-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --
Volver (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2006)
✭✭✭✭✩
Headed by a tour-de-force female ensemble, Almodóvar reconjures familiar motifs of trauma, melodrama and intergenerational womanhood in this captivating, magic-realist piece. It is joyous, dazzling cinema, even with the grotesque nature of events depicted, but – in particular – a cinema of women, of all ages, nationalities and classes, a bringing together of one powerful, female voice. Volver stands out, alongside The Skin I Live In and Julietta (my own, personal favourite) as one of Almodóvar’s most ebullient, haunting features.
Headed by a tour-de-force female ensemble, Almodóvar reconjures familiar motifs of trauma, melodrama and intergenerational womanhood in this captivating, magic-realist piece. It is joyous, dazzling cinema, even with the grotesque nature of events depicted, but – in particular – a cinema of women, of all ages, nationalities and classes, a bringing together of one powerful, female voice. Volver stands out, alongside The Skin I Live In and Julietta (my own, personal favourite) as one of Almodóvar’s most ebullient, haunting features.
Three Short Films from dir. Agnes Varda: L’opéra-mouffe (1958), Black Panthers – Black is Honest and Beautiful … (1968), Salut les Cubains (1971)
✭✭✭✭✩
Images craft a display of interior thought, in the short films of Agnes Varda, a portmanteau consciousness – whether in sensitivity, appreciation or warmth – found in the frame of almost every scene. Across the triptych of these works, the relationship between viewer and viewed is a fixed preoccupation to Varda’s wandering eye: various faces occupy the screen, unaware of the camera, whilst, in other moments, the odd one becomes conscious of its presence – irritated, bemused or simply uncertain – and, in rarer moments still, notice it only to then pretend they haven’t. No single view or viewer is prioritised or predictable. I discovered these short documentaries by accident, on MUBI, whilst staying for a brief period in Germany, and am incredibly grateful for it. Varda, once again, shimmers with curiosity and pleasure for the craft.
Images craft a display of interior thought, in the short films of Agnes Varda, a portmanteau consciousness – whether in sensitivity, appreciation or warmth – found in the frame of almost every scene. Across the triptych of these works, the relationship between viewer and viewed is a fixed preoccupation to Varda’s wandering eye: various faces occupy the screen, unaware of the camera, whilst, in other moments, the odd one becomes conscious of its presence – irritated, bemused or simply uncertain – and, in rarer moments still, notice it only to then pretend they haven’t. No single view or viewer is prioritised or predictable. I discovered these short documentaries by accident, on MUBI, whilst staying for a brief period in Germany, and am incredibly grateful for it. Varda, once again, shimmers with curiosity and pleasure for the craft.
Los Abrazos Rotos (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2009)
✭✭✭✩✩
Signature brilliance and colour is brought to yet another Almodóvar feature, a fluently-uncoiled noir of erotic passions, guilt, and the hyper-fixations of filmmaking itself. After a visit from a figure of the past, blind scriptwriter Mateo Blanc – otherwise known as “Harry Caine”, a fictional alter-ego – is forced to re-tread the tragedies of a former relationship (artfully teased by the ultra-sensuous Penélope Cruz) and its eventual collapse. Arguably predictable in layout, Almodóvar’s feature moves not unlike the roving, Hitchcockian eye at the onset to Vertigo (winding over Kim Newman’s profile), or the floundering Tippi Hedren, in The Birds and Marnie, a cinema in love with its female subject, if troubled, only here with bold and renewed intelligence.
Signature brilliance and colour is brought to yet another Almodóvar feature, a fluently-uncoiled noir of erotic passions, guilt, and the hyper-fixations of filmmaking itself. After a visit from a figure of the past, blind scriptwriter Mateo Blanc – otherwise known as “Harry Caine”, a fictional alter-ego – is forced to re-tread the tragedies of a former relationship (artfully teased by the ultra-sensuous Penélope Cruz) and its eventual collapse. Arguably predictable in layout, Almodóvar’s feature moves not unlike the roving, Hitchcockian eye at the onset to Vertigo (winding over Kim Newman’s profile), or the floundering Tippi Hedren, in The Birds and Marnie, a cinema in love with its female subject, if troubled, only here with bold and renewed intelligence.
Napszállta (dir. László Nemes, 2018)
✭✭✭✭✭
Translated from Hungarian as “Sunset”, László Nemes’ follow-up to his Oscar-acclaimed debut, Son of Saul, is an arresting spectacle of tragedy, dream and false consciousness, one that traffics the final, paralysing moments preceding the beginning of WW1. As demonstrated with his prior work, little, if any, dialogue is spoken throughout the course of narrative, feelings instead pronounced by shallow-focused closeups (the opening, for example), weighted forms of lighting (gaslight, fireworks) and drawn-out tracking shots across elaborately designed set pieces (the garden banquet, for example). It is a film reminiscent of nightmare or dreamscape, only a type of somniloquy from which no figure can be woken – nobody appears to be able to leave the city, despite persistent requests, and faces revisit the screen, only deepened in contour – and by this does its history adopt an otherworldly, imaginative optic (not dissimilar to the performance of lead Juli Jakab), time seen from a future, over-the-shoulder perspective of terror. At once led as dramatic mystery, Napszállta point us into a pervasive, ideology-driven society at the heights of its fury and inner damage. Stunning, evocative cinema.
