Category: Directors

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty are the shallow, violent romantics Bonnie and Clyde

Director: Arthur Penn

Cast: Warren Beatty (Clyde Barrow), Faye Dunaway (Bonnie Parker), Michael J Pollard (CW Moss), Gene Hackman (Buck Barrow), Estelle Parsons (Blanche Barrow), Denver Pyle (Marshal Frank Hamer), Dub Taylor (Ivan Moss), Gene Wilder (Eugene Grizzard), Evans Evans (Velma Davis)

Bonnie and Clyde can lay claim to being one of the most influential American films ever made. It came out of a seismic cultural change in America, as old style Hollywood royalty faded out and a new generation stormed the barricades to make films that felt rougher, rawer and told complex stories in shades of grey.

Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway): drifting youngsters, not interested in accepting a conventional life. They want to go where they please and take what they please. And if some people get hurt – well they can justify that to themselves. As the poster famously said: “They’re young. They’re in love. And they kill people”. In a deliberately disjointed narrative, where time is unclear, the two meet, head out together, commit crimes, stay on the run and are eventually killed by law enforcement. The story is simple – it’s the telling of it that matters.

Bonnie and Clyde latches on to a counter-culture vibe that was growing in strength at the time. But what the film does so brilliantly is subvert this. It invites us to identify to with the romantic, Byronic yearnings of its heroes, who see themselves as free spirits, living a life of idealistic, unconstrained excitement. But the film also has a clear eye on the trail of violence they leave behind them, their lack of regard for this and the impact on the victims. Because make no mistake, these dreamy killers get more and more violent as they go on.

The film turns these two killers into would-be celebrities – guys who want to project a certain image of themselves to the world (down to mailing the papers photos and poems about themselves). They enjoy the notoriety and their self-proclaimed mythology. Clyde walks into banks and gleefully announces he’s with the “Barrow gang”, as if half expecting someone to ask for his autograph. Later in the film, as Clyde reads their press coverage out loud, with CW Moss like a star-struck groupie, the film never forgets the two of them were basically nobodies, who wanted to feel like somebodies.

And it lets you enjoy the romance of this. There is something fairy-tale like in the film about Clyde picking up Bonnie from outside of her home, taking her into town for flirting and robbery. The whole film continues this dreamy logic, with time jumps and scenes that don’t necessarily link up directly with each other.

But then the violence takes over. Wow is Bonnie and Clyde a film that lets you know about the impact of bullets. Gun shots don’t just maim or wing, they rip bodies apart. The japey feeling of their bank robberies gets dispelled about half an hour into the film when Clyde shoots a bank teller in the head from point blank range (“him or me”, he later tells his brother). The gang are so incompetent, that the film is frequently punctured by shoot-outs in which no mercy is shown to anyone.

This is of course hard for the gang to reconcile with their self-image as Robin Hoods, so they mostly forget about it. Clyde won’t steal money from ordinary people (though he’ll happily steal cars, or beat a grocery store clerk into a coma). They playfully tease and taunt a captive US Marshal – until he spits in Bonnie’s face at which point violence ensues. Only at points do the gang seem to have the slightest idea of the dangers: after kidnapping Gene Wilder’s nervy car-owner and his fiancé, a happy-go-lucky Evan Evans (both excellent), merry conversations in the car with the gang are suddenly halted when Wilder admits he’s an undertaker – Bonnie immediately demands they are thrown out and the next shot is her weeping in a field. She doesn’t seem to understand the connection, but we can.

The film is superbly put together. Warren Beatty produced the movie practically from its inception. Robert Benton and David Newman’s script was intended as a French New Wave film – evident in its looseness, its lack of old-school values, its violence, its focus on naïve dreamers who choose the easy way out – but Beatty took the script, re-crafted it with Robert Towne (billed as special advisor) and decided the film needed an American director, not a Truffaut or Godard. He brought on board Arthur Penn, and the two worked together (fought together) closely to bring this radical, edgy, jittery, electric film to the screen.

Penn and Beatty pushed themselves to some of their best work. Beatty is terrific as the vainglorious Clyde – whose determination in crime is matched by his impotence in the sack (the film wisely doesn’t overplay Clyde’s impotence as an ironic theme, but lets the audience draw its own conclusions). He also produced the film expertly. Penn’s direction is sublime, marrying the finest elements of French New Wave cinema with old-style Westerns.

The film is restless and energetic, and intermixes moments of fun and frivolity among the gang with ominous danger and violence. The camera jitters and shakes, while throwing us into the action – the film is masterfully edited – while at other points sailing on like a neutral observer. The film has a neat satiric edge, and Penn uses banjo music masterfully to ironically contrast with much of the action we see on the screen. The characters – all of them – seem to spend so much time talking about their press coverage because they have so little to say to each other. Even the lovers only really seem to find a moment of quiet devotion shortly before their death. It give you violence as entertainment, but also tells you effectively and quietly how appalling and dangerous violence is.

The acting is similarly extraordinary. Beatty is wonderful, as is Dunaway as an impossibly young, romantic Bonnie who adapts with alarming swiftness to killing and robbing. Michael J Pollard is excellent as the slightly simple, eager young car mechanic who hero-worships the couple. Hackman and Parsons are both excellent as Barrow’s older-but-not-wiser brother, and his wife who seesaws between resentment, fear and an imperious delight in her new-found infamy.

