving each of us mad.

Rumble Fish is currently available to rent or buy on Apple TV, YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Video, and the DVD or Blu-ray can be purchased on Amazon.

Yorgos Lanthimos | 2hr 21min

Unlike Mary Shelley and her fellow Gothic writers, Yorgos Lanthimos is not greatly bothered by man’s displacement of God through scientific progress. The artificial creation of life in Poor Things no doubt induces feelings of profound discomfort and horror, though the ethical dilemmas raised here are more fanciful in their eccentric incongruencies and psychological implications. Where Frankenstein hid great existential horror within the prospect of creating artificial life, Poor Things hides a majestic appreciation for humanity within an even more disturbing biological experiment – the transplant of an unborn baby’s brain into the body of her tragically deceased mother. When confronted with accusations of transgressing the laws of nature, mad scientist Dr Godwin Baxter returns a simple question that lightens his moral darkness to a medium grey.

“Would you rather the world had not have Bella?”

It is true that he has sentenced this infant to grow up inside the body of an adult, but so too has he effectively saved her life. In much the same way a child reveres their parent or a believer worships their deity, Bella appropriately gives her own endearing nickname to the professor – God. Along with his duck-dog hybrids and barking rooster, she joins his fantastic menagerie of similarly Frankensteined creatures that he leads as a lumpy misfit of the highest order. Lanthimos doesn’t hide the Garden of Eden allegory that encases Bella in a sanctuary of grotesque innocence, though the overtness of the metaphor is no concern. After all, it is merely the starting point for Bella’s coming-of-age odyssey across Europe and Africa, where Lanthimos aims his offbeat, satirical wit at the modern complexities of sex and gender.

With The Favourite being a watershed moment for Lanthimos’ development as a cinematic artist, Poor Things continues that stylistic trajectory of surreal brilliance which elevates his most recent work above his first few films. His auteur trademarks are instantly recognisable, distorting detailed sets through wide-angle lenses to dramatically stretch its elaborate features, and fish-eye lenses that seem like voyeuristic peepholes. Long dissolves are also Lanthimos’ editing device of choice to convey his characters’ slippery grasp on reality, just as our own perspective is challenged in visual gags that force us to look twice at images as simple as a horse pulling a carriage. No doubt his continued collaboration with writer Tony McNamara pays off marvellously as well, delivering an absurd, biting wit that punctuates stiff formalities with anachronistic profanities and heightened slapstick.

And yet even with all these similarities in mind, the epic adventure that carries Bella across oceans in Poor Things is far more sprawling than the tightly contained worlds of Lanthimos’ other films. For the first time in his career, soundstages are used in place of real locations, allowing for a level of visual control and curation that his previous budgets could not afford. Traces of Terry Gilliam’s eccentric surrealism can be found everywhere, adopting avant-garde camera angles that warp insanely constructed set pieces beyond any hint of realism, from God’s giant Gothic manor to the castle-like cruise ship of turrets and towers. Tracking shots and zooms navigate these scenes with a steady fluidity, as rigorously measured as the production design itself, though they only barely mask the hidden chaos of Bella’s existence.

At its most dreamlike, Poor Things interprets Bella’s voyage through wispy, greyscale images of her riding grotesque fish and crossing bridges in slow-motion, and uses these abstractions as chapter breaks between each new location. Within her actual adventure, purple swirls and angry blue clouds stretch across vast, starry skies that could have been painted by Vincent van Gogh, and cast impressionistic textures over miniatures of steampunk cities. In Lisbon, trams are suspended by wires between 19^th-century buildings, and hot air balloons shaped like UFOs float above the urban skyline. Elsewhere, Alexandria is depicted as a sandstone hellscape of extreme poverty steeped in fiery golden hues, and the monochromatic streets of Paris offer respite with its sheets of soft, powdery snow. The idiosyncratic palettes of these settings are also made all the more vibrant by Lanthimos’ choice to starkly shoot most of the film’s first act in black-and-white, formally sectioning off Bella’s confinement to God’s manor from her extraordinary, colourful journey of discovery.

