Category: Directors

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Greed is Good? Scorsese’s masterpiece is a heady deconstruction of the excess of white collar criminals

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Jordon Belfort), Jonah Hill (Donnie Azoff), Margot Robbie (Naomi Lapaglia), Kyle Chandler (FBI Agent Patrick Denham), Rob Reiner (Max Belfort), Jon Bernthal (Brad Brodnick), Matthew McConaughey (Mark Hanna), Jon Favreau (Manny Riskin), Jean Dujardin (Jean-Jacques Saurel), Joanna Lumley (Aunt Emma), Cristin Milioti (Teresa Patrillo), Christine Eberle (Leah Belfort), Kenneth Choi (Chester Ming), Brian Sacca (Robbie Feinberg), Henry Zebrowski (Alden Kupferberg)

All The Wolf of Wall Street is really missing is an early freeze frame of a coke-fuelled banker slamming the phone down on a closed deal and a wistful voiceover from Jordan Belfort: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be Wall Street trader”. If Goodfellas was Scorsese’s exploration of the attractions – and dangers – of a life in blue collar crime, then The Wolf of Wall Street is its white collar companion piece. The fact that so many viewers find the behaviour of Belfort morally outrageous in a way that no one ever objects about Henry Hill is, for me, an indication of how much we loath these masters-of-the-universe. For all their faults, we’d still rather see a violent criminal as one of us.

Based on Jordan Belfort’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) autobiography, The Wolf of Wall Street follows his time building a dodgy trading empire and a large fortune. Not that he can remember most of it, as he seems to be on a permanent intoxicated binge of drinks, hookers and every drug you can ever imagine (and some you can’t). The FBI catches up with him eventually, but Belfort learns precious little from his experiences. Other than, perhaps, that so long as you are rich and white in America, you can basically get away with anything.

That’s perhaps the key to Wolf of Wall Street. Scorsese may not shy away from the delicious dark comedy of Belfort’s life of excess, but it doesn’t blind him to the shallow awfulness of the man or his unthinking, instinctive greed and self-obsession. You would need to be a pretty shallow person to look at Belfort’s greed, moral emptiness and self-destructive binges and want to ape him. If you think watching DiCaprio literally paralytic on quaaludes is the life you want, frankly there is something wrong with you.

What perhaps made some feel Wolf of Wall Street was oddly in love with Belfort is its electric pace. The film is a brilliant reminder of Scorsese’s faultless understanding of pace. Or one who matches unparalleled cinematic skill with the rambunctious energy of a first-timer allowed to play with his movie toys for the first time. Brilliantly assembled, this is a superb collection of cinematic techniques, from jump cuts to fluid transitions that power through a series of increasingly bacchanalian parties and isn’t afraid to admit that, in the moment, this stuff can be fun (rather like getting the best table in Goodfellas) but ultimately self-destructive. (After all, few know the dangers of drugs like Scorsese.)

At the centre of this whirlwind is a stunning performance from Leonardo DiCaprio. With his still youthful, charismatic handsomeness, DiCaprio only needed to tweak his screen persona to provoke the sort of perverted idolatry Belfort receives from his co-workers. But he goes above and beyond in his transformation in this role. He makes Belfort simultaneously oddly childlike and revoltingly corrupted, someone whom we enjoy spending time with while finding repulsive. He rips through Belfort’s trademark, drug-fuelled motivational speeches, monologues of insanely eye-popping intensity, explosions of off-the-chain wildness. At other times he’ll sulk and whine like a spoilt child. DiCaprio struts across the screen with an unpredictable physicality – his embodying of the physical effects of mind-altering drugs is hilarious and horrifying –in possibly his finest ever performance.

DiCaprio is the raw energy source that helps power the rest of the film. Scorsese matches him blow-by-blow with this dynamic expose of white-collar corruption. Using Belfort as a narrator – which serves to further expose his shallowness, greed and utter inability to learn any sustained messages from the depths he plummets to – the entire film is all about how the flip side of the American Dream tacitly promotes and encourages this sort of behaviour.

Belfort is the rash the system has come out as. In a highly effective early cameo, McConaughey plays Belfort’s first mentor, a coke-fuelled hedonist hooked on the buzz of closing deals, who pushes Belfort towards a career of success (including introducing a brilliant breathing exercise – improvised by McConaughey based on his own warm-up exercises – that becomes a mantra in the film). DiCaprio’s eyes have already lit up at watching a deal closing. Drugs and sex are just an attempt for Belfort to replicate the buzz of the real addiction: money.

Scorsese recognises that we don’t need to know the details of Belfort’s illegal dealings. (In his voiceover Belfort literally tells us it doesn’t matter, all that does is the shitload of cash they were bringing in.) We learn enough about the huge mark-ups (50% of the deal’s value) he can make from selling penny stocks (trades of small public companies) and “pump and dump” tactics to know it’s wrong. I will admit the film does little to show the victims – but then Belfort never cares either, proudly stating at one point he has no guilt fleecing his clients out of cash, because he knows how to spend it, better than they do.

It all pours into a hedonistic, alpha-male environment where the air is as littered with fucks (the film held a record for most use of the word) as the floors and desks of Belfort’s offices are during his hooker-filled end-of-week parties. Wolf of Wall Street is also an expose of toxic alpha-maledom. Bullying, abuse and screaming are ripe, women are basically commodities traded as easily as shares. The only exceptions are those allowed into the boys’ club as either surrogate-male fellow traders or trophies to adorn the arm. Margot Robbie (superb in a star-making role) plays Belfort’s glamourous wife, who knows she needs to use her physical assets to make her way in this world.

The film rips along through a party-deal-party structure. Belfort goes from wowing his fellow penny stock traders by making $2k in two minutes to wrapping the trading floor of his fake-old-school Wall Street firm around his finger in excess filled speeches. He also goes from a charming party animal to an incoherent, rambling, deeply unpleasant and dangerous drunk and drug addict. But crucially, he learns nothing . There is no life-and-soul shattering payback like Henry Hill undergoes. Fault, guilt and consequences roll off his rich, spoilt back. He ends the film still winning the adulation of would-be millionaires, his conscience (if it exists) untroubled by any impact his actions have had on others.

Perhaps Scorsese could have allowed more space to victims – and to Kyle Chandler’s dutiful and dedicated FBI agent who brings him down (our final shot of this character stresses his humble, low-paid status – echoing back to his confession to at times regretting leaving a trading career for a law one). But that’s to criticise the film for not being obvious enough. Of course parties are fun. But each party becomes wilder, more orgiastic and uncomfortable as the film goes on. But if we didn’t understand the fun, we couldn’t understand how people get hooked on this adrenalin fuelled life.

Wolf of Wall Street though is a warning to the curious – if you are smart enough to look. Belfort’s soulless, horrible life is not one to aspire to, and his moral emptiness not one to wish to have. It’s a funny film, but it’s also a dark one. DiCaprio is brilliant beyond belief, Jonah Hill funny and pathetic as his best friend, Margot Robbie becomes a star and Scorsese rips through the film with the energy, passion and dynamism of a much younger director. An outstanding tentpole film in his CV.

Summer Interlude (1951)

Memory, mortality, repression, grief and a little dash of hope: Bergman establishes his themes in one of his earliest film

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Maj-Britt Nilsson (Marie), Birger Malmsten (Henrik), Alf Kjellin (David Nyström), Annalisa Ericson (Kaj), Georg Funkquist (Uncle Erland), Stig Olin (Ballet Master), Mimi Pollak (Mrs. Calwagen)

On the night of the dress rehearsal for her next production, successful ballerina Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson) receives a parcel containing an old diary. It’s thirteen years old and belonged to Henrik (Birger Malmsten), a young man she met and fell in love with while staying with family friends on a small island. The relationship was one of blissful joy – so why then does even the faintest memory of it bring out a cold panic in Marie?

