The assassination that will finally allow secret lovers Julien and Florence to elope couldn’t be more carefully planned, and yet the fatalistic pull of destiny has other mischievous intentions in Elevator to the Gallows, as Louis Malle intertwines two Parisian tales of love and crime with dark, seductive malice.
Contessa Livia Serpieri’s distaste for melodrama clearly does not extend to her own operatic romance in Senso, as Luchino Visconti stages her reckless affair against the tumultuous backdrop of 19th century Italy with historic grandeur, apprehensively waiting for these delusions of exotic love to unravel and expose the insecurities they conceal.
To truly revere a land as incomprehensibly vast and complex as Africa is to feed a connection to one’s own soul, and yet as Out of Africa absorbs us into Baroness Karen von Blixen’s bubble of romantic bliss, Sydney Pollack also develops a poignant metaphor that keeps her greatest love as distant as her nostalgic reminiscences.
Michael Mann’s grand mythologising of colonial America forecasts a solemn future in The Last of the Mohicans, and yet it is also through the cross-cultural relationships formed between Europeans and Native Americans that seeds of harmony are planted, miraculously blooming in the unfertile soil of war.
A return to the Mad Max series once again turbocharges George Miller with raw, high-octane vigour, as Furiosa expands its demented, post-apocalyptic wasteland to remarkably expansive proportions, and gives us even greater reason to admire its titular warrior as a force of undistilled willpower.
With an intelligent employment of religious and demonic imagery at hand, Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina craft one of the most indelible cinematic characters of the 1950s, allowing us an empathetic vessel through which we contemplate the religious hypocrisies and class struggles of post-war Italy.
Whether Terry Gilliam’s mischievous storyteller in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a hero, a liar, or both, he is undoubtedly a man who can reach the hearts of those who listen, constructing magnificently surreal worlds of aliens and gods that place him right alongside history’s greatest mythical figures.
It is not just the fantastical designs and living furniture which imbue the enchanted castle of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast with an air of otherworldly awe, but its illusory logic makes for a dreamscape as inventively surreal as it is fearsome, penetrating deceptive facades of beauty and ugliness that conceal the true nature of our humanity.
It takes a special sort of inhuman cruelty to live in such close proximity to largescale genocide, profit off its spoils, and continue each day with no remorse, so the vast wall that divides Auschwitz from the camp commandant’s country house makes for a chilling visual metaphor of this in The Zone of Interest, as Jonathan Glazer shrewdly considers where history’s greatest evil truly lies.
The image of post-war Germany that Rainer Werner Fassbinder composes in Lola is remarkably distinct from its 1905 source material, and yet its tragic romance between a middle-aged gentleman and young performer carries through with vibrant poignancy, melding social realism and colourfully heightened melodrama in a timeless fable of degraded honour.
