Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore – dir.Martin Scorsese, 1974

When we begin with a young Alice, the screen is soaking red. The opening titles suggest a silky smooth fifties romp, something involving whisky swigging cigar smoking men, and teary loose lipped broads running away from the hell of it all.  Then out comes Alice, just like Dorothy Gale, swathed in her ruby red. So intense is the colour it’s as though a sunset is fit to burst. It’s a pretty emotive beginning and it lets us know that this Alice is both a charming little dreamer and someone who clings to song. Song is as much the identity of Alice the outsider on her bridge, as the Prairie home on the hill is America’s, and she will never let it go.  When we next meet her, the red has faded and the screen widens to birth America. This is New Mexico, its hot and sticky with seductively sprawling highways, screaming at her to exit.  Alice has an irascible distant husband (Billy Green Bush), and a mischievous bespectacled boy (Alfred Lutter).  Pretty soon her husband is killed in a freak accident.  Its not clear whether what happens next is born from quiet relief or grief, but Alice (Ellen Burstyn) is spurred to move on, she takes to the road with her boy, bound for Monterey, California.  On the road with Alice, the scene cuts a little quickly, a little awkwardly, but it fits somehow with her nerves, after all, she’s leaving home.  The photography and music flood, gushing into scenes of sprawling dusty highways, mountain topped Americana at its most fleeting and nonchalant. We’re unsure whether to like this place or that as Alice and her son check into some cheap motels along the way. She soon meets a smooth talking low-life wife beater  (Harvey Keitel) who scares her and her son back onto the road again.  All the while we fleetingly glimpse her life ambition, she has a voice, she wants to sing, and so Robert Getchell gives her a shot at the American songbook.  With her fingers on the piano her quiet voice lets us know, ‘the clothes you’re wearing were the clothes you wore’, and from then on we know she is awaiting her deliverance.  When Alice gets a job as a waitress and can’t sing anymore, her frustrations become apparent, and the whole world seems to be a diner full of short-fused poor-tippers.  She meets David (Kris Kristofferson) who for the first time offers her a man seemingly without wife beating inclinations and perhaps even, akin to her, a musician’s soul.  She befriends Flo (Diane Ladd) a woman as fraught as she, with a dirty mouth to boot.  At one point Flo shows Alice her necklace, a cross, made of safety pins, that’s what holds me together, she says. This is a piece of the Scorsese oeuvre unlike any other.  One could almost call this film a musical, its protagonist after all has gotta’ do what she’s gotta’ do, and that is sing.  All the while her son brandishes a guitar like it’s an extension of his arm. The film is a funny and glorious thing, a joyous portrayal of starting over, moving on, ultimately it is something that will never leave you.

★★★★★

Women, Film Won’t Protect You Anymore

The woman on screen, in our western patriarchal society, is, outrageously, still little more than an object. She is love interest, muse, femme fatale, she is familial, a sister or a mother.  Rarely is she portrayed anywhere near an equal, rationally or intellectually, even in integrity, which is a position reserved for another male, someone not dissimilar to the protagonist. A woman is too much the other, too subordinate and too different, for this role, besides her desirability and her lack of masculinity, proves the protagonist’s machismo, and thus worth.  This notion may seem extreme, trite, or dated even, but in an industry where actresses have blurred into little more than wide-eyed, insipient, and undernourished commodities, passed around by the fat cat male bastions of the industry, we are yet to truly experience the medium of film through the female gaze, regardless of how earth shattering a female winning the academy award for best director is.  Hollywood after all, is a spin machine, though not to detract from Katherine Bigelow’s deserved win, she is the exception that proves the rule.  At the dawn of Hollywood, men and woman were treated similarly, as property, owned by the studios, stuffed with pills, their imperfections public and private smoothed over, at some point men broke away from their clutches, but the women stayed behind.  If the philosopher Judith Butler’s idea of gender performance is to be applied to film, actresses perform not once, but twice for the cameras. Butler’s credo is that gender is a performance played out by woman and men, a social patriarchal indoctrination to ultimately result in ‘breeding,’ or the procreation of man.  The female gender, historically certainly the subordinate one, is manipulated by the patriarchy, their performance is secured from birth so as to procure a mate, to be mother.  The female is defunct and passive, whereas the male is active, assertive, and empowered.  In many films the female part is an object of desire, the holy grail of the chase, she is constantly being observed, rarely is she actively perusing or pursuing.  Woody Allen’s Annie Hall is an example of the male gaze, capturing the female performance.  It is a subversive film, yet it maintains the classic Hollywood prescription, boy meets girl, and girl breaks away.  Annie (Diane Keaton) herself dresses so as to deflect from gender stereotype, she wears mannish trousers and blazers, she toys with her femininity, however it is inherently her character that divulges her gendered insecurity.  At one point she plays on her gender to get what she wants, she calls Alvy (Woody Allen) over to her appartment when she sees a spider, a definitive effeminate phobia.  What is most concerning in surmising the female gaze, is the reality of the overwhelming omnipresence of the male gaze, woman have, in truth, learnt only to look at themselves from the male perspective.  A film like Barbara Loden’s Wanda is so revelatory, and so important in the western film cannon, because it offers a female director portraying a female character, and one so strange and fragile, that the film is as though the pretence of gender has been stripped away, leaving just the core of the character.  Woman need more Wandas.