The answer is of course rooted in past trauma in a film that touches on so many themes Bergman would explore in even greater detail later, it’s hard to see it as a film in its own right, like an early draft pencil sketch of a Renaissance master. Themes of memory, trauma, mortality, repression, romance and coming to terms with all of these would resurface time and again in the master’s later work. Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Face to Face, Persona, Fanny and Alexander… They all expand on Summer Interlude. For starters, Marie’s reverie on the island revolves around memories activated by eating strawberries and takes in an ageing priest exploring mortality through chess.

So, you can sort of watch Summer Interlude as a game of inspiration-spotting, keeping a tally of the Bergmanesque pre-homages. But that would do a disservice to a heartfelt, beautifully judged, hauntingly sad film which deals not only with loss but also acceptance. It’s effectively two films in one, straddling the emotionally cold present and Marie’s return to the windswept island, and the glorious summer of carefree romance she shared all that time ago, when everything was possible.

As Marie, Maj-Britt Nilsson is impressive. One of the first of Bergman’s muses – and the first major indicator of his skill and empathy for powerful female-led drama – Nilsson has the difficult job of distinguishing between two versions of her character. Her present day one is muted, restrained and hiding behind her ballet performance make-up, unable to really face the world and unhappy in her own skin. By comparison, the younger version feels like a different person: vibrant, hopeful, excited and youthful. And besotted with Birger Malmsten’s boyish and delightful Henrik, an impulsive but engaging kid.

The flashback to their romance is given the sun-dabbled beauty of memory. They run across beaches and up hills, flirt in beach huts and conduct a sweet engagement ceremony. The company of the other is more than enough for both of them. Gunnar Fischer’s photography captures this with an intense, naturalistic beauty – including a gorgeous shot of a cloud across the sun while we hear the voices of Marie and Henrik below. It also makes for a wonderfully alive contrast to the more static coolness of the present, where wide-open spaces are exchanged for backstage confines.

It’s not a huge surprise to reveal that Marie and Henrik’s relationship end tragically. That after all is the mood we associate with the Gloomy Swede. But what makes the film really work is the hope and joy not only of the memory of that glorious summer – but also in the ability, thirteen years later, of Marie to consider processing it and allowing new joy into her life. To come to terms with what has happened to her and learning to love the person she is today, (literally) wiping away the defensive make-up that has kept her distant from the world.

Much of her defensiveness comes courtesy of “Uncle” Erland (a deeply unsettling Georg Funkquist), the family friend she was staying with that summer. A doctor and psychiatrist, Erland clearly has a unsuitable interest (bordering on obsession) with Marie (something all too obvious to his wife). His desire to help her deal with her tragedy is based more on an unpleasant desire for control as it is friendship. He’s one of the darker figures in Bergman, even more so because he’s so mundane in his corruption.

Memory and past trauma linger over Summer Interlude – and the influence of both is central to the film’s impact. Bergman skilfully intercuts between past and present, without ever overplaying or showing his hand. Both timelines are interspersed with little character flourishes that would be worthy of whole films (and in some cases Bergman explored those himself later!). Henrik’s geriatric aunt, a fanatical chess player, who (correctly) states she will live for decades to come. A priest dwelling on mortality. A ballet master who understands how Marie’s obsession with dancing serves to blot out any other life. A fellow dancer who muses on how long before their time is up.

These ideas are assembled though with a warmth and emotional intelligence that would become Bergman’s hallmark. It’s also a film crammed with invention: a (brief) argument with Henrik over Marie’s obsessive practice, frames her feet in constant close-up as she practices her moves: the film will end with a similar shot, this time with practice married to romance. For a film about tragedy, trauma and torturous memories, it’s surprising how optimistic it is. As Marie smiles for what seems like the first time in decades, you feel there is hope for us all.

Another Round (2020)

Vinterberg’s film explores our complex relationship with alcohol with a surprising lack of judgement

Director: Thomas Vinterberg

Cast: Mads Mikkelsen (Martin), Thomas Bo Larsen (Tommy), Magnus Millang (Nikolaj), Lars Ranthe (Peter), Maria Bonnevie (Anika), Helene Reingaard Neumann (Amalie), Susse Wold (Principal)

Mankind’s most difficult relationship? Might just be with alcohol. Ever since Noah first toppled over pissed, we’ve struggled to balance that delightful buzz a touch of intoxication gives with the destructive impact way too much has. It’s a relationship explored in Thomas Vinterberg’s curious mix of warning and celebration, Another Round, which (slightly obliquely) looks at the positives and negatives of alcohol consumption.

In a gymnasium school in Copenhagen, history teacher Martin (Mads Mikkeslen) has lost all passion and interest in his students (so much so they try to have him removed) and his marriage is stuck in an increasingly distant rut. After a birthday meal, he and three friends – PE teacher Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), psychology teacher Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) and music teacher Peter (Lars Ranthe) – agree to a pact to combat their ennui. After reading a theory that mankind is born with 0.05% blood alcohol content deficiency (and topping it up makes you more creative and relaxed), they decide to experiment with maintaining a certain level of inebriation. At first it has a positive impact; but as they push the boundaries of the experiment, the negatives swiftly multiply.

Vinterberg’s film is notable for not taking an obvious (or firm) stance on alcohol consumption. It’s easy to imagine an American or British film dwelling on the negatives at the cost of everything, or demonstrating deep regret in the friends for ever starting on this journey in the first place. Another Round doesn’t do this. In fact, it rather bravely points out the positives we can feel from the happiness and relaxation alcohol can give. So much so that, at first, it actually improves people’s lives. After all, if it was always all bad – we wouldn’t drink it would we?

This is most notable in the case of Martin. He might stumble in the staffroom on the way to class, but (after a swig of vodka) his teaching becomes more inspiring, electric and engaging. He rediscovers a passion for working with students, dropping the disengaged drawling of semi-confused facts we see him use earlier (where he doesn’t even seem to be listening to himself, randomly drifting from the Industrial revolution to Churchill) and replacing it with insightful parallels, high-energy tempo and fun activities. Whether it’s psychological or something else, being able to relax clearly has a positive short-term impact on his ability to teach.

It’s matched in the others as well. Peter gets his students singing with an intensity and beauty he couldn’t begin to get them to reach earlier. Tommy, in his work with a primary school football team, brings out the skilled footballer in a shy, bespectacled student (although his uncomfortable blurring of the line between teacher and surrogate parent with this boy hints at Tommy’s lack of control, which the film will explore in more depth). Vinterberg echoes the giddy feeling of elation all four feel by subtle use of a free-moving handheld camera, compared to the more staid rigidity of the earlier stable shots.

Martin also dramatically improves his personal life. He starts to reconnect with his family and rebuild passions with his wife. Sure, there are negatives. Hidden alcohol stashes at the school are discovered. It becomes harder to hide their intoxication in the common room. But it still feels good, right? Problem is, Martin makes the mistake many of us have. If a small amount of this makes me feel this good – why don’t I take a large amount? Surely if I up the blood alcohol content even higher, the positives will be all the greater. Sadly, of course, it doesn’t work like that.

Vinterberg’s film is careful not to use labels like alcoholism. But, in the same way it isn’t afraid to show the world-beating confidence a stiff drink or two can give you, it doesn’t shy away from the impact of over-consumption. Deciding, “as an experiment”, to push their drinking to absurd levels for one night only, to get as intoxicated as possible, the four have a fab night. But the next morning? Peter loses all his clothes diving in the sea. Nikolaj wets the marriage bed in a confused stupor. Martin wakes up, face bleeding, on the pavement having tried (and failed) to use his keys on his neighbour’s house, and is carried home by his humiliated children.