With such an imaginative production design landing Poor Things among the most handsome films of the past few years, and a screenplay as boldly funny as McNamara’s, it takes an extravagantly talented ensemble to match this heightened world. Ramy Youssef and Jerrod Carmichael are the only ones who apply a little too much restraint here, while Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo strike a perfect balance between chewing the scenery and precise comic timing.

To go this long without mentioning Emma Stone though is a crime. Her achievement as Bella stands among her very best, playing out an extraordinary but gradual evolution from incoherent infancy to liberated young adulthood. “What a very pretty retard,” her future husband proclaims early on as he watches her toddler-self jump and spin in uncoordinated motions, and it is this incongruency between her mind and body which forms the rich foundation of Lanthimos’ comedy and drama. Given her womanly appearance, Bella is not shielded from society’s archaic gender politics, and yet like most children she is a being of pure impulse who pursues whatever momentary sensory pleasures come her way. In this unique instance, it is only natural that her sexual discovery of “furious jumping” quickly becomes a carnal yet innocent obsession, and one that men like rakish cad Duncan Wedderburn selfishly seek to exploit.

The physical comedy and rapport that Stone and Ruffalo share as adventuring partners here is gleefully charming, especially during one dance scene calling back to The Favourite that lets them unleash ridiculous moves to a bizarre honking instrument. It is when Bella begins to rub up against Duncan’s misogynistic entitlement that her place in the world slowly comes into focus, even as she remains ignorant to her origins. Distressed by the pain she sees in her travels, she tries to donate a large portion of Duncan’s wealth to the needy, only to naively let it fall into the hands of untrustworthy sailors. When she eagerly takes up employment as prostitute against his wishes, she grows further disillusioned with the discovery that some men find pleasure in her pain, and that her employer would prefer her to remain submissive.

Deepening the question of Bella’s bodily autonomy though is the very nature of her being – this is not her body, but her mother’s. Her belly bears the scar of her own birth by C-section, strangers recognise her as a different person in public, and late discoveries about her mother’s suicide complicate the relationship they never had. Having strayed from God’s domain and partnered with a gutless chauvinist, she is forced to become her own maternal guide in a misogynistic world, navigating its arbitrary social conventions through little more than trial and error. She learns of indulgence and restraint, generosity and self-care, taking each in moderation as her mind slowly catches up to her physical appearance. Jerskin Fendrix reveals his aggressively abstract score to be a perfect mirror of this journey as well, initially offering a window into her infantile mind with untuned strings, breathy pipes, and jarring mallets, and then gradually layering in more complex textures as these sounds mature alongside her.

Vacuous pretensions of respectable society be damned, Bella is a woman looking to carve out her own peculiar path through the world, rebelling against God’s creation even as she expresses a deep, abiding love for him. It matters little that Lanthimos’ final act sticks an unsteady landing, heading off on a sudden new adventure that continues past the point the story should have wrapped up. Films as boldly ambitious and wickedly funny as Poor Things are so exceedingly rare that flaws are simply part of the lavishly embellished package, relishing the magnificent improbability that any natural or manmade creation should ever exist to begin with in a world as preposterous as our own.

Poor Things is currently playing in theatres.

Alfonso Cuarón | 1hr 46min

To Alfonso Cuarón, the story of Mexico’s political turbulence at the end of the twentieth century is not best understood through a historical epic or biopic. Y tu mamá también is far more interested in capturing its cultural and class tensions through the friendship of two teenage boys, completely indifferent to the dwindling power of the Industrial Revolutionary Party which held onto the presidency for the past 70 years, as well as the nation’s increasingly globalised economy. The world may be changing around them with wide-reaching implications, but they would much rather spend their time chasing women and upholding that self-devised, fraternal manifesto they claim is sacred, and yet so frequently stray from.