Love in the Afternoon – dir.Eric Rohmer, 1972

Fredric (Bernard Verley) has a nice house and a charming and clever wife, with whom he has a cherubic child, with another on the way. Frederic is unable at present to objectively appreciate his domestic situation as he is faltering in the midst of a somewhat premature seven-year itch.  When he takes the morning train his intense gaze at a young woman, sitting ripe and deliciously mysterious in the morning sun, could smoulder the meanest of young hearts. Fredric, whilst sitting in a café on a bustling Parisian street, reveries of controlling the crowds of woman, that pour out from nowhere, to be gone in an instant, never to be known by him. As the last of Rohmer’s ‘six moral tales’ this film has a narrative clout to it that engages with the protagonists own moral quandary, on reacquainting himself with the enigmatic Chloe (Zouzou).  Chloe is the anathema to Frederic’s marriage.  Chloe is loose, free and cool, she flits from job to job, and man-to-man, a totemic temptress, offering Fredric an opportunity to take action and nullify his otherwise meandering passive café-sitting placidity.  She is an alluring thing that Fredric finds a place for in the afternoons.  Chloe’s character is oppositional to Frederic, who is comforted by domestic security.  Chloe is spontaneous and unreliable, which offers excitement yet she never displays any notion of needing anyone, what she offers Frederic fits perfectly for his marriage.  Chloe’s face and body is utilised by Rohmer to bestow a sense of her fragility.  Waiflike and girlish, topped off with high cheek bones and sad eyes, Zouzou’s own mischievousness is an undeniable factor in much of Chloe’s allure. The film is an exploration of the male gaze, the power it has over woman in its objectification, yet there is a warm heart to the story.  Frederic epiphanies that he is in love with his wife, from his crisis has arisen the realisation that he loves her more than ever.  It is a tender seen when he tells her this, as though a light has come on from in the darkness, her reaction is to cry, can’t you see I’m laughing, she tells him.

★★★★☆

Cache – dir.Michael Haneke, 2005

Cache is a superbly unsettling film and stirs in the viewer an explicit sense of discomfort and confusion. The very theme of the film, voyeurism, is a practice human beings deplore as victims, and yet are guilty of, in the very action of watching this film. Similarly, the notion of blurred innocence with guilt is an affliction we come to surmise of the protagonist Georges (Daniel Auteuil).  Georges, who has recently received some primarily nonthreatening yet suspicious surveillance tapes showing the exterior to his Parisian home, eventually associates the source of the threat with a childhood incident.  Georges’ wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), confused by the tapes and the accompanying crude crayon scribbles, is both a passive observer and yet quietly threatened by this domestic disturbance.  Watching the events unfold, the subject of the threats, it transpires, is her husband.  Haneke plunges the viewer into the dark with the opening scene.  Are we watching a still or a moving image?  Who is filming, victim or perpetrator? We are from the onset unclear of where the malevolence lies. Surely though, to warrant such animosity Georges must be guilty, but of what?  Before purging his soul to an unsuspecting Anne, Georges tracks down the conditional culprit.  One could read the film, and the terrible sadness at the heart, as an application to approach the French guilt for the Paris massacre of 1961.  Indeed Georges’ bourgeois persona, most definitely receives a little light ridicule, if only in dichotomising his intellectual pomp with the tragedy and asceticism of the Algerian Majid (Maurice Benichou).  This film however is not wholly concerned with retribution, for neither Mijad nor Georges is offered any comfort or replenishment from either’s predicament.  The end subtly induces the plot to hang on, the final scene adding another layer of complexity to the story.  Ultimately the viewer  does not feel to have found any moralistic culmination or otherwise to the story. Cache is a little too enigmatic and harbours too much uncertainty to be a political stance. It is a little too complex, fragile, and loaded to be an out and out thriller.  The story Haneke weaves is a murkier narrative than most, combined with clever scenes that we witness fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward, at a giddying pace.  The viewer becomes the eyes of Georges, someone desperately searching for clues, pointers, anything, whilst truly anxious and afraid.  Training our astuteness for the one final clue that could just as easily slip past as the credits roll.   Georges’ guilt is ostensibly born from the actions of human weakness. It is the consequences of his actions that we are asked to judge. The questions stack up as the sprawling tragic story unveils, for all the answers to ultimately remain hidden.