Translated from Hungarian as “Sunset”, László Nemes’ follow-up to his Oscar-acclaimed debut, Son of Saul, is an arresting spectacle of tragedy, dream and false consciousness, one that traffics the final, paralysing moments preceding the beginning of WW1. As demonstrated with his prior work, little, if any, dialogue is spoken throughout the course of narrative, feelings instead pronounced by shallow-focused closeups (the opening, for example), weighted forms of lighting (gaslight, fireworks) and drawn-out tracking shots across elaborately designed set pieces (the garden banquet, for example). It is a film reminiscent of nightmare or dreamscape, only a type of somniloquy from which no figure can be woken – nobody appears to be able to leave the city, despite persistent requests, and faces revisit the screen, only deepened in contour – and by this does its history adopt an otherworldly, imaginative optic (not dissimilar to the performance of lead Juli Jakab), time seen from a future, over-the-shoulder perspective of terror. At once led as dramatic mystery, Napszállta point us into a pervasive, ideology-driven society at the heights of its fury and inner damage. Stunning, evocative cinema.
Peeping Tom (dir. Michael Powell, 1960)
✭✭✭✭✩
Vivian: ‘Now what are you doing? Mark: ‘Photographing you photographing me.’ She replies: ‘Mark, you’re wonderful …’ Such wonderful ‘doing[s]’ in photography, or film, are fundamental to the self-reflexive camera that observes all in Peeping Tom, whilst also, perhaps, the most unknowable, most terrifying of acts. It is interesting to consider the ways in which our understanding of the camera – from a lumbering, mighty object, to a hand-held mobile of ease – has changed, a blind acceptance that a camera simply sees what we wish and nothing more. (One may see the rise of iPhone-filmed movies – such as Sean Baker’s Tangerine, or Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane and High Flying Bird – as products of this change, with varying success.) Michael Powell wishes to feel the weight of a camera pressed into the most dangerous of places, in particular, that of our own reflection (notably, in the moments before death). Aspects of this horror classic grind onward, and at other times – much like the tiresome expository at the close to Pyscho– does its dialogue over-explain or needlessly clarify. Peeping Tom, regardless of these slights, artfully reminds us of our own, morbid fascination with looking, and the hesitancy of having the camera turned on ourselves.
Vivian: ‘Now what are you doing? Mark: ‘Photographing you photographing me.’ She replies: ‘Mark, you’re wonderful …’ Such wonderful ‘doing[s]’ in photography, or film, are fundamental to the self-reflexive camera that observes all in Peeping Tom, whilst also, perhaps, the most unknowable, most terrifying of acts. It is interesting to consider the ways in which our understanding of the camera – from a lumbering, mighty object, to a hand-held mobile of ease – has changed, a blind acceptance that a camera simply sees what we wish and nothing more. (One may see the rise of iPhone-filmed movies – such as Sean Baker’s Tangerine, or Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane and High Flying Bird – as products of this change, with varying success.) Michael Powell wishes to feel the weight of a camera pressed into the most dangerous of places, in particular, that of our own reflection (notably, in the moments before death). Aspects of this horror classic grind onward, and at other times – much like the tiresome expository at the close to Pyscho– does its dialogue over-explain or needlessly clarify. Peeping Tom, regardless of these slights, artfully reminds us of our own, morbid fascination with looking, and the hesitancy of having the camera turned on ourselves.
Belle de Jour (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1967)
✭✭✭✭✭
Unforgettable, lyrical cinema, Belle de Jour is truly unlike anything else, an effortless carnival of lust, imagination and mounted shame. Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine Serizy, the eponymous, Parisian “Belle de Jour”, whose call for masochistic pleasure begins in nocturnal wonderings – for example: tied to a tree, beaten and assaulted – before transferring into daytime employment at a high-class bordello, 11 Cité Jean de Saumer. To Buñuel, the nature of transgression sits (all too comfortably) at the centre of entrenched, bored norms in society – such as marriage – which, by the escapism offered through sex, lull its population into new realms of physical experience. A piece of contradiction, scandal and craft, Buñuel’s classic of modern-French cinema is an uproarious journey into the deepest valleys of our passions.
Unforgettable, lyrical cinema, Belle de Jour is truly unlike anything else, an effortless carnival of lust, imagination and mounted shame. Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine Serizy, the eponymous, Parisian “Belle de Jour”, whose call for masochistic pleasure begins in nocturnal wonderings – for example: tied to a tree, beaten and assaulted – before transferring into daytime employment at a high-class bordello, 11 Cité Jean de Saumer. To Buñuel, the nature of transgression sits (all too comfortably) at the centre of entrenched, bored norms in society – such as marriage – which, by the escapism offered through sex, lull its population into new realms of physical experience. A piece of contradiction, scandal and craft, Buñuel’s classic of modern-French cinema is an uproarious journey into the deepest valleys of our passions.
Incendies (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2010)
✭✭✭✩✩
Tough and confident filmmaking drive this beautifully-visualised thriller from rising director Denis Villeneuve, its theme and style otherwise prototype to what has since been refined in his wonderfully-unusual, later Hollywood works (Arrival and Bladerunner 2049). Incendies does suffer, nevertheless, in its sequence of concluding events, as narrative implausibility finds itself married to melodramatic, contrived stupor. This aside, Villeneuve strikes his audience with the sheer skill and flourish of his ability.
Tough and confident filmmaking drive this beautifully-visualised thriller from rising director Denis Villeneuve, its theme and style otherwise prototype to what has since been refined in his wonderfully-unusual, later Hollywood works (Arrival and Bladerunner 2049). Incendies does suffer, nevertheless, in its sequence of concluding events, as narrative implausibility finds itself married to melodramatic, contrived stupor. This aside, Villeneuve strikes his audience with the sheer skill and flourish of his ability.
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