This is as nothing compared to the terrible impact of alcohol on Tommy. While all four of the men no doubt become increasingly dependent, it’s Tommy who tips into full blown alcoholism. Beautifully played by Thomas Bo Larsen, its painful to watch this gruff-but-playful bachelor dip increasingly into confused, stumbling, permanent inebriation, living in a home made of finished bottles and unable to hide from colleagues or students his intoxication.

But, for all that much of the second half of the film focuses on these negatives, it doesn’t offer easy solutions. All four realise things have gone too far – but none of them can forswear (or even seem to consider doing so) alcohol. Martin’s marriage collapses and Nikolaj’s nearly goes the same way. But they still gather at the film’s end for a drink. It’s at this point that it can be a little unclear what Vinterberg’s thoughts are on the demon. But then perhaps that is the point: we all know it’s bad for us anyway, so a film that looks at how we balance that desire with a certain level of responsibility is always, perhaps, going to shy away from either easy answers or definitive statements.

It’s perhaps why the film ends with a surprisingly blissful, up-beat ending of hope for the future rather than despair, as Martin explodes into a riotous improvised dance routine. It’s easy to forget Mikkelsen is a trained dancer, and the fact he provides such a striking, memorable ending to the film is fitting as it’s a triumph for him. At first a shambling, sad-sack figure, Mikkelsen’s Martin finds a casualness and relaxation that seemed beyond him (the film is a physical triumph for Mikkelsen – his drunken move through a common room worthy of Gene Kelly or Buster Keaton). Mikkelsen’s work is extraordinary in its emotional complexity – bursts of pained sorrow, rage, guilt, self-loathing, despair and hope flash across his face and he holds the entire film together.

He’s ably supported by Larsen, Millang and Ranthe – all superb – and Vinterberg’s deceptively casual and unobtrusive direction helps craft a film that offers scenarios but not lectures. While I could have hoped for the film perhaps taking a bit more of a stance one way or the other – or give a more unflinching look at the impact on others of alcohol abuse – as a personal story Another Round is vibrant, honest and (strangely) hopeful, for all the terrible impacts it displays. It lingers with you like a hangover.

The Lighthouse (2019)

Undefinable, haunting madness in Robert Egger’s mesmeric film that defies categorisation

Director: Robert Eggers

Cast: Robert Pattinson (Ephraim Winslow), Willem Dafoe (Thomas Wake)

Who’d want to be a lighthouse keeper? Weeks on end, stuck on a rock, with nothing but sea gulls and your fellow keepers for company. The cabin fever might well start to make you feel your grip on reality shifting. You’d definitely think it was a strong chance watching Robert Eggers’ mesmeric, enthralling and undefinable masterpiece, a mix of everything from Victorian shlock to Greek Mythology via MR James and Edgar Allen Poe, by way of Freud and Jung. It’s impossible to work out, horrifyingly clear and deeply, unsettlingly brilliant.

Two ‘wickies’ (lighthouse keepers) in 1890s arrive on an island off the coast of New England. Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) is a (self-proclaimed?) salty-sea-dog and veteran wickie. He tends the light. His assistant, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), is a former woodworker working on contract, seemingly on the run from something. He is the island’s dogsbody and tends the mechanisms that keep the light on and turning and the island’s fog-horn blaring. These two live cheek-by-jowl, a relationship that oscillates between distrust, resentment and strange warmth.

Things take an increasing turn for the bizarre, as a storm cuts them off from their scheduled relief. Slowly the isolation, supplies failure (gin and beans are seemingly the only food sources left) tap into the psychological flaws in the men themselves. Ephraim becomes ever more consumed by visions of a horrific but sensual mermaid. Wake obsessively guards his sole access to the lighthouse tower – and, Ephraim suspects, the mysteries it contains. Their relationship crosses boundaries of longing, violence and anger.

The Lighthouse is somewhere between parable, modern myth and psychological study. You could call it a horror film – I see it more as a classic ghost story – but you could just as easily call it a survivalist film, a character study or a psychological thriller. Egger’s insidiously unsettling film-making and the sublime acting from the two leads combine to make a film ripe for interpretation, and intensely rewarding on rewatch. It’s an explosion of artistic brilliance.

Shot in a superbly atmospheric black and white – and a claustrophobic academy ratio 4:3 – it’s a film that presents one striking, chilling, unforgettable visual image after another. Inspired by silent cinema – in particular Murnau, Lang and von Sternberg, although I spotted elements of Keaton – but as if moody German expressionism was used to shoot a Rorschach test. The inky blacks, and overwhelming bursts of blinding white light, suggest unimaginable horrors lurking out of sight, while its impressionistic imagery constantly pushes us to question the reality of the film.

It all builds on the superb feeling of isolation Eggers invokes. Rooms are small and crowded with furniture. The island is a bleak rock, shorn of any vegetation. The only wildlife is an army of seagulls. The blare of the island’s foghorn is continuous – sounding like a doom-laden rumble from Hell – that seeping into the viewer’s soul. Every corner of the lighthouse station becomes achingly familiar to the viewer and somewhere you can imagine not wanting to spend a second longer than you have to.

Stretching their vocal muscles around a script (written by Eggers and his brother Max) full of rich, chewy, Victoriania dialogue by way of Beckett and Pinter (in one compellingly funny sequence, the two actors basically shout “what” at each other over and over again) both are superb. Dafoe walks a fine line expertly between realism and Robert-Newton-esque parody, as the saltiest sea-dog imaginable, who can oscillate between surly admonitions and flights of myth-filled, metaphorical fancy. Pattinson dives head first into a man who we are never sure we fully understand: is he a frustrated time-server, a violent monster, a delusional schizophrenic, a little-boy lost? Either way it’s a truly brilliant performance of Day-Lewis level commitment and immersion.

You could have a lot of fun arguing that perhaps both men are two halves of the same fractured psyche (as if Wake is a future version of Ephraim, almost as if the film is him witnessing his own origins story). Certainly, as their film progresses, their personalities and histories begin to merge. It would help explain the curious emotional bond between them: at times they seem to almost hate each other, at another a drunken fight is only inches away from a sexual encounter. They laugh at and loath each other, are mutually dependent, plot each other’s destruction but then pathetically look at each other for reassurance and praise (Wake is heartbroken when Ephraim criticises his cooking, while Ephraim both resents and worships this hard-taskmaster father figure).

It’s a suspicion that could also be incited by the all-pervading weirdness on the island. Ephraim –carrying the burden of secret crimes on the mainland – see visions of a mermaid among logs, in which sexual encounters are mixed with the mermaid’s murderous attempts to drown him. His first-day searches of the house unearth a carving of a mermaid, which seems to fascinate and repel him – he takes to masturbating (joylessly) over it in the workshop. He seems to spy Wake worshiping, naked, the light during his long-night vigils up the tower (suspicious fluids drip down from here, along with half glimpses of mermaid tentacles). In any case, Wake guards his access to the light like a jealous lover, while his faith in sea mythology becomes increasingly less of a mantra and more of a framework to understand the world.

How much is real? Or is it a sign of Ephraim’s fractured, guilty, conscious? We see most of the events through his eyes – a man we know is a thief and, most likely, a killer. There is more than enough evidence that Ephraim is lying about his past as much to himself as he is Wake. Wake too is a liar – telling at least two versions of how he ended up with a gammy leg, enough to make you wonder how much his claims of being a sea-dog are true. As isolation and constant drink – the two spend most of the second half in various states of inebriation first from gin then turpentine – kick in, and they and their surroundings become increasingly dishevelled and fart-stenched.