★★★★★

Wild Strawberries – dir.Ingmar Bergman, 1957

Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom) is a curmudgeonly old man. After a long successful career in medicine, he is awarded an honorary degree from his alma mater, and takes to the road, daughter in law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) in tow, to receive it.  On the way they stop at Isak’s childhood home. Dizzy with nostalgia, he comes across a patch of wild strawberries. Half aware of the improbability of the metaphysical experience, he is transported back to the days of his youth.  We then bear witness to several painful episodes in Isak’s life, involving the love of his life Sara (Bibi Andersson) and her obvious preference to his brother, whom she would later marry. Present also is Isak’s mother, a stern forbidding woman, whose relationship with her children mirrors Isak’s own later relationship with his son.  His son, it later transpires, is so embittered by life, that he forbids his wife to bear him a child.  The car, in which Isak and Marianne travel, is a literal and metaphoric vessel through which human-form mementoes penetrate Isak’s consciousness.  They pick up some hitchhikers, snapping Isak out of his reverie, one of them, Sara (Bibi Andersson), has not only a nominal affiliation, but also a striking and tantalising resemblance to Isak’s past Sara.  Further mirroring Isak’s story, the Sara-a-like sits in the back between two male companions, gently teasing them, both evidently in love with her. The girl serves as a human embodiment of the momento-mori.  At one point apologising for having insinuated Isak’s old age, she emanates youth, free will, and choice and by doing so illuminates the inevitability  and closeness of Isak’s death.  She sits in the back of the car, like Boadicea at her chariot, an empowered woman, with the reigns of several people’s future in her hands, who will she chose?  Years before Sara didn’t chose Isak.  As if to tantalise with this fact, on first meeting Isak, the second Sara mistakes the biblical Isaac for having married her namesake, no, Isak corrects her, unfortunately he didn’t.  The scenes are seeped in haze and mystery. In one nightmarish vision Sara runs to  an elaborate cradle, around which trees hang like ghosts, and a house appears through the thickets, wooden, stark, and fantastical.  When Marianne finally confronts Isak with the sad truth of her marital situation, we see Isak, sincerely affected and saddened by the prospect he may be somewhat to blame for his son’s unhappiness.  Bergman’s film is a gentle masterpiece at not telling one, but a lifetimes worth of stories. The man facing death must ultimately reflect back on the people and things he has, in bad faith, affected, to ultimately be awarded not just an honorary degree, but absolution.

★★★★★

Vivre Sa Vie – dir.Jean-Luc Godard, 1962

Has any other film approached the subject of life itself quite so masterfully? As a series of vignettes, Vivre Sa Vie, explores the hopes and the subsequent decline of Nana (Anna Karina).  Nana, who’s Rimbaudian ‘I is another,’ detachment to the present, aspires to become an actress. Unable to make a break for herself, having abandoned her husband and facing impoverishment, Nana drifts into prostitution.  Godard crafts the film so that the scenes are perfectly compact in themselves, using innovations in sound editing; the frames melt into one another. Glorious, rich, and luxurious shots of  Paris, and the beautiful Nana, crank the film along. The inside of the brothels, stark and monochrome, with windows looking out on to the moody Parisian streets, brings forth the realities of the social situation. The girl here is a definite dreamer, she is looking to be saved, looking for an escape route, she asks some shady journalist to take her photograph.  She is content at being the woman watched, but at what price must she pay when perhaps all along it was that she wanted to be listened to.  The philosophical undertone to the film is most conspicuous on Nana’s meeting an elderly man in a Café.  He tells her about the thinking life and how it is more difficult and painful but ultimately more rewarding than the elementary one.  Bemused and girlish, but unfazed by his sagacity, she asks him about love.  He tells her that love is a solution on condition that it’s true.  The wisdom of the film is far superior to the fatalistic story, intended to highlight the social cause at its heart. The tragic end comes soon after Nana is told by a lover that ‘art and beauty is life,’ which in that moment she embodies. Wide eyed and loving, it is a strange fleeting scene, which whistles past as though it were a moment, not in Nana’s, but someone else’s life.