Despite their ignorance, Mexico’s modern politics are intimately intertwined with their personal relationships. After all, Tenoch’s upper-class background brings with it an air of superiority, seeing him use his foot to lift the toilet in Julio’s working-class home in much the same way he does at a shabby motel. Conversely, Julio is self-conscious at his friend’s more impressive house, lighting a match after using the bathroom. These adolescents may be hormonally aligned in their love for masturbation, sex, and all things masculine, but Y tu mamá también is acutely attentive to those differences that surface over the course of their beachbound road trip, specifically motivated by the prospect of charming their newest companion – the beautiful, 28-year-old Luisa.

By 2001, Cuarón had already established a solid filmmaking career moving from Mexico into Hollywood, and yet his greatest success to date comes here with a modest $5 million budget. In place of highly curated studio sets, beautiful long shots of rural Mexican countrysides, roads, and beaches connect us to the nation’s natural terrains and infrastructure, often placing the horizon towards the bottom of the frame while dusty blue skies and soft orange sunsets stretch out over detailed landscapes. His usual palette of murky greens is still occasionally present in his lighting and production design too, but Y tu mamá también is far more naturalistic than his previous films, opting for handheld camerawork that freely navigates scenes in long takes.

This is a specific sort of world-building that Cuarón would further explore in the smooth tracking shots of Children of Men and the steady pans of Roma, disengaging from his central characters to examine the details of their surrounding environments. In this instance, frivolous conversations remain audible even while our eyes wander elsewhere, drifting several times past family photos hanging on walls during phone calls, and elsewhere swinging inside a car to glance back at a pulled-over vehicle. Cuarón is sure to never quite sit long enough on these distractions to give us anything more than a vague glimpse – after all, Tenoch, Julio, or Luisa would much rather keep their heads down than consider their implications, though we are still left to wonder whether this traffic stop is a drug bust, an abuse of police power, or both.

Our travellers will encounter many more fragments of Mexico’s sprawling culture on their journey, some steeped in tradition with villagers stopping passing cars to pay a toll to their “little queen” dressed in bridal white, while others hint at widespread corruption. In a stroke of formal genius, Cuarón matches these diversions to the narration as well, frequently muting his diegetic sound before dropping in its commentary. These annotations are often as trivial as the camera’s fleeting observations too, offering brief cultural insights which mean little on their own, yet which together weave a textured landscape of poverty, celebration, and profound torment.

“If they had passed this spot 10 years earlier, they would have seen a couple of cages in the middle of the road… and then driven through a cloud of white feathers. Shortly after, more crushed cages, filled with bleeding chickens flapping their wings. Later on, an overturned truck, surrounded with smoke. Then they’d have seen two bodies on the road, one smaller than the other, barely covered by a jacket. And next to them, a woman crying inconsolably.”

On one level this narration positions us like readers of a novel, expanding the world through an omniscient literary voice, though this subversion of the narrative’s first-person continuity also bears great resemblance to Francois Truffaut’s formal experimentations during the French New Wave. The similarities to Jules and Jim especially are numerous, right down to the story of two friends being in love with one woman, and so it is also through Cuarón’s narration that we gain deeper insights into those thoughts they would rather keep hidden.

For the secretive Luisa, this is a particularly crucial conceit. As a funeral procession passes by, the narrator notes the existential concerns rising in her mind of how long she will be remembered after dying. We don’t know it at the time, but this is more relevant to her psychological state than we can imagine – she is suffering from terminal cancer, and this entire trip is one last hurrah to embrace life before it slips away. She may be more mature than her male companions, but she is just as adrift, and so it seems are many others they encounter. At one point, the narrator adopts future tense to reveal what is in store for a friendly fisherman who takes them in, and given the changing economic landscape, it does not look bright for him either.

“At the end of the year, Chuy and his family will have to leave their home, because a new luxury hotel will rise in San Bernabé. They will relocate to the outskirts of Santa María Colotepec. Chuy will attempt to give boat tours, but a collective of Acapulco boatmen supported by the local Tourism Board will block him. Two years later, he’ll end up as a janitor at the hotel. He will never fish again.”