Penn’s brilliant film deconstructs the mythology of criminals to show the emptiness underneath, their shallow self-regard and lack of insight. It does this while still managing somehow to remain affectionate towards these two murderous dreamers. Bonnie and Clyde is a sublime modern Western, a commentary on fame, a dissection of violence and a great black comedy. Shot with youthful energy and an influential lack of traditionalism, it’s a film that always feels modern and necessary.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Robert Redford goes on the run in conspiracy thriller Three Days of the Condor

Director: Sydney Pollack

Cast: Robert Redford (Joseph Turner), Faye Dunaway (Kathy Hale), Cliff Robertson (Director Higgins), Max von Sydow (Joubert), John Houseman (Wabash), Addison Powell (Leonard Atwood), Walter McGinn (Sam Barber), Tina Chen (Janice), Michael Kane (SW Wicks), Don McHenry (Dr Lappe)

Three Days of the Condor never leaves you in any doubt that the real villains are those in power – and the possibility of escaping the reach of organisations like the CIA is beyond all of us. Condor is damn well-made though – Pollack’s direction is nearly faultless in its taut claustrophobia – even if the film itself gets a bit lost in its confusing obliqueness.

Joseph Turner (Robert Redford) is a quiet, boyish, Robert-Redfordish academic whose job is to read books published all over the world and report back to the CIA any familiarities with any secret operations past or present, or any good ideas from operations. One day, while out fetching lunch for his colleagues, he returns to find they have all been murdered by a hit-team led by a shadowy foreigner (Max von Sydow). Calling in the CIA, he finds he can’t trust anyone – and is forced to hide out by kidnapping a woman, Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway), whom he bumps into in a shop.

Three Days of the Condor opens with an electric pace. The build-up to the assassination of Turner’s co-workers is extremely tense, while the immediate after effects – and Turner’s lost, confused terror – is brilliantly involving. The stream of conspiracy-laced events, and the unsettling lack of security about who to trust creates a terrific mood of paranoia. Pollack’s editing is tight, and the photography keeps the action naturalistic and eerily involving. It creates an unsettling drama where no one can be trusted.

It taps perfectly into that 1970s vibe of the state being omniscient and inhumane – Turner’s CIA contact will only talk to him using his code name, shows no human interest in his deceased comrades and only asks if Condor himself is “damaged”. Later Turner chippily asks why a senior agent is addressed by his name, while he is only called Condor.

Redford is very good as Turner – perfectly convincing as the bookish man thrust into circumstances where he is out of his depth, but whose innate abilities to think fast and adapt allow him to believably keep one step ahead of those pursuing him. The film has a love for the grimy Le Carre-ish detail of espionage, which it mixes well with its James Bondish elements of hitmen, violence and sex. The script has good lines, and several excellent set-pieces that trade in that queasy feeling of being out-of-depth.

The momentum of the first half however eventually gets bogged down in the “working out” of the conspiracy. This is a bit hampered by the early acts of the movie being focused more on atmosphere than on plot build-up. With the exact purpose and function of Redford’s CIA role only really being loosely explained quite late on – and the various inter-relationships of the assorted CIA bigwigs we see also not really being that clear – the final reveal of the wrong uns is murky and doesn’t quite justify the build-up.

Part of this is the film’s 1970s vibe – its sense that the resolution is, in a way, less important than the downer atmosphere and conspiracy tension – but it’s also a bit of a narrative flaw. It’s hard to invest in a story that never really gets put together or explained properly, and doesn’t really give us a sense of the major stakes at play or the reasons why various characters do what they do.

Other factors also have dated the film, principally the relationship of Faye Dunaway’s Kathy and Redford’s Turner. Now there is an odd Stockholm syndrome relationship if ever I saw one. From Kathy tearfully fearing rape and assault for most of the first ten minutes of their screen time together – and with no reason to believe the story Turner is peddling – sure enough within a few hours of knowing each other this pair end up in bed together. The film attempts to suggest Turner’s ability to understand her personality (in a way no-one else ever has naturally) through her photographs brings them together –but nevertheless it’s basically a hostage falling into bed with her kidnapper, about 20 seconds after she stopped crying, after he has just released her from being tied up and gagged in her own bathroom.

I guess it helps when your kidnapper looks like Robert Redford – and the film uses Redford’s innate trustability well – but it’s a little unsettling. Kathy swiftly becomes Turner’s little helper – but you never really get a sense that the she is an actual character, or that the film even really needs her that much. Dunaway is a good actress and plays the part very well – but there is an unsettling submissiveness and even exploitation to her character that dates the movie (not that we have moved past films where female character’s principal role is to have sex with the hero to ease his pain). The best you can say for this character is that she has “pluck”.

It’s dumping Turner down into Kathy’s home where the momentum leaks out of the film slightly. It’s a film that feels like it’s going to be set-up as a chase movie with a spy tinge, but it never really turns into that. On top of which, it takes time away from properly developing Turner’s enemies. His possible CIA opponents, led by Cliff Robertson and John Houseman, don’t really come into focus as characters. The performer who does stand out – largely because of the wry world-weariness he brings to the role – is Max von Sydow as the hitman Joubert, a character I’d happily see more of (where was his spin off?).

Three Days of the Condor is a well-made triumph of atmosphere – but the later sections of the film don’t quite live up to the build-up, and the film doesn’t quite snap together as much as you would like in the second half. It gets lost in its labyrinthine schemes and then doesn’t have a resolution that seems interesting enough to make satisfying narrative sense. It’s got some great moments in it, but it’s a flawed film.