★★★★☆

Wanda – dir.Barbara Loden, 1970

Wanda (Barbara Loden), as her name phonetically suggests, wanders. She walks around the industrial wasteland of her town, distracted and solitary. Her pale fragile figure skimming the black coals of the quarries, like foam on coffee.  She walks around in a peppermint haze, a colour that permeates the film, like an aura around the sadness. The film, in long lingering shots, follows Wanda as she goes from the courtroom, where swiftly, and uncontested, she divorces her husband and leaves her children, to cafés, cars, and cinemas, where she is invariably picked up by strangers, pick-pocketed, and abandoned.  Finally she enters a bar where she meets moustachioed man, Mr Dennis (Michael Higgins) who unknowingly to her is in the process of robbing the joint.  Wanda, whose character is frail and disconcertingly unfeigned, is so cracked that the light shines through.  She emanates goodness, innocence even, dressed in white dress and shoes.  Yet she’s a bad mother, her husband told the court, and she’s clearly a drifter with a perpetual sadness that seeks that old on the road cliché, the comfort of strangers. Mr Dennis is no comfort, an oddly family-man looking criminal, he is clearly on the brink of some horrendous maniacal descent. Bespectacled and menacing, Mr Dennis emits extraordinary unhappiness and discontent, he leads Wanda on a criminal escapade, telling her she hasn’t done anything until now, and yet ultimately fools only himself with his words.  Wanda, who throughout the film remains unaffected by the physical and mental tortures she endures, finally displays an outward sense of grief after the tragedy of Mr Dennis. Her still silent figure crammed in between various revelers, she is unable to mask the effect of the wretched days’ events, and we watch her pretty face crumble as the stirring music plays on.

★★★★★

2 Days in Paris – dir.Julie Delpy, 2007

Though this film will inevitably draw comparisons to Before Sunset, same girl, same city, it’s an original in its own right.  The film zings along endearingly, largely due to its own self-conscious parodying of a light French farce.  French lady, Marion (Julie Delpy), and her American boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg), have come to Paris for two nights, where they are to stay in Marion’s flat, on the floor above her enfants terribles type parents.  Jack is a little uptight, he’s a New Yorker don’t you know, so whilst he preoccupies himself with the pitfalls of hypochondria, Marion takes off her spectacles and explores the possibility of romantically moving on from this quirky foreigner who has come along, seemingly  to just humiliate and isolate himself from the footloose Parisians at every available opportunity.  Jack gets threatened when Marion’s exes crop up out of flower stalls from nowhere, he gets a little paranoid when he interprets some questionable French text messages that he sneakily reads on her phone. ‘Paris is hell!’ Jack declares as they break up on the banks of the Seine. A quip to Sartre perhaps, or as it transpires later, he just stayed up watching ‘M’ all night. The strengths of this film are most definitely in the credulity of the relationship that we witness unravel.  Jack is a tattooed totem of neurosis who finds himself out of depth with the laissez faire wooziness of Marion’s family, friends and exes.  Marion, who we are primarily to believe is  cooler and calmer than her boyfriend, her self offers a glimpse of amusing hypochondria.  Convincing herself at a party, that she has had an allergic reaction to some muscles. But perhaps her anxieties run even deeper than that, she is afraid, she tells Jack, of being with just one person for the rest of her life. He accuses her of being a squirrel, collecting men like nuts to have for winter. This film is at its weakest and most disjointed with scenes that seem inserted to politically punctuate the plot, such as Jack sending a group of Bush voting American rednecks the wrong way round Paris.  The film’s successes lies mostly with the fluidity and likability of the performances.  In particular Goldberg’s, whose stand out is the metro scene, where he comically attempts to ward off a strange little man, by casting stern animated faces at him, well at least it made him forget about the threat of terrorism for a while, George Bush, his sinuses, his headaches…