Tenoch and Julio might not see the point in contemplating the future, and yet Cuarón realises that their attempt at escapism is a political act in itself, refusing to acknowledge the complexities of the real world. As such, they are ill-equipped to face up to their own vulnerabilities and flaws as well. Their manifesto may forbid sleeping with each other’s girlfriends, and yet they do so anyway. They may openly share feelings for Luisa, but her first sexual encounter with Tenoch stings Julio all the same. Luisa might comfort Tenoch over his poor performance in bed, but he still takes it as a shameful weakness in his masculinity. In fact, almost any time some wedge is driven between these friends, sex is involved. Given the amount of it going on too, there is good reason for the constant conflict.

Only when these immature boys reach a point of self-acceptance and honesty does sex become pure, and perhaps the only straightforward thing in an incredibly complicated world. As they speak about their affairs for the first time without inhibition, Cuarón’s camera basks in the green glow of the seaside retreat, eventually following Luisa to the jukebox where she selects a song at random – the soft-rock ballad ‘Si No Te Hubieras Ido.’ Suddenly, she fixes her gaze right on the camera, intimately inviting us into their shared space as she begins to dance, with the boys soon joining her in a passionate embrace.

There is no insecurity, ignorance, or masculine pretence in the orgy that soon consumes them. It won’t be long after this trip that Tenoch and Julio will go their separate ways, and Luisa will tragically pass away from cancer. So too will Mexican politics, culture, and economics continue to shift as the 21^st century dawns, subtly contributing to this widening distance between old friends. Within this moment though, the ecstasy of the present is rightfully all that matters. Finally, there arises an equal affection in Y tu mamá también that neither insecurity, hierarchy, nor the uneasy advance of an early grave can suppress. The story of modern-day Mexico may vast, but this tiny coming-of-age chapter is just as formative to its identity as all those other lives caught in Cuarón’s expansive periphery.

Y Tu Mamá También can currently be bought on Amazon.

Keisuke Kinoshita | 1hr 38min

There might not be any reliable historical record that the ritual of ‘obasute’ was practiced anywhere outside of Japanese folklore, and yet it is exactly in that heightened, mythical realm where The Ballad of Narayama dwells. In the small valley where the 69-year-old Orin lives with her grandson Tatsuhei, it is tradition for elders to be carried to a mountaintop when they turn 70, and then left alone to perish. This form of customary senicide is not something to be feared, just as the natural course of ageing is not to be shied away from. In fact, Orin’s 33 intact teeth are even a point of shame for her, becoming the subject of a mocking song that is quickly spread between neighbours, cruelly suggesting that she struck a deal with the devil.

“In a corner in the back room

My granny found herself a set of 33 demon teeth.”

The other implication here is that Orin’s appetite is unusually large for a woman of her age, and in this starving village, a gluttony like hers is worthy of public humiliation. Whether for celebration or punishment, singing is the medium through which ideas are shared among the locals, turning rumours into stories, and stories into lyrics. As implied by the title The Ballad of Narayama, narrative and music are strongly intertwined in the film’s very form, paying homage to the traditions of kabuki theatre with a singer introducing scenes and offering poetic commentary. “The harvest in autumn brings sorrow, Even as the rice ripens to a golden hue,” his wavering voice croons to the twanging of his three-stringed shamisen, evoking colourful images of workers labouring away in yellow rice fields that are only outdone by the bright, saturated visuals Keisuke Kinoshita matches to the lyrics.

While his Japanese contemporaries Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu were still working in black-and-white around this time, the lesser-known Kinoshita was boldly venturing into the realm of colour cinematography – still a relatively new technology in late 1950s Asia, yet one which has rarely been put to better use than it is here. Within the widescreen Shochiku GrandScope, the earthy yellows and oranges of autumnal landscapes are detailed in vast, painterly compositions, while the colour palette’s eventual shift to greys and whites as snow starts to fall visually ushers in a dreary seasonal change.