Black Narcissus (1947)

Deborah Kerr leads a community of nuns struggling with temptations in the classic Black Narcissus

Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Cast: Deborah Kerr (Sister Clodagh), Sabu (Young General), David Farrar (Mr Dean), Kathleen Byron (Sister Ruth), Flora Robson (Sister Philippa), Jenny Laird (Sister Honey), Judith Furse (Sister Briony), Esmond Knight (Old General), Jean Simmons (Kanchi), May Hallatt (Angu Ayah)

In 1947, people hadn’t seen anything like Black Narcissus. Its triumphant technicolour was like nothing that had been made before – and watching it now on a brand new, shiny restoration, it’s still overwhelmingly impressive. Alongside this beautifully shot action, we have a storyline surprisingly modern in its acute psychology and questioning of the strengths and weaknesses of human nature.

Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) is given leadership of a group of nuns in a remote Himalayan harem building converted into a nunnery. But the isolation of the mountains and the strange atmosphere of the harem bring out weaknesses in the characters of the nuns, leading to profound challenges to their spiritual and mental well-being – not least Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), who becomes increasingly pre-occupied with local land captain Mr Dean (David Farrar).

Powell and Pressburger’s film is a brilliant, slightly hard to interpret, psychological gothic drama, a du Maurier-style sexually charged drama set in an exotic Indian location which the nuns struggle to understand. It’s a curious melange of scenes, often moving swiftly, sometimes only with narrow bridge scenes, meaning you soon get as lost in how much time has passed as the nuns themselves. Several key events take place off screen, and the native Indians are curious, unknowable and strangely intimidating in their distance and coolness.

All this is to help build the audience into feeling as unsettled as the characters themselves. It’s a film about the struggles between expression and repression. The two principal nuns – Sisters Clodagh and Ruth – both show elements of this. Both are drawn towards the earthy, manly but still patrician Dean, but both handle these emotions in very different ways – one by denying those feelings, another by trying to embrace them. All of this takes place in a distancing and intoxicating environment, where the convention rules of life seem suspended.

For Sister Clodagh, Dean serves as a bridge back to her own frustrated romantic feelings for an old flame – whose failure to propose guided her towards taking the veil – and elements of her warmer persona (witnessed by us in flashback). But Clodagh resolves never to make herself a slave to these feelings, and these moments of remembrance seem to make her cling all the more to her order – even while the film suggests that it is a strange mixture of pride, insecurity and fear as well as faith that motivates her.

By contrast, Sister Ruth – already acknowledged by the Mother Superior as not an obvious choice for the sisterhood – increasingly loses her grip first on her faith, then sanity, as she struggles with the feelings she clearly has for Dean. This quiet obsession has built up in her mind into representing all the desires for freedom and independence she feels while in the order. Where Clodagh resolves to cling closer to the repression of her feelings, Ruth rejects this very idea and determines to express herself – even as it costs her everything.

This heated growing madness is powers the film – and Kathleen Byron provides most of the drama with a stunningly unhinged performance, which builds so quietly (almost in the background of the film) that it never becomes wearing and also surprises with the extent of her unhinged delusion. One particular night-time encounter with Clodagh sizzles with rival agendas – one woman using a lipstick, the other using a Bible.

Powell (and it was Powell who largely directed these Archers pictures) uses a variety of techniques to develop this unease. Several shots are direct POV shots, with the audience becoming one of the characters, giving us the slightly unsettling feeling of being addressed by the actors. Quick tableaux editing gives us economic storytelling and a sense of events building swiftly towards a head (several sequences use a series of quick cuts of characters reacting to events). The camera uses a series of close-ups of sweaty foreheads or dizzying, vertigo inducing shots of the Himalayas to increase the unease. A later shot shows Sister Ruth moving through a shimmeringly filmed jungle, bringing a sense of confused eroticism to the picture.

Sexuality is a major theme of the film – and the characters have a series of acknowledged or unacknowledged sexual interests in each other. The music and camera work develop a sense of heated intensity on the mountain that suggests a simmering heat that unnerves the mind and throws open the temptations of physicality. Old wall paintings from the harem of bare-breasted women seem to be a constant presence – no wonder feelings are running high.

Jack Cardiff’s photography is simply extraordinary – it’s hard to believe none of this was filmed on location and most of it was shot in a studio – and this is still a film today that is hugely beautiful. The production by Alfred Junge is hugely impressive, with the nunnery a triumph of mismatched themes.

It’s not perfect. It’s a bit awkward to see actors blacking up. Some of the acting is quite OTT or stagy – in particular May Hallatt at points – and the film’s occasional delight in its visual appeal means its themes don’t always get the exploration that they deserve. One of the disadvantages of its deliberately vague timeline is that sometimes events happen too soon – or we don’t get enough sense of why they are happening. But these are blemishes.

This is a masterfully made picture, still beautiful to look at with impressive performances from Kerr, Byron, Farrar and many of the rest of the cast. It’s a surprisingly gothic melodrama by the end, with reds splashed across the screen with an imposing sense of threat. Still one that needs to be seen: and the end is so melodramatically gothic considering where the film started that the fact it doesn’t seem hugely jarring is an enormous tribute to the talents of those involved.

Marathon Man (1976)

“Is it safe?”: Laurence Olivier interrogates Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man

Director: John Schlesinger

Cast: Dustin Hoffman (Thomas “Babe” Levy), Laurence Olivier (Dr Christian Szell), Roy Scheider (Henry “Doc” Levy), William Devane (Peter Janeway), Marthe Keller (Elsa Opel), Richard Bright (Karl), Marc Lawrence (Erhadt), Fritz Weaver (Professor Biesenthal)

The 1970s were the era of the conspiracy thriller. These were deliberately enigmatic, almost opaque, mysteries in which a humble individual was thrown up against sinister forces, backed by equally shady governments. Marathon Man is a stylish (if rather impenetrable) mystery that offers some gripping moments but gets bogged down a little too much in pleasure at its edginess, darkness and professional assurance.