★★★★☆ 

Fargo – dir.Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996

Snow can be so sinister. The cinema has so subtly dichotomised snow that while one might think it most synonymous with all the toasty, twinkling, cold snaps of Christmas, it has, in actual fact, played its part in the darkness too. As a preliminary cause of Jacks spiral into madness in The Shining, the snow caused entrapment and isolation, in cutting the Hotel off from the outside world.  In Fargo, the Coen brothers, use snow as a literal canvas, a white expanse on which they play out their dark and comic story.  Like the haze around the moon, it’s bright white glow, illuminates all the darkness.  The white lets the blood show up, it soaks into the snow, like a sponge absorbing the traces of these dead beats’ peccadilloes. The snow also conceals, and thus has its part in dishing out the ultimate retribution. When Carl (Steve Buscemi) hides the ransom money, he chooses to bury it in the snow, but he is dead before he recovers it.  Somewhere buried in the still white fields is what all the bloody murder was for.  Now it gently scorns with an inanimate silence, the bloodied, dirty actions it has been witness to, as an unwilling apprentice.  As pregnant cop Margie (Frances McDormand) tells the ‘mute’ psychopathic criminal Gaear (Peter Stormare), there’s more to life than money you know.  Fargo has countless comedic moments to counteract the grim and gore but what is so brilliant is that they are also the most disturbing scenes.  When Jerry Lundegaard’s (William H. Macy) wife first sees her abductor at the window, it is inexplicably amusing to see her watching the masked figure look through the window cupping his hands to find his victim.  Strange that terror and fear could promote such a reaction, but that is what the Coens do, they warp humanity until you don’t know what side of good and bad you might be on.  The Minnesota nice that floods the lingo of the film enhances the crass vulgarity of the criminal’s potty mouths, yet it also masks the somewhat disturbed character Jerry, who hides behind it to cloak a rather more dangerous character.  Though Jerry seems to explode at several points throughout the film, it is his final appearance, writhing and crying out on a motel bed to get away from the police, a broken and finished man, that is the most uncomfortable scene of all.

★★★★★

Before Sunset – dir.Richard Linklater, 2004

I like this film so immensely because of how it ends. It’s a Kaiser Soze-type humdinger of a thing.  Yet when you see it, so gentle and subtle is it, that it could easily pass you by, which is a testament to both the script and the acting.  The film dissolves, like sherbet on the tongue.  It so perfectly ends, that I wonder how a film and its prequel (Before Sunrise) could precede it.  Thankfully the film itself is filled with similarly glorious moments. In the back of a taxi, Celine (Julie Delpy) raises her hand to affectionately touch Jesse (Hawke), who mid rant and sitting slightly forward, is none the wiser, Celine thinks twice though, and swiftly retracts the gesture, putting her arm back down again.  It seems such a strange action to witness and yet is a perfectly beautiful depiction of amorous trepidation and neurosis, and from then on we read Celine entirely more clearly.  We feel sorry for Jesse not knowing that for a moment there she wanted to be tender. The film itself is a testimony to what is not done, and what hasn’t happened.  The two never successfully reunited ten years before, and though there are frissons between the two in Paris, they are not acted on, as Jesse is married, it would have been too crass and torrid to dirty this fine romance with betrayal.  The film is about Jesse’s moment with Celine, it is hurried, he has a plane to catch; a metaphor perhaps for the distance in time and space between them and a hark back to their first meeting on a train. Their relationship is a pacing fleeting one, never unhurried, never leisurely.  The element of time adds restlessness and desperation, they only have so long to say or not say everything they have wanted to for years. Both, at points, in between long soliloquies about their lives spent, find it difficult not to orally buckle under the pressure. The film is a private moment played out in a public space, the streets of Paris, until it finally becomes a private one, Celine’s flat, where she, in song, admits that it was always Jesse. The Parisian sun seems to make Celine glow like some golden statue, she hasn’t changed Jesse says, maybe a little thinner, but you know she turned out exactly how he had hoped her to.  Jesse had better stop musing over her or he’s going to miss that Plane.  The most agonizing part of their story is when this pair, with no means of contact, recounts how close they were to meeting again all along.  Both lived in New York City for a while at the same time. Jesse on the way to his wedding, to what would be a loveless marriage, thought he saw her once.  Did he or didn’t he? Was it a tormenting apparition to cold feet or a tantalising coincidence?  She used to live near there she tells him. What is excruciating becomes the most romantic thing of all, but only because they found each other again.  If they hadn’t it would have been another saddest story in the world.

★★★★★