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.
Tony Richardson’s adaptation of classic novel Tom Jones is imbued with the rebellious spirit of the young maverick himself, throwing out the playbook of cinematic convention to skilfully blend highbrow social satire and lowbrow slapstick in its coming-of-age narrative, while finding comfort in the frivolities of an absurdly unpredictable world.
The god’s-eye view of humanity that Wim Wenders grants us in Wings of Desire flies high above 1980s West Berlin with watchful angels, and swoops down low to tune into the intimate thoughts of its citizens, crafting a dreamy city symphony that finds childlike wonder in its everyday pleasures and private sufferings.
Time is a precious resource at the train station where the secret lovers of Brief Encounter fall into a reverie, though David Lean exerts a fine control over its gentle flow in Laura’s nostalgic recollections, intertwining love and guilt within a complex affair that forces this heartbroken housewife into an even greater repression.
With such an emotionally distant sociopath at the centre of The Killer, it is no wonder why David Fincher was so drawn to its methodical screenplay and intensive study of perfectionism, meticulously following the procedures of a vengeful hitman through a treacherous, gloomy underworld that very gradually unravels his icy composure.
Just as Martin Scorsese seems to have had his final say on the crime genre, a spate of violent assassinations targeting the Osage people for their newfound wealth emerges in Killers of the Flower Moon, sprawling this colonial exploitation and genocide out across an epic narrative that elegiacally mourns one of America’s great historical injustices.
Even by Ingmar Bergman’s standards, Dr Jenny Isaksson’s characterisation is layered with immense psychological depth in Face to Face, treading a fine line between realism and surrealism as her childhood traumas, insecurities, and mortal fear of death chaotically rise to the surface after years of emotional repression.
Ingmar Bergman uses six isolated episodes of Johan and Marianne’s married life to piece together a collage of a fragmenting relationship in Scenes From a Marriage, turning their divorce not into a battle of husband versus wife, but rather lovers versus the space between them.
From the moment the first bombs start falling, Ingmar Bergman descends Shame into an irreversible degradation of innocence, love, and compassion, tragically twisting the souls of wartime survivors into distorted shadows of their former selves and taking this study of human violence to its logical, haunting end.
As we trace back the steps of one mentally tortured painter through the days before his disappearance in Hour of the Wolf, it becomes clear that no other Ingmar Bergman film has come this close to outright psychological horror, surreally warping our most intimate relationships into vulnerable weaknesses where demons come to play.