Thomas “Babe” Levy (Dustin Hoffman) is a post-graduate student working on a re-evaluation of the McCarthy era, partly aimed at clearing his father’s name (who committed suicide while under investigation). Babe’s brother Henry “Doc” (Roy Scheider) works for a shady government organisation, and has recently narrowly avoided assassination twice in France. Doc suspects the killers were sent by renegade-Nazi Dr Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier). Szell’s New York-based brother was recently killed in a car crash, and with his death Szell has lost vital access to his cash reserve of diamonds in a New York bank, which he needs to maintain his safety in Uruguay.

I hadn’t seen Marathon Man for several years, and I was struck by how long it takes to get going: it takes a solid 45 minutes to get to the point. Huge swathes of the opening act of the film is all about getting the set-up and atmosphere, rather than establishing the story. It also seems to be about setting up as complex as possible a context for a film that boils down to a pretty straightforward plot. Nearly all the action that Doc gets up to in Europe is pretty much impossible to work out and never seems to tie in with the rest of the plot once it starts (exciting as it is to watch him dodge assassination attempts). Even the marathon running of the hero, and his relationship with Marthe Keller’s mysterious swiss woman doesn’t in the end really tie in that closely with the story.

But then that’s often the way with Marathon Man. It’s a film in love with atmosphere, its Hitchcockian tricks and its brooding creepiness more than with logic, story or even (really) character. It’s pretty hard to work out what’s going on, and the muttered plot revelations and Schlesinger’s grimy, often deliberately obscure, filming style doesn’t always help the humble viewer work things out. It wants to be like other 70s thrillers and juggle huge events – but it’s actually a rather small-scale, humble film telling a deliberately dreary story, scored with a very 70s combination of electronic noises and plonking piano notes. Plot wise it never really explains what is it about, and gets so bogged down in cross and double cross that it eventually loses its own way.

Where the film does succeed is its individual scenes. Mention Marathon Man and anyone who has heard of it will immediately say “the dental torture film?” They might even say “Is it safe?”. Marathon Man’s dramatic centre-piece is this unnervingly taut torture scene (not too graphic it has to be said – gosh violence in films has moved on since 1976!) where Szell questions Babe (just the one question repeated over and over again) while using his dental skills to “encourage” Babe to answer (ouch!). Ever been even slightly squeamish about going for a dental check-up? This probably isn’t the film for you (heck even one of Szell’s murderous henchmen can’t watch).

Schlesinger shoots this scenes extremely well, with the camera lingering effectively on everyday dental tools that become dreaded torture devices. Schlesinger builds sequences around action and violence very effectively: escape attempts by Babe are gripping and fight scenes are extremely tense, particularly Doc’s fending off of an assassin in a Paris hotel room.

That scene also highlights another effective part of Schlesinger’s direction of the film: his use of bystanders. The life and death struggle between Doc and an assassin is witnessed across the street by a wheelchair-bound old man powerless to intervene. The opening road-rage deaths of Szell’s Nazi brother and a furious New York Jew are intercut constantly with the reactions and confusions of people in New York’s streets. In the film’s finest scene, Szell has to undertake a terrifying (for him) walk through New York’s Jewish quarter to collect and value his diamonds. His paranoia and fear of being recognised mean he sweatily watches every face. When he is recognised by an old woman – who shrieks for help from bemused passers-by – you really feel Szell’s fear that this woman will turn the mass of watching New Yorkers into a lynch mob. The bystanders really add depth to the film’s paranoia – they are both dangerous and also help to isolate the characters.

The film’s main strength is Laurence Olivier’s stand-out sinister performance as the Mengele-like Szell. Terrifyingly cold, paranoid and sadistically proud, Szell is a truly great villain, and Olivier channels all his Shakespearean experience into turning him into an iconic villain. The film also really works matching Olivier’s imperious old-schoolishness with Hoffman’s edgy, brittle method (the famous anecdote from the film was Olivier’s aghast reaction to Hoffman’s decision to prepare for the torture scene by not sleeping for three days: “Dear boy, would it not be easier to just act?”).

Hoffman is actually very good in the film as a man out of his depth from the start who slowly becomes as hardened and dangerous as the people chasing him. In fact Hoffman, is so involving and empathetically frightened in this film (his desperate range of answers to “Is it safe” are really affecting) that you overlook that he is clearly far too old to be playing a college graduate. Roy Scheider is similarly good as his domineering, but loving spy brother.

But it’s Olivier’s mastery of nastiness that really makes the film lodge in your mind. Schlesinger’s film is often long-winded, opaque and confusing, but Olivier delivers a master-class in imperious nastiness. Szell is a nightmare image of the well-spoken, polite monster and Olivier’s eyes carry a spark of intense menace. Honestly I could happily watch just the scenes he is in – particularly that masterfully performed street walking scene – and be happy to stick with that. The rest of the film is often a bit of a murky mess, but when Oliver is at the centre you forget all that. Marathon Man is a conspiracy thriller so confusing I think it confuses itself – but in the individual scenes it often brilliantly captures dread, discomfort and fear.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

“Hello old sport”: Leonardo DiCaprio is The Great Gatsby

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Jay Gatsby), Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway), Carey Mulligan (Daisy Buchanan), Joel Edgerton (Tom Buchanan), Elizabeth Debicki (Jordan Baker), Isla Fisher (Myrtle Wilson), Jason Clarke (George Wilson), Amitabh Bachchan (Meyer Wolfsheim), Jack Thompson (Dr Walter Perkins), Adelaide Clemens (Catherine)

The Great Gatsby is possibly the great American novel. I’ve only read it once, but I certainly admired its beautiful prose, capturing of an era of American life and understanding of the fragility behind America’s love of success. Baz Luhrmann is clearly a fan, as he spent years putting together this passion project, presenting the biggest, brashest version of Fitzgerald you are ever going to see.

Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is a young writer turned bonds salesman in 1920s New York. He lives across the bay from his cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and her husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), a brash old-money man carrying on an affair with Myrtle (Isla Fisher), the wife of his garage mechanic. Carroway’s next-door neighbour is the sumptuously wealthy, but mysterious, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) whose parties and generosity are legendary. As Carraway gets to know Gatsby (as much as anyone can), he discovers that Gatsby has a deep, near obsessive, love for Daisy.

Luhrmann’s film is a technicolour explosion that uses many of the techniques you’ll be familiar with from any of director’s other films. The camera is a whirligig of motion. The colours are bright and primary. The whole tone of the film (certainly for its first hour) is larger than life. The narrative has been tweaked to take on the tone of a Greek Tragedy, with the loud noise, fast camera moves and speedy pace all inverted in the latter half to invoke sadness and tragedy. And of course, the music is deliberately anachronistic, mixing modern genre music with 1920s sounds.

Sometimes this high-budget technicolour brilliance does feel like it is partly getting in the way of the deeper themes that lie within the original. But that might be partly because the novel’s themes are so reliant on internalised feelings, unsaid or guessed emotions, and deeply purple prose, that these are ideas which are very hard to translate to the screen.

There is something to be said for Luhrmann turning one of the pillars of 20^th-century American culture into a spiritual sequel to Moulin Rouge!. And Moulin Rouge! is what the film strongly resembles, not only in design, but its romantic structure, poetic retelling, high drama, sense of impending doom and danger behind the bright lights, assault on class and the way it stands in the way of true love, and the lack of freedom in our lives. Both even have sad, reflective authors book-ending events.

So your enjoyment of the film is probably going to depend on how you feel about Luhrmann’s OTT style. Love Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Julietand you will probably find something to enjoy here (and you’ll also notice his love of tragic love stories). Saying that, of those three, Gatsby is the one the carries the least depth to it, which is intriguing as it probably mines the most psychologically rich source material. While Luhrmann understands that the book is about the real emotions masked by explosive parties and opulence – the film often feels as choked by these things as the characters do.

This is partly because I feel both Maguire’s and Mulligan’s performances don’t quite work. Maguire is so stripped back, quiet and passive he almost disappears – you don’t get a sense of Carraway as either a shrewd observer or someone wrapped up in events: instead he’s a passenger, like the plot contrivance Gatsby sometimes treats him as. Similarly, Mulligan is slightly overwhelmed by the movie, not giving a strong enough performance for her to break through. The film powers forward with such momentum and brashness, it squashes her.

It’s probably why the most successful lead performance by far comes from DiCaprio. He’s perfectly cast as Gatsby: so good in fact you wish he was in a more thoughtful, relaxed film that would give him a more of a chance to breathe. DiCaprio perfectly encapsulates the desperation just beneath Gatsby’s surface, the fear and uncertainty that lies under his suave urbanity. He completely gets the character, understands he is a showman presenting a front to the world because that’s what he thinks the world wants, but who is, in his own way, as empty and lost as the world of bright lights he is offering people. It’s an excellent performance.

Luhrmann’s work with DiCaprio is what gives the film it’s centre and, for all the colour, noise and joy of the first 40 minutes or so, it finds its heart in the moments of acting and character interplay as the Gatsby-Daisy-Tom love triangle comes to a head. This scene, with its bubbling emotions, high stakes and tension is like an oasis of calm in the high-faluting scenery that surrounds it. But then this is a film where the smaller moments actually come across as richer than the larger ones – partly helped by the fact that Joel Edgerton and Elizabeth Debicki both give excellent performances as the key supporting characters.

The Great Gatsby captures the feel of Fitzgerald rather well, but for all the dialogue of the book placed over the film in voiceover, it never quite manages to capture the spirit of the book in the same way. It looks wonderful, and its dynamic filming is certainly enjoyably impressive, but it doesn’t quite become a film that deals in emotions and depth. It flashes and fizzles but it never lets us really soak in its ideas and themes. It’s all too much at times, and the tragic sadness at the heart of the story, of this lost boy trying to live the life of a man, never comes out as it should. An interesting and entertaining film, but not one that will last.

Three Colours: Red (1994)

Irène Jacob gives a soulful performance in Kieślowski’s crowning achievement Three Colours: Red

Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski

Cast: Irène Jacob (Valentine Dussault), Jean-Louis Trintignant (Joseph Kern), Jean-Pierre Lorit (Auguste Bruner), Frederique Feder (Karin), Samuel LeBihan (Photographer), Marion Stalens (Vet), Teco Celio (Barman)

Spoiler warnings: I wouldn’t usually do this for a film that was made over 20 years ago, but discussing this film is almost impossible without covering the entire plot so – be warned! This is a rich viewing experience you should discover for yourself.

Kieślowski’s great trilogy wraps up with Three Colours: Red, a fascinating, moving, intriguing puzzle of a film that opens itself up to countless interpretations. It’s a film that seems to be about a great many things, but wears its intelligence and insight very lightly, never hammering points home or getting too wrapped up in its own smartness. It’s primarily a story and never forgets that. It also pulls together threads and themes from the entire trilogy hugely effectively. It’s a great movie.

Valentine (Irène Jacob) is a student in Geneva, funding her time at university through part-time modelling. After accidentally hitting (but not killing!) a dog with her car, she meets the dog’s owner, retired judge Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Joseph is spending his time in isolation from the world, listening to his neighbours’ phone calls, more out of a judge’s habit of finding out secrets than any truly malicious intent. Valentine challenges this blatant disregard of privacy, and she and Joseph begin to form an increasingly strong bond.

Red is a beautiful film, wonderfully made and rewards constant analysis. Kieślowski described this as the hardest film of the trilogy to write, and you can see why. Dealing with themes of fraternity, it ties this in closely with love (romantic and otherwise). The entire film shows the strengths of people coming together, specifically Valentine and Joseph who develop a bond that enriches their lives. This is contrasted throughout with Valentine’s domineering boyfriend on the other end of the phone-line, and modern communication in general that builds distance between people. Joseph, a man distanced himself from all others, finds his humanity once he opens himself to considering other people as people.

Kieślowski’s film also plays interesting games with narrative and time. A seemingly minor character, Auguste, a lawyer training to become a judge, is slowly shown to share a huge number of life events with Joseph’s youth. The question that bubbles over the film is, is this a coincidence or are Auguste and Joseph somehow linked? Is Auguste in some way the same person as Joseph – some sort of reincarnation? Is this fate or chance or mere coincidence? Is Joseph, living like some lonely old-testament God in complete isolation, somehow trying to move events to correct errors in the past – to try and find some contentment for Auguste (whose conversations with his girlfriend he has been listening to) so that he avoids the life Joseph has led?

I like this idea. It appeals a lot to me, not least as I started to feel that Joseph was almost some sort of Prospero, using phone taps as his own private Ariel to know everything happening around him and then (more benignly perhaps than Prospero) using this to improve the lives of those close to him. Perhaps. There is even a seemingly magic storm at the end of the film that brings several characters together, not least the leading couples from the previous two films in the trilogy. It’s also a storm that, it is suggested, will bring Valentine and Auguste together.

It’s a romantic flourish at the end of the film that speaks of the possibilities for the future (though typically of this intriguing series, it’s a flourish that comes out of a ferry accident that kills over a thousand people – you can’t get something for nothing in this world, and no romantic story is straight forward). It’s also a natural development of the strong romantic link between Joseph and Valentine. If Joseph and Auguste are (essentially) versions of the same person, it’s a further suggestion that (in another life) Joseph and Valentine would certainly have fallen in love (to match the platonic love that develops between them). This interpretation of love joining people together is seen as well in the lead couples from Blue and White also surviving the accident.

Or is this all coincidence? Kieślowski plays the mystery and depth so lightly – lets these points float out or be lightly stated without tub-thumbing – that it leaves it all gently to the viewer’s imagination. You can make of it what you will: the story works just as effectively if you ignore all the things I just discussed. Joseph as the isolated, austere man who finds a warmth in himself awakened by the generosity and compassion of Valentine. All this stuff could just be the working of chance.

But either way, the film is about fraternity: people coming together, and communication and compassion making us human. Irène Jacob is wonderful as the endearing, romantic and empathetic Valentine, her brightness and humanity shining through. Jean-Louis Trintignant is superb as the judge, whose careful veneer of distance and coldness is punctured throughout the film. The scenes these two share are beautifully done: conversations that throb with emotion under the surface. Kieślowski again directs these scenes with a masterful minimalism, using differing heights and levels (they are very rarely on the same level, usually one sits or stands above the other) to show the dynamics subtly change between the two. These height differentials – with Valentine often kneeling at Joseph’s feet – also suggest a growing intimacy between the two characters.

Technically the film is a marvel. It is lusciously filmed by Piotr Sobociński. The presence of red throughout is very well done and adds a poetic brilliance to the images. Kieślowski in particular shoots sunrises and sunsets with an astounding beauty, and uses light to add a huge emotional depth and beauty to private conversations. Zbigniew Preisner’s score is marvellous, a lyrical, beautiful series of compositions that rewards constant re-listening.

Red is a marvellous, thought-provoking and humane film crammed with wonderful and involving ideas, and brilliantly gives you loads to think about both narratively and thematically. It’s a warm and moving story, with darker elements that make those parts seem richer. With two marvellous performances at its centre, it’s brilliantly directed by Kieślowski (who tragically died shortly after the film’s release), with grace, poetry and passion. It looks wonderful, it sounds marvellous and it always make you think. It’s a masterpiece.

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

The most beloved of all musicals gives you a burst of pure enjoyment no matter when it plays

Director: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly

Cast: Gene Kelly (Don Lockwood), Debbie Reynolds (Kathy Selden), Donald O’Connor (Cosmo Brown), Jean Hagen (Lina Lamont), Millard Mitchell (RF Simpson), Cyd Charisse (Woman in the green dress), Douglas Fawley (Roscoe Dexter), Rita Moreno (Zelda Zanders)

Is there a more loved musical than Singin’ in the Rain? Is there a more famous musical from Hollywood’s golden age? That second point is particularly interesting, as this was possibly the last of the big Hollywood song-and-dance films – most of the rest that followed were film versions of Broadway hits. Singin’ in the Rain also has that “late discovery” quality: inexplicably not nominated for Best Picture (or hardly any other Oscars), it was for many years considered a second tier musical behind works like An American in Paris. Now it stands tall over the lot of them.

Singin’ is a film assembled from a collection of songs MGM held the rights to. The songs were given to Kelly, Donen and the screenwriters with the instruction to “come up with a movie”. What they came up with was this delightful film-about-films. Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) are the biggest stars of the silent screen in Hollywood, whose careers are in trouble overnight when sound is introduced. He can’t really act and she has a voice like nails on a blackboard. But Lockwood can sing and dance – so why not make their latest film a musical? Especially since the talented Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), who Lockwood has fallen in love with, can sing and act and can dub Lina’s voice. What could go wrong?

There are few more purely enjoyable films than Singin’ in the Rain. Nearly every scene has a moment designed to make you burst out in a smile, be it a cracking line of dialogue, a piece of prodigious dancing skill or the simple warmth and joy of the leading actors. Every second something delightful seems to happen. The entire film is an explosion of gleeful joy in the sheer exuberance of singing and dancing. Kelly’s choreography brilliantly uses everyday props and pieces of furniture to give the numbers an exciting everyday charm. It gives the songs an immediate “gotta dance” energy. How could you not like it?

Threading these songs around a structure of Hollywood taking on sound for the first time was a brilliant idea. The recreation of the acting styles and technology of Hollywood is brilliant. Lockwood is a hopelessly stagy actor, hideously artificial in his gestures, while poor old Lina Lamont is horrendously wooden with an awful voice, and a complete lack of any talent. Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont is in many ways the butt – but she’s so demanding, bullying and selfish we don’t mind that most of the jokes are on her.

The shift towards sound in Hollywood is actually interesting as well as hilarious. Where do we place the mikes? How should the actors get used to speaking into a mike? How do we cancel out the background sound? What do we do with loud props? One of the highlights is the screening of this film-within-a-film to an audience for the first time. All the terribleness Lockwood and Lamont gets revealed. In a particularly genius moment, the sound of the picture gets out sync with the picture, with the voices seeming to come out of the young actors’ mouths to hilarious effect.

Alongside this we get some of the finest song-and-dance routines in the history of the movies. Donald O’Connor is electric as Cosmo and his dance routine for “Make ‘em Laugh” is an astounding early pace-setter in the film: how does he do what he does here? O’Connor goes bouncing off walls, swirling in circles on the floor, springing from place to place without a single pause for breath. Most of this number (like many of the others) is done in one take with electric pace. And that’s the film just warming up.

Debbie Reynolds famously described doing Singin’ as being (along with childbirth) one of the hardest things she’d ever done in her life. You can see that in ‘Good Morning’, another electric three-way number with herself, Kelly and O’Connor – she is pounding the floor to keep up with these two masters (and does a brilliant job). She was pushed to the extremes by Kelly who privately considered her a not quite strong enough dancer. Kelly dropped her from Broadway Ballet Medley, a complex ballet-heavy (as per all Kelly films from On the Town onwards – a sequence that I must confess I find a little dull). She’s still excellent – charming, sprightly, light, glorious fun – but it did mean Kelly re-worked the main number to showcase just himself.

Ah yes. ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. This sequence of the film is probably wedged in everyone’s mind. Even if they’ve never seen the film, people are familiar with Gene Kelly, soaked to the skin, dancing through puddles and swinging around lampposts. Kelly is of course marvellous in this sequence (hard to believe he was apparently suffering from the flu at the time) and the number has complete charm to it – that carefree vibrancy of realising you are falling in love. Especially as Lockwood’s ego is finally being put to one side in order to celebrate feelings he’s having for another person. But the whole scene is just sheer cinematic magic. And for something so famous, you never get tired of it.

But then Kelly has pure star-quality here. Lockwood is a charming, handsome and smooth film star – but the film is happy to puncture his pomposity, or demonstrate in its opening sequence the self-aggrandising version of his early career (“Always dignity!”) with the reality of faintly embarrassing and dignity-free stage and stuntman work. Kelly is so charming you don’t mind that the film gives him an easy ride, considering Lockwood is actually quite selfish.

Singin’ in the Rain is pretty close to perfect. Even though I find some of the ballet stuff a little boring myself, it’s still filmed and shot with skill. It’s a pet discussion between film experts to ask how much of the film was directed by Kelly and how much of it was done by Donen. I guess it doesn’t really matter except to cinephiles, as the film is just beautifully directed: light, frothy, fun and with real technical expertise – the slow crane shot at the end of the famous number is justly famous. The pace is spot on, and the film is hilarious. Its understanding of filmmaking really pays off in the sequences that chronicle early film making.

So why did this film not get recognised at the time? Well to be honest, there were probably too many movies like this out at the time. It was a lot easier to miss in the crush of mega-MGM movies. It followed on the coat-tails of An American in Paris which had worn a huge number of Oscars (and was pushed back into cinemas in place of Singin’ in the Rain). Singin’ was still a big hit – but it perhaps needed film-fans to embrace it because it so perfectly married a love of Hollywood with the technicolour delight of 1950s musicals. Either way, Singin’ in the Rain is a delightful masterpiece which is guaranteed to pop a smile on your face. No matter the weather.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Martin Sheen heads into insanity in Coppola’s epic pretentious masterpiece Apocalypse Now

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Martin Sheen (Captain Willard), Marlon Brando (Colonel Kurtz), Robert Duvall (Lt Col Kilgore), Frederic Forrest (Chef), Albert Hall (Chief), Sam Bottoms (Lance), Laurence Fishburne (Mr Clean), Dennis Hopper (Photojournalist), GD Spradlin (Lt General Corman), Harrison Ford (Colonel Lucas), Scott Glenn (Captain Colby), Christian Marquand (Hubert de Marais), Aurore Clément (Roxanna Sarrault), Jerry Ziesmer (Mysterious Man)

During the 1970s, the director was king in Hollywood. Get a reputation as a visionary director, and Tinseltown fell at your feet. You could spare no expense to put together ambitious, thought-provoking, epic films. If you wanted to shoot on location at huge cost, or reconstruct elaborate sets for single shots, for a huge runtime that catered as much to your ideas of being an artist as it did to crowd-pleasing narrative, then Hollywood would give you keys. It didn’t last: several massive bombs (combined with the huge box office take of Star Wars) shattered the mystique of the director as an ego-mad, flawless genius who had to be indulged, and persuaded Hollywood the future was in big-budget, mass-produced action films (welcome to the 1980s, Hollywood’s nadir).

Apocalypse Now wasn’t one of those flops, like (most infamously) Heaven’s Gate. But, by golly gosh, it really could have been. In fact, in many ways it should have been. It has all the hallmarks: a huge runtime, filmed over a colossal period of time in a difficult location, a plot that mixes action, war and thrills with impenetrably pretentious musings on mankind’s dark soul. A maverick director throwing his own very personal vision at the screen, and damn the consequences. It’s a miracle Apocalypse Now wasn’t a career apocalypse for everyone. It escaped because, despite everything, it more or less gets the balance right between plot and character and pretention and faux-philosophy.

The film is famously a transposing of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into Vietnam. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is ordered to head down the river to “terminate with extreme prejudice” rogue Special Forces Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who is conducting his own vigilante war. On the boat trip down the river, Willard encounters a host of increasingly bizarre and surreal scenes, from war-mad Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) to a seemingly leaderless battle over a bridge, a playboy bunny show and a compound of ex-French colonials. And that’s before he even arrives at Kurtz’s compound and things get really strange.

Apocalypse Now is almost impossible to separate from the bizarre, tortuous route it took to get to the screen. Originally scheduled for a few months, the film took over a year to complete. A typhoon destroyed all the sets in the first two months. Original star Harvey Keitel was dismissed after a week (as his performance wasn’t right): his replacement, Martin Sheen, had a near-fatal heart-attack partway through filming. Marlon Brando not only turned up the size of a buffalo but refused to learn (or even speak) his lines. A year into production, the film had no ending. Coppola put his entire fortune up as collateral to complete the film. It was a nightmare.

But yet somehow what emerged has a sort of force-of-nature quality to it. Even though parts are basically pretentious rubbish, despite the fact I have twice fallen asleep in this film, despite the fact it is far from being a film that trades in complex ideas and offers profound insights, it still has a hypnotic quality about it. It’s done with a real force of commitment, a genuine labour of love, a film that doesn’t leave anything in the locker room but throws it all at the screen. The quality of what lands may sometimes be questionable, but the commitment with which it is thrown is beyond doubt.

And in a world of cookie-cutter films, it’s hard to have anything but respect and regard for a film that is so defiantly its own animal, that tells its story in its unique way. It’s perhaps one of the first “experience” films: no film could of course communicate what it was like to serve in Vietnam, but this film perhaps gets close to the surreal, drug-fuelled madness in that conflict.

Because Apocalypse Now is a very surreal film. Its plot is extremely thin, and each section of its (mammoth) runtime is all about experiencing another element of the American experience. In the commentary, Coppola talks about the river trip being partly a journey from the present into the past, a journey back not only into the history of the conflict (and its different stages) but also the regressing of mankind itself into a more primitive, malleable, basic state. It’s a big lump for a film to bite off – and I’m not sure if the idea really comes across without you knowing it. The real impression you get is of rules of society being left further and further behind.

The arrival at Kurtz’s compound is the fufillment of this increasingly unnerving story. We’ve seen the madness on the journey, the pointlessness, and the bemused, carefree confusion of the crew. But at the camp we get the overblown, decadent lunacy of Kurtz. Brando dominates the final 30 minutes of the film, although his monologues are meaningless drivel, the sort of intellectual point-scoring you could hear in a sixth form debating society. To be honest, iconic as Brando’s appearance is, his performance of mumbling battiness is actually a little awful (like one big practical joke from the actor) and the film’s momentum grinds to a halt while he babbles on.

In fact, so self-indulgent is Brando that in a way it’s a sort of tribute to Coppola’s mastery of cinema that he makes this pompous character make any sense at all – or that he makes this sort of nonsense even remotely watchable. But again it’s the hypnotic pull of the film: Coppola builds towards a chilling, haunting final sequence of Willard and Kurtz’s final confrontation intercut with The Doors’ The End and the real-life slaughtering of an ox by a crowd of real-life villagers (they were going to kill the animal anyway but offered to do it for the camera). Coppola somehow turns all this into iconic cinema, even though, viewed objectively, it’s overblown, indulgent, pretentious rubbish.

The whole film is a testament to hewing compelling filmmaking out of breathtaking insanity. After the film departs in the boat, most of reason, sense and conventional story-telling depart with it. Information only gets conveyed through rambling monologues from Willard. The crew of the boat get into scraps that reflect heightened versions of the American experience in Vietnam