Michael Powell’s Technicolor visuals no doubt influenced Kinoshita here, especially with matte backdrops of expansive mountain ranges heavily evoking Black Narcissus, and yet the village’s fluorescent green wash at night and its striking contrast against a bright pink sky makes for an electric contrast that was still quite novel in 1958. The potential of neon lighting was established from there, paving a path for Seijun Suzuki and Mario Bava’s stylistic genre experiments in the 1960s, though it wouldn’t be until Peter Greenaway’s brightly coloured satires in the 80s that we would see another filmmaker adopt and even match Kinoshita’s grand, theatrical artifice.

Because as a visual and formal statement, that is what The Ballad of Narayama is – a heavily curated representation of traditional Japanese storytelling, adapted to a modern medium. Kinoshita never hides the fact that these sets are built on highly controlled soundstages, but also never lets its limitations impose on his vibrant worldbuilding. The lighting dramatically shifts with the sentiment of each scene, at one point dimming to a spotlight on two characters consumed by darkness, and later casting an angry red wash over Orin’s disturbing arrival at a festival with several of her teeth smashed out.

Of course, all of this is entirely in line with kabuki theatre conventions as well, maintaining that invisible fourth wall between the scenery and the viewer as Kinoshita’s camera tracks parallel to the action, and frames interiors in wide shots like dioramas. These sets are incredibly dynamic, often moving walls and props to transition between scenes where one might expect to find a cut, and thereby manipulating our perception of time through theatrical rather than cinematic conventions.

This is not to say that Kinoshita’s direction is stagebound though, as there remains a very sharp attention to detail in his depth of field, mimicking the look of multiplane animations by dividing his frame into separate layers that move at different speeds when the camera drifts past. It is especially the final act of the film following Tatsuhei’s journey up the mountain with Orin on his back that Kinoshita delivers some of his most immaculate cinematic scenery, largely excising dialogue as grandmother and grandson traverse great mossy boulders, cascading waterfalls, and trees that grow more withered with the rising altitude.

Atop the craggy peak, the only sign of life are black crows standing over a number of skeletons – foreboding imagery for sure, and yet this pilgrimage is nevertheless one of serene acceptance. Through the ritual of obasute, generations are united in a cycle of life as enduring as the seasons themselves, which just so happen to shift at the exact point Tatsuhei begins his journey back down. Snow begins to fall, and again we move through the same shots as before, though this time in reverse order and with a soft, white powder concealing the vibrant colours.

Though there may be peaceful closure within Tatsuhei’s family, the burst of violence that disrupts his descent is a culmination of several disputes we have witnessed up to now. His neighbour Matayan is at a similar age as Orin, and yet he does not embrace his encroaching death with such grace. Conversely, his son couldn’t be more ready to rid himself of the old man, finally resorting to dragging his fearful father up the mountain against his will. The brutality and selfishness of these villagers was also firmly established earlier with their lynching of a starving man who tried to steal food, and now as we watch Matayan and his son struggle on a cliff’s edge, we witness another cold-blooded murder. The son’s patricide is an unadulterated perversion of tradition, demonstrating an eagerness to escape the burden of the past rather than let it go with dignity as the conventions of obasute dictate. Grasping for some sort of justice as a bystander, Tatsuhei unleashes his fury upon his neighbour, and eventually succeeds in sending him plunging to his death too.

As if sectioning this entire tale off into a sad, distant dream of Japanese folklore, Kinoshita’s epilogue removes us completely from the vibrant sets and theatrical storytelling that have dominated The Ballad of Narayama up until now. Colours are desaturated into a miserable black-and-white, and for the first time the mountain scenery is entirely authentic, seeing a train pull into a modern-day station. The only indication of the region’s history is etched on a sign, giving the station its name – “Obasute”, or the “abandonment of old people.” A term that once carried great pride has become one of mourning, implying a desertion that is not merely symbolic, but loaded with cruel dispassion. Perhaps we can at least find some solace in the preservation of Japan’s forgotten legends through this cinematic ballad of lush, vibrant colours, healing that division between past and present with a painterly reinvention of theatrical and film conventions as we know them.

The Ballad of Narayama is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the DVD is available to buy on Amazon.