There are dark powers at work on this island. Echoes of Greek Myths loom – Ephraim has traits of Prometheus, fascinated by a light horded by the Gods, the very light that Wake, Proteus like, is determined to keep to himself. Wake stresses that the gulls carry the souls of dead sailors – and the unsettling persistence these pester Ephraim with, is surpassed only by the violence with which he responds to them. Elements of Victorian ghost stories, hypnotism and gothic fiction combine in every corner of a film where we see very little but get a lot implied (powerful, Eisenstein and Bunuel-style, close-ups of faces and eyes imply powerful horrors out of shot).

The Lighthouse reminds me in many ways of the best of the BBC Ghost Stories of the 1970s in their unsettling, MR James-style unexplained (even unstated) horrors. There is a palpable air of horrific tension around the film, of an unexplained, unknowable force that could somewhere destroy both men – and has perhaps unsettled their minds. The film culminates in a superb, haunting shot as Ephraim comes face-to-face with something unknown that is pure MR James: we never see what caused the horror, only its terrible results. (It’s as terrifying as Whistle and I’ll Come to You or A Warning to the Curious where blind, over-confident curiosity leads to dreadful outcomes).

Eggers film is not a conventional horror film: I believe thinking of it as a deeply unsettling exploration of man’s vulnerability and weakness, ala MR James, is key. This is a story of unseen, imagined, unsettling horrors – but also a claustrophobic relationship drama, playing out like a psychological thriller as two men dance around destroying and seducing each other. It’s a complex Rubrik’s cube that rewards constant thought and attention. Beautifully filmed, superbly acted, compelling in every frame, it can claim to be one of the most unique and powerful American films of the 2010s.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Ageing, romance and sentiment in Fincher’s handsome shaggy dog story

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Brad Pitt (Benjamin Button), Cate Blanchett (Daisy Fuller), Taraji P Henson (Queenie), Julia Ormond (Caroline Button), Jason Flemyng (Thomas Button), Elias Koteas (Monsieur Gateau), Tilda Swinton (Elizabeth Abbott), Mahershala Ali (Tizzy Weathers), Jared Harris (Captain Mike Clark)

As the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 strikes, a baby boy is born. A baby boy unlike any other, with the appearance and illnesses of a very old man. Discarded by his horrified father (Jason Flemyng), the boy is adopted by Queenie (Taraji P Henson), caretaker of a nursing home. There it becomes clear he is growing backwards: the older he gets, the younger he appears. Young Benjamin will eventually grow into Brad Pitt and spend his life watching those around him grow ever older as he grows ever younger. Most joyful, and painful, of all being his childhood friend Daisy (Cate Blanchett), the woman he will love his whole life.

Fincher’s film is a strange beast. A huge technical triumph, that uses cutting edge special effects and astonishing make-up to age – in both directions – Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett throughout the course of the film (both taken from extreme old age to face-lifted youth), it’s also a whimsical shaggy dog story with elements of a fairy tale that does very little with its astonishing concept other than pepper the script with easily digestible homilies about the purity of the simple life, as if screenwriter Eric Roth was still gorging on the same box of chocolates from which he plucked Forrest Gump.

TCCoBB has a lot going for it: you can see why it was coated with technical Oscars. The ageing and deageing special effects are skilfully and even subtly done, the recreation of a host of periods – from the 1910s to the 1990s and beyond – flawlessly detailed. Claudio Miranda’s photography uses a host of film stocks – from sepia, to scratchy home movie footage style, to luscious technicolour beauty – to reflect time and era constantly. The assemblage of the film has been invested with huge care and attention and, despite its great length, Fincher cuts together (with Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall) an episodic film that manages to keep its momentum and drive going.

Also, it’s a far less vomit-inducing spectacle than the manipulative stylings that coat Forrest Gump. This is in part to Brad Pitt’s restrained and contemplative performance in the lead role: Pitt underplays with surprising effectiveness, capturing Benjamin’s “come what may” attitude and eagerness to go with the flow of the opportunities life offers him. He delivers the narration with an authority just the right side of portentous (for all his rather flat, uninteresting voice) and skilfully manages to invest his body with a physicality quite contrary to his physical appearance (his old body moves with a young man’s casualness, while his younger form carries a slightly world-weary hesitancy).

Benjamin’s mantra becomes one of living your life just as suits you best, not as others expect you to and never worrying about leaving it too late to take chances or make changes. Or at least something like that. To be honest, the weakest part by far of TCCoBB is the lightness and breeziness of its thematic impact. I’ve seen this film three times and, other than a slightly charming shaggy dog story, I’m not quite sure what point it is trying to make – other than straining for a star-cross’d romantic sadness.

This feels like a missed opportunity because there is so much that could be explored here. The film is a nearly unique opportunity to explore how much age – either physical or mental – defines us. A chance to see how our perceptions of a person are shaped as much by what they look like or how they sound, as by who they are. What sort of different perspective on humanity might Benjamin have? How might those around him evaluate, their own lives as they see this him getting younger?

Questions such as these are not touched, the film settling for Benjamin’s whimsical, first-do-no-harm philosophy crossed with a sort of saintly non-interference. The closest it gets to dealing with this is in Benjamin’s friendship and later relationship with Daisy. Old/young Benjamin is told off by Daisy’s grandmother for being a dirty old man, when they first met as children (or old man in his case). Later their lives will drift together and apart, until they form a relationship when both are “the same age” physically. But the film shirks really exploring the implications of this – and outright flees the idea of Benjamin as an increasingly younger man in a romantic relationship with an increasingly older Daisy.

Instead, it settles all too often for easy lessons, comforting parables and charming little vignettes. Benjamin grows up cared for by his adopted mother Queenie (an engaging, if straight forward, performance by Taraji P Henson) – but in the sort of 1920s New Orleans where a racial epithet is never even whispered. He travels the world with Jared Harris’ (rather good) salty sea-dog, falling in love briefly with Tilda Swinton’s lonely champion swimmer turned society wife. He reconnects happily with his father (after all it’s much easier to live a life of free choice if you are the heir to a massive button factory empire). Idyllic 1960s love hits Daisy and Benjamin – a brief shot of a cruise missile taking off is the only reference to those troubled times we see.

It’s all very easy, romantically toned, sweet and easily digestible. Even writing it down highlights how these are charming, eccentrically tinged, vignettes. All events and experiences come together with a vague “lessons learned” impact, as old Benjamin regresses into a teenager, a child and then an infant. But it could have been so much more. A real study of what makes us human, a real look at how events and perspectives define us. It isn’t. Heck, other than watching Pitt travel handsomely around the world on a motorbike in a late montage, we don’t really get much of a sense of how being young/old may impact him.

Which isn’t to say it’s not enjoyable. It all proceeds with a great deal of charm and love, much of which has clearly been invested in every inch of its making. The acting from (and chemistry between) Pitt and Blanchett is very effective. But it feels like a slightly missed opportunity, a film that settles for being a warm, reassuring cuddle when it could have sat you down and helped you understand your life. For all its slight air of importance, it’s a crowd-pleasing, if slightly sentimental, film.

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Injokes, backslappery and smugness abound in this terrible Thor adventure

Director: Taika Waititi

Cast: Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Natalie Portman (Dr Jane Foster/Mighty Thor), Christian Bale (Gorr the God Butcher), Tessa Thompson (Valkyrie), Jaimie Alexander (Sif), Taika Waititi (Korg), Russell Crowe (Zeus), Kat Dennings (Dr Darcy Lewis)

Okay. Part way through this desperately unfunny tonal mess I wondered: if I had to choose would I watch this again, or Thor: The Dark World? I can’t quite believe it, but I’d rather watch that functional, forgettable, mundane film. At least it doesn’t make me angry as it drifts past my eyes. And I say that as someone who loved Thor: Ragnarok. Thor: Love and Thunder is terrible. So, unlike Star Trek, it looks like even numbered Thor films are awful – so at least Thor Five should be a doozy.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is in a state of ennui – although that doesn’t stop him restoring his buff form after we last saw him as a coach potato in Avengers: Endgame. He doesn’t know what to do with his life: he has (and I can’t believe the film doesn’t make this obvious joke considering its jukebox score) “lost that lovin’ feelin’”. Will the arrival of bereaved father Gorr (Christian Bale), and his mission to butcher all Gods because they don’t answer your prayers, give him meaning? Or will it be the chance to finally rekindle his love for Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) when she unexpectantly lands back in his life? However, it’s not the Jane he remembers: unknown to him, she’s dying from cancer, but his old hammer Mjolnir is keeping her alive, transforming her into a female version of Thor.

Thor: Love and Thunder is a bit like attending a victorious Thor: Ragnorak after-show party. Everyone there thinks everything they say is like the funniest thing ever and the air rings to the sound of backs being slapped. It takes everything that it believes worked best in that film and dials it up to eleventy thousand. Waititi doubles down on his quirky, off-the-cuff, shoulder shrugging humour at every turn and you get the feeling that no one once tapped him on the shoulder and said “you know that’s funny to us on set, but are we sure that will be funny in the audience?”

Because, based on the audience I saw it with, it wasn’t. I think I chuckled about three times in the film. Which considering it takes every single bloody opportunity to tell a joke, is damning. Perhaps it fails to land because, unlike in Ragnarok or other Waititi films, its like he’s surgically removed anything emotional or gives a weight to the gags. He’s also sacrificed much of his trademark sweetness. Instead, this is full of incredibly knowing, tip-the-wink gags at the audience, as if trying to say “hey it’s okay, we can’t take this seriously, comic books are all silly, silly shit”.

And you know, that’s fine many people take these things too seriously. But what worked about Thor: Ragnarok was it balanced a quirky sense of humour with genuine stakes and real emotional quandaries. This however is just a tonal mess. We have an opening scene dealing with child death, that shifts swiftly into knock-about farce. A leading character dying of cancer sitting alongside a pair of screaming goats. It is revealed Jane is effectively draining her life source using the hammer (that it is keeping her alive and killing her at the same time). Here’s a chance to explore the cost of heroism and finding a purpose in life (after all isn’t Thor supposed to be depressed? Wouldn’t Jane make a good contrast here?). instead, the film constantly retreats to playing the humour card (worst of all unfunny humour!), as if Waititi perhaps thinks this genre stuff is silly and slightly below him.

Ragnarok allowed moments of impact: this film shits all over any moment of potential emotional reality. Hemsworth’s Thor used to be a guy with a strong moral purpose and seriousness, but allowed to stretch his wings with comedic sharpness. Now he’s a buffoon who interrupts a speech to distraught parents with gags. Any attempt to build an arc of a hero who is internally lonely and searching for purpose is constantly smashed by self-consciously irreverent humour. It says a lot that Thor’s axe Stormbreaker feels as much a character as anyone else – although the film is overly pleased with the gag of the axe being jealous of Thor’s doe-eyes at his old hammer.

The entire film feels like it’s been plotted out in about four minutes. Presumably Waititi was confident “hilarious” off-the-cuff inspiration would solve any problems. Christian Bale struggles manfully with his villain – but it’s like no one gave him the memo that the film was a piss-take. Tedious detours fill the plot – like an un-funny Guardians of the Galaxy cameo at the start, a tiresome trip to an orgy-tastic God planet and the screeching giant goats which feels like a joke whose punchline has been cut. A major plot point about a wish granting Eternity God is suddenly introduced to establish a secret plan for the villain. It’s like no one gave a damn.

Waititi doubles down on funny stuff that worked in small doses in Ragnarok by stretching it past any point of humour here. Liked Neill, Damon and Lesser Hemsworth playing bad actors in that film? Well, you get bucket loads of it here with Melissa McCarthy as a Fat Hela (that’s the joke: she’s fat). Liked Korg’s overly literal asides? Well, he’s in seemingly every second of the bloody film here, including narrating it. Russell Crowe pops up for a cameo that everyone clearly feels was hilarious but really looks like a big-name actor amusing himself with a borderline racist Greek accent. The film is crammed with this crap.

Hemsworth does okay I suppose, but in many ways the film feels as much of an ego-trip for him as it does Waititi. Natalie Portman gets to do some some fun things, but comedy isn’t her natural forte and she struggles with getting the zing in the dialogue that Tessa Thompson manages. It builds towards a big ending where Thor weaponises children and then the film lands on an utterly unearned emotional ending at a secret place – as if Waititi suddenly remembered his films work best when they have a heart – at the centre of the universe that is so easy to reach you wonder why people didn’t go there much earlier in this franchise. Even the final explanation of the title feels thrown in at the last minute and I’ve no idea what we are supposed to make of Thor’s character arc in this film.

The lack of heart is what is missing here. There is nothing heartfelt or emotionally true really in this. Nothing to give you warm feelings or to make you say “ahh”. Instead there are just endless, endless smug insiderish-gags. This is a piece of shit and the silent reaction it got from the full audience I saw it with says it all. A smug, tonal mess by a director who is over-indulged and unrestrained and forgets that humour works best when grounded with some sense of drama. I’d definitely rather watch Thor: The Dark World again.

The Men (1950)

Brando makes his film debut in this earnest but realistic drama about paraplegic war veterans

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Cast: Marlon Brando (Ken Wilocek), Teresa Wright (Ellen), Everett Sloane (Dr Brock), Jack Webb (Norm), Richard Erdman (Leo), Arthur Jurado (Angel), Virginia Farmer (Nurse Robbins)

The Men opens with a thoughtful dedication to the two wars many soldiers have fought: the first with weapons, the second “with abiding faith and raw courage” against the physical and emotional consequences of the first. Fred Zinnemann’s documentary-influenced The Men takes a careful look at how the impact of that second war at a paraplegic veterans hospital. Ken Wilocek (Marlon Brando, in his film debut) is a former college sports star now confined to a wheelchair and struggling to adjust. His fiancé Ellen (Teresa Wright) is still eager to marry – but are either of them ready for the difficulties Ken will have adjusting his life?

The biggest strength of The Men – aside from its realist lack of flash – is how it avoids easy answers to big questions. Sure, Carl Foreman’s script has a tendency to lean into a mix of relationship drama and information film. But in looking at Ellen and Ken’s wedding night (and, in a neat visual metaphor of a misfiring champagne bottle, their likely sex lives), The Men is coldly realistic. Ellen might be largely presented as a picture-perfect ideal woman – but even she is freaked out by Ken’s squeaky wheelchair, twitching leg, implied impotence and the thought of what she has let herself in for.

That’s as nothing to the self-loathing fury – directed into rage at Ellen – Ken feels. This man who defined himself by machismo and physicality, who labours for weeks to stand upright so he can get married at the alter (it’s a sign of the film’s avoidance of easy solutions that, despite this, Ken still falls over at the alter) suddenly realises that he will always be partially dependent on his wife for simple tasks. He’ll never be the provider he expected to be – and he’ll never be able to fulfil some of his wife’s sexual needs. A proud man, no wonder the realisation throws him into depression.

It’s moments like this when Zinnemann’s film is at its strongest. It’s a film surprisingly frank and (for the time) daring about the emotional and physical consequences of war injury. Everett Sloane’s impassioned doctor is introduced warning wives and mothers about the consequences of paraplegia and the difficulties emotionally, physically and (he all but says) sexually they will have – but he might as well be talking direct to the camera informing the audience.

ZInnemann’s film, in a dispassionate but respectful way shows the process of rehabilitation, its strengths and its weaknesses. From physical training to the difficult emotional adjustments. The film used several real-life veterans – including Arthur Jurado in a key role as a Latino paraplegic holding onto optimism – and worked closely with hospital medical staff (some of whom appear as themselves). There is a solid sense of respectful realism about the whole thing. (You can feel the hand of producer Stanley Kramer.)

He’s also helped hugely by a powerful, committed and complex performance from Brando in the lead role. Making his first film, Brando astounded Zinnemann and the crew with his commitment. Effectively Brando “learned” to be paraplegic, forming deep friendships with the veterans (far more allegedly than with his fellow actors). His performance is a searing collection of contradictions. Ken is boyish, eager and lets excitement flash across his face when playing sports or driving an adjusted car for the first time. But he’s just as apt to be surly, resentful and bitter, to snap at those trying to help him and furious at the failings his own body have forced on him.

It comes to a head at that disastrous wedding night. Brando struggles with a growing realisation of his dependence and helplessness and his face flares with the pained recognition that this is in no way the wedding night be imagined. Throughout much of the film he is desperate to cling to any chance of recovery – from imagining sensation in his legs to furious workouts to build his upper body strength to help him pretend he still has fully functioning limbs. It’s a fabulous performance, a slice of realism and humanity, underplayed with an everyday casualness.

It does mean Teresa Wright at times looks a little more actorly as Ellen. To be fair to Wright, her part is saddled with the most conventional plot arcs and scenes, of romantic devotion mixed with sudden doubts. (It’s not helped by Dimitri Tiomkin’s overly emphatic themes for her character, that do their best to do all the work for the audience). Her scenes tend to have the air of the infomercial about them, as Ellen debates disabilities with Dr Brock and her doubting parents. Foreman’s dialogue also tends to lean a little too much into “I’ll love you Ken, no matter what” territory.

The Men is at its weakest when it looks at societal integration. For all the quality of Brando and the low-key sensitivity of Zinnemann’s direction, this ends up being a lighter, less impactful version of Wyler’s astounding The Best Years of Our Lives. Brando plays a combination of Dana Andrews’ and Harold Russell’s characters from that film, but The Men never hits the same heights of universal experience and pain as that film does. (Teresa Wright basically plays the same role here as she did opposite Dana Andrews). It’s just a little too low-key, a bit too documentary.

When away from the medical, there is a lack of inspiration and poetry from The Men. It gains a lot from Brando’s performance, but without him it would feel more like a Government infomercial. When it hits drama, for all its daring, it never manages to fully turn itself into something more than a traditional romance-against-the-odds. It has its heart in the right place, but it feels like a companion piece to better films than a classic in its own right.

The Blue Angel (1930)

Dietrich lights up the screen in von Sternberg’s first fliration with sound but not his last with obsession

Director: Josef von Sternberg

Cast: Emil Jannings (Professor Immanuel Rath), Marlene Dietrich (Lola Lola), Kurt Gerron (Kiepert), Rosa Valetti (Gueste), Hans Alberts (Mazeppa), Reinhold Bernt (Clown), Eduard von Winterstein (School director), Rolf Muller (Angst), Roland Verno (Lohmann), Carl Balhaus (Ertzum)

Love and lust can be dangerous, all-consuming forces. Just ask Josef von Sternberg. It’s a rare film on his CV that isn’t about the self-destructive nature of longing. The Blue Angel is about obsession and its deadly consequences: but it’s also the birthplace of an obsession that would define von Sternberg’s own career. It’s the film where he discovered Dietrich. Did von Sternberg guess that, in time, he might himself become a version of the lovestruck Rath? I’d guess not, but the stench of sadomasochist excitement from complete prostration comes out of every frame of this classic.

Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) is a professor at the local gymnasium, preparing his students for university. Problem is, they are more interested in the goings-on at the seedy nightclub The Blue Angel than with Rath’s pompous lessons about Hamlet. Specifically, they are obsessed with Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), the erotic head-line singer. Rath tries to catch his students in the act – and instead finds himself smitten by Lola, leaving his career to marry her. Five years later, and Rath has lost every ounce of self-respect, regularly debased by the cabaret company and reduced to doing humiliating chores for his wife.

The Blue Angel was one of the first major sound movies made in Germany. Jannings – winner of the first Best Actor Oscar – was the biggest star in Germany and handpicked von Sternberg, who had directed him to that Oscar in Hollywood’s The Last Command, to make the film. Plans to make a film about Rasputin were ditched in favour of an adaptation of Heinrich Mann’s story about a professor who becomes infatuated with a cabaret singer. It’s a tragic tale of a man bought low by an unsuitable woman: however, von Sternberg (with Mann’s agreement) rewrote the plot into a parade of humiliation for the professor. Rather than a tragic figure, he would be a pompous man turned into a submissive, emasculated figure of mockery.

Is this what Jannings had in mind? Surely not. Von Sternberg was critical of the actor, believing his overly-expressive movements and facial expressions – so perfect for silent cinema – looked crude and ridiculous with sound. Jannings certainly seems more comfortable throughout The Blue Angel with reactions than dialogue: but even then, his wide eyes, double-takes and shocked mouth often seem too much. In art imitating life, he feels like the self-important “actor” being taken down a peg, marginalised in the frame and (by the end) smeared in clown make-up with the yolk of raw eggs running down his face.

Jannings was certainly unhappy with the focus of the film shifting powerfully to Dietrich. He was the star, but it’s Dietrich you remember. And no wonder, since von Sternberg’s camera can hardly take its eyes off her. Dietrich’s cabaret performances – recorded live – were a sensation. Just as much was her brooding sensuality, with Dietrich’s rawness as a performer guided by von Sternberg into an unforced naturalism. Where Jannings is large, she is small. Where he double takes, she raises a single arched eyebrow. Where he blusters, she quietly sits and cocks her head. Von Sternberg’s camera frequently centralises her in the frame as if trying to unwrap the enigma of this intriguing woman.

Who is Lola? You can watch in detail and never be sure. At times she’s a coquettish tease. At others a contemptuous dominatrix. But then she is also playful, sensitive and (at first) seems to find the idea of possible security and fatherly protection from Rath desirable and alluring. Dietrich’s performance constantly keeps us on our toes. Does she at expect to be protected by Rath, but finds his increasing submissiveness arousing (does Rath find the same?). Or was she – as she hints in her cold and manipulative second rendition of Falling in Love Again – always a manipulator of men? (I like to think the other clown in Act One is some sort of former lover of Lola, the sad eyes he uses when staring at Rath seeming to say “don’t make my mistakes”.)

Sex is central to The Blue Angel. Von Sternberg’s camera constantly catches Lola’s legs in frame – in one striking shot on a spiral staircase directly above Rath’s head. Dietrich swaggers and dips, her hips moving, her legs curled sensually. She’s lit like a mix of an angel and a Caravaggio-esque temptress. She takes a sort of twisted pleasure in demeaning Rath – reduced to cooling her curling iron and rolling her stockings on so she can head out to “entertain” more men. But, just as telling, Rath keeps coming back for me. Sure, he might shout and rage – but then he’ll humbly take his place on his knees in front of her.

The Blue Angel is strikingly decadent. While Rath’s classroom has a hide-bound Victorianism – with himself as a puffed-up Thomas Arnold – the nightclub is seedy, crammed with loutish clientele swigging beer. Lola’s dressing room is rundown, the pay is poor and the glamour almost non-existent. This is the underbelly of Weimar Germany, already feeling the pinch. Rath is reduced to selling dirty postcards of his wife – his dishevelled frame hawking these around the punters after her performances – and allowing her to entertain “private admirers”.

Humiliation becomes the heart of this beautifully made film. Shot by von Sternberg with his signature artistic richness – the unnamed town feels like a Dickensian blow back more than Germany of the time – with beautiful halos of light and a frame that constantly fills itself with dynamic movement, The Blue Angel culminates in high tragedy laced with farce. Rath, forced into performing a humiliating clown routine in his hometown, watches as his wife watches him while clasping her new lover to her lips. Is she seeing how far she can push her pet in his humiliation? Will nothing make him stand up to her? Is this always what she wanted or just what she finds she likes?

Either way, you can see here the formation of fascinations that von Sternberg would only let go further in future films (think of The Scarlet Empress which reimagines Catherine the Great as the ultimate dominatrix). It humiliates Jannings both textually and meta-textually – making him look like a hammy relic, next to the sensual naturalness of Dietrich. But it’s also one of the great films about the erotic desire to be belittled. It was von Sternberg’s calling card and it cemented his desire to work with Dietrich again and again. Make of that what you will.

Note: The Blue Angel was of course made in the shadow of the rise of the Third Reich. Dietrich narrowly beat out Leni Riefenstahl for her role. Goebbels later banned the film for being “Jewish”. Of its three stars: Dietrich was a passionate anti-Nazi campaigner. Emil Jannings became the most famous actor to support the Nazis (which ended his career after the war). And, tragically, Kurt Gerron and his wife were murdered in Auschwitz.

The Last Metro (1980)

Passion, privacy, tension and terror all come to head in Truffaut’s stately theatrical occupation epic

Director: François Truffaut

Cast: Catherine Deneuve (Marion Steiner), Gérard Depardieu (Bernard Granger), Jean Poiret (Jean-Loup Cottins), Heinz Bennent (Lucas Steiner), Andréa Ferréol (Arlette Guillaume), Paulette Dubost (Germaine Fabre), Sabine Haudepin (Nadine Marsac), Jean-Louis Richard (Daxiat), Maurice Risch (Raymond Boursier)

The curtain parts and we are introduced to a magic world of imagination and drama play out before us on stage. But how can the actors immerse themselves in this, while such huge drama plays out in the real world? It’s the dilemma of the Montmatre theatrical troupe in Paris during the Occupation. With war raging with all its complex moral choices and dangers, how can you focus on the art within – or for the matter process the complex emotional entanglements in an already claustrophobic profession only made worse by the perils of Nazi occupied Paris and their pet collaborators.

Truffaut’s film is called The Last Metro as it recalls a period during the occupation when hundreds of thousands of people crowded into Parisian theatres to stay warm at night before rushing to catch the final train home before the curfew. The Montmatre Theatre is run by Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve), a film star turned stage actor struggling to keep the theatre going in the absence of her Jewish theatre-director husband Lucas (Heinz Bennett) – who, unknown to anyone else, is hiding in the theatre basement. Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu) is her new lead actor for their latest Ibsenesque production: but his presence will stir powerful feelings in the embattled Marion.

Truffaut’s film steers away from his other more famous work – the sort of vibrancy and romance of earlier films like Jules et Jim or The Four Hundred Blows or the inventive playfulness of Day for Night. Instead, The Last Metro is a more formal, classically shot, interior piece that revels in small moments and touches of emotional investment so subtle and glancing some viewers might not even notice them. It’s also – surprisingly for cinema’s leading cineaste – a film deeply in love with the mechanics and backstage drama of theatre, subtly contrasting the claustrophobia and intensity of such spaces with the oppressive world-shrinking and glance-over-your-shoulder anxiety of occupation.

It’s also a superb character study, with a quite brilliantly complex and compelling performance from Catherine Deneuve. A starlet with a double burden – not only keeping the theatre alive, but also her husband – Marion is a woman pulled so hard and so overwhelmingly in so many competing directions, it’s taking every ounce of her control to hold herself together. Facing financial pressures, censorship pressures and the constant fear that a single wrong word could see her theatre ripped away from her and her husband discovered and killed, she maintains a cold and professional veneer that rarely, if ever, slips.

So little does it, that Bernard – played with an effortlessly underplayed grace and charm by Gérard Depardieu that belies his Rugby-player bellicosity – is, for the most part, blissfully unaware of Marion’s growing, unspoken, attraction to him. A love she seems hardly able to acknowledge herself, not least because it feels like an even deeper betrayal now of her husband, hiding out in the basement and utterly dependent on her, than it would in peacetime.

Lucas – a wonderful Heinz Bennent – is himself teetering on the edge of falling apart from the sustained effects of acute cabin pressure. Never leaving the damp theatre basement – apart from surreptitious trips to the stage late at night – Lucas’ attitude to his enforced imprisonment moves from a larkish boys-own adventure into an increasingly bitter resentment. Directing the show from afar – a drain has been hooked up so he can listen in on rehearsals – he provides late night feedback to Marion to accompany the detailed handwritten notes he ‘left behind’. Mapping out future productions on his cell walls, Lucas avoids the suspicion that the constant pressure of concealing him has tipped their relationship from romance to one of anxiety-ridden responsibility.

It contrasts with the play the company is performing: where, in typical Ibsen style, the lead is a tragedy tinged woman, suffering memory loss, who falls into a deep but mutually painful love with her son’s tutor. Even from the rehearsals, Marion begins to feel some bleed of this dramatic relationship into her real world: she asks Bernard to not touch her during rehearsals, as if worried that this moment of physicality could lead to consequences she cannot control.

Touch is a key sensation in The Last Metro – as if moments of physical contact and intimacy carry even more weight in a world where no one can be trusted and every word must be carefully watched. Bernard uses a repeated routine of palm reading to try and seduce (with mixed results) a series of women (most notably lesbian production designer Arlette – strikingly played by Andréa Ferréol – who, in a lovely flourish, he describes as longing for “like a warm croissant”). Physical contact – the light caress of a face and hands – is crucial to the film. Truffaut’s camera zooms in on moments where hands take each other, either in longing, understanding or – in a sequence where Marion journeys to Gestapo headquarters – with the threat of imminent violence.

Closing distance is particularly important in a period where all contact must be carefully judged and measured. Collaborators, like powerful press chief Daxiat, will use the smallest slight or word out of place to justify pulling your world down. Played with a hissable vileness by Jean-Louis Richard, Daxiat is a pompous, self-important, two-faced and vindictive man parroting Nazi slogans and revelling in his power to destroy careers. But, small man though he is, the Occupation gives him power – when Bernard angrily confronts him for his rudeness about Marion in his review, its Bernard who Marion is furious at for his recklessness.

It’s because hanging over every moment – and constantly playing in Deneuve’s expressive eyes – is the dread of what will be found if her theatre is searched or how doomed her husband will be if it is closed. Finding a play that passes muster with the censors and pleases the masses is literally a matter of life and death.

Truffaut echoes the claustrophobia of occupied France in his shooting of the cramped backstage world – and he and Suzanne Schiffman in their screenplay add to this with their look at backstage politics and affections between actors, stagehands and crew. Even the outside is shot like an interior – and Truffaut never bothers to make the locations feel like anything other than sets, as if the whole world is a claustrophobic theatre – with extensive use of mid and close-up shots and subtle tracking shots that maintain the theatrical effect.

It does make for a film that can feel stately and a little too heritage – and its undeniable you miss some of the energy of Truffaut’s other films (you can’t imagine his idol Hitchcock ever shooting a frame of The Last Metro – or what he would have made of its luxurious pace). Its subtle energy is sometimes so easy-to-miss that it can be easy for parts of the film to pass you by. Plotlines – such as Bernard’s support of the resistance – sit awkwardly at times within the framework, and the film’s boiling down of Vichy France to (essentially) one bad apple told a story about Occupation that was very pleasing to the French self-image (no wonder if was a massive hit).

The Last Metro is at times a little too in-love with its cultural heritage and the quiet professional skill of its making. But, it counter-balances this with some involving and subtle work from all its principles and director: and in Denevue (especially) and Depardieu it had two of the greatest actors in French cinema at the top of their game. Multi-layered and demanding, it’s a film that makes you work from its newsreel opening to its fourth-wall, metatextual ending, riffing on romantic entanglements, art, burdens and the oppression of occupation. Perhaps too knowingly prestige to be great, but still an essential watch.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

Dinner dates never happen in Buñuel’s playfully witty, absurdist satire

Director: Luis Buñuel

Cast: Fernando Rey (Rafael Acosta), Paul Frankeur (François Thévenot), Delphine Seyrig (Simone Thévenot), Bulle Ogier (Florence Thévenot), Stéphane Audran (Alice Sénéchal), Jean-Pierre Cassel (Henri Sénéchal), Julien Bertheau (Monsignor Dufour), Milena Vukotic (Inès), Claude Piéplu (The Colonel), Maria Gabriella Maione (Terrorist), Muni (Peasant), Michel Piccoli (Interior Minister), Pierre Maguelon (Brigadier Sanglant), François Maistre (Commissaire Delecluze)

Six very bourgeoisie Parisian friends try to have dinner; but circumstances keep getting in the way. Circumstances that become increasingly bizarre, surreal and absurdist and half of which may or may not be dreams (or even dreams within dreams). This is the jumping off point for Buñuel’s engagingly light and witty, but also profound, intriguing and defying interpretation. The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie. In the hands of a dogmatic artist, it would be heavy-handed trash: in Buñuel’s it maintains a playfulness making it entertainingly (if at times infuriatingly) mystifyingly unreadable.

Those six friends are a shallow, self-obsessed bunch who talk the snobby talk of class and culture, but their knowledge is skin-deep and their lifestyle funded by cocaine smuggling. That cocaine is trafficked into Paris in the diplomatic bag of Ambassador Rafel Acosta (Fernando Rey), representative of the (fictional) Latin American Republic of Miranda. It’s sold by his friends, François Thévenot (Paul Frankeur) and Henri Sénéchal (Jean-Pierre Cassel), and its these three – along with their wives Alice Sénéchal (Stéphane Audran) and Simeone Thévenot (Delphine Seyrig) and Simone’s sister Florence (Bulle Ogier) – who keep trying to have dinner.

Those dinners are constantly interrupted by a series of increasingly outlandish events, that the guests accept with the sort of blasé insouciance this sort of people pride themselves on. Things escalate on successive nights from Henri forgetting he has invited their guests to dinner, to a dead landlord of a country inn, the Sénéchals slipping out to the garden to have sex, a Bishop (Julien Bertheau) who longs to be a gardener, a café that runs out of tea and coffee, an army division on military manoeuvres, their arrest by the police… That’s not mentioning the onslaught of dreams as the characters imagine yet more meals interrupted by murder, terrorism and even their dining room turning into a stage in front of an audience where they don’t know their lines.

If that sounds pretentious… I suppose that’s fair. But the point is that Buñuel never hectors or overplays his hand. Instead, the film is an absurdist light comedy, a whimsical road-to-nowhere (like the country road we frequently see the six characters walking down in cutaways) that, in its structure, aims to expose the shallowness and hypocrisy of an entire class. Our ‘heroes’ are overwhelmingly concerned, time and again, with their own basest needs – mostly food and sex – and are more than happen to call in a chauffeur so they can mock him for not knowing how to drink a cocktail correctly (doesn’t stop him enjoying the cocktail way more than any of them do). They encapsulate a whole class, concerned only with tucking in and making sure everyone can see they are unshaken by events, no matter how outlandish they seem.

Into this mix, Buñuel throws an astonishing and inventive selection of dreams that increasingly dominate the second half of the film. (And in fact, makes you wonder after a while whether everything we’ve seen in the film is some sort of crazy, unlikely fever dream). Buñuel used to joke he slipped in dreams when he needed to expand a films runtime, but it’s wonderful here how often the dreams comment subtly on the characters and their perceptions of each other: and how little they seem to learn or be aware of the implications of this.

The most surreal dream of all is Henri’s fantasy of entering a house – a house with walls painted with false perspective images of other rooms – where the group encounter rubber food and then a curtain sweeps aside to find an expectant audience watching them. Despite the prompts for their lines, the characters flee in sweaty nervous panic. Do they realise the meaning of this exposure of their sense of unbelonging? You can be sure they don’t.

In fact, in a stroke of daring by Buñuel, they are so remote from understanding this that Henri is in fact having a dream inside François’ dream: as if François can only vicariously confront his fear of unbelonging by dreaming about another man dreaming about it. That worry of mockery and isolation in society is then continued in François’ dream, as he dreams of Henri waking from a dream and arriving at a party at a Colonel’s house where the mockery and ignorance of Rafael’s home country becomes so overbearing, Rafael shoots the Colonel dead. As if, again, François can only imagine being pushed to extremes vicariously.

Perhaps he’s simply jealous of Rafael, who is blatantly conducting an affair with his wife. Rafael’s a man of class, obsessed with greed and lust. He’s also a sneaky coward and a creepy opportunist, not above trying to seduce a female terrorist who tries to kill him (and then having her shipped off by his security when she turns him down). Doesn’t make him different from anyone else: the Thévenots are arrogant upper-classes scorning those below them, Florence a shallow, selfish drunk, the Sénéchals full of hedonistic entitlement.

Buñuel’s film gently deconstructs the code and hypocrisies of this society – with its unspoken rules, strange hierarchies and lusts – not with lectures but with the tools of farcical theatre. The film repeatedly feels like a left-field Cowardian drawing room comedy, mixed with Moliere farce. A cheating wife is interrupted by the sudden arrival of her husband, a Bishop borrows the clothes of a gardener so no one believes he is a priest, sudden entrances and exits constantly interrupt scenes. This is all told with a light, revealing wit: with subtle playing and controlled, skilful direction, we learn about these characters depth (or lack of them) while enjoying the frequently bizarre circumstances.

It doesn’t just touch them either. When the characters are arrested, they are released on the orders of the Interior Minister for reasons that we are don’t hear three times because of traffic noise. Outside noise jumps in at several key points to undermine key information and interrupt events – the characters indifference to this as constant as their general ambivalent uncaring coolness to everything else. It’s also funny.

There are also darker dreams, told by soldiers and police officers, haunted by mauled bodies and murderous consequences. A soldier tells a dream of a ghostly encounter of his dead mother, urging him to avenge the death of his parents (its left unclear if this is a false memory or a dream). A policeman sees a vision of his dead body releasing his prisoners – after an interrogation of a young man that sees a piano transformed into an electric chair.

Not to mention a world where suave class and violence sit side by side. Rafael’s readiness to use guns – shooting a wind-up toy of a terrorist from across the street, his apartment littered with hidden firearms – is matched by the Bishop who mixes forgiveness and revenge for the man who killed his father. Much of this taking place in the classiest and most well-observed of environments.

There are excellent peformances across the board, but this is a triumph from Buñuel. It’s a film that defies easy interpretation and understanding, that wraps its insight up in intriguing, unreadable and bizarre dreams and events which strike a magical balance between both possible and impossible. It explores a whole class and its hypocrisies, but does so in a series of light, even playful, scenes which feel more like light-comedy. It’s the work of an inventive master working with the medium in a unique and unrepeatable way, who can be both surrealist enigma and master of farce. You could watch it multiple times, drawing different shades and interpretations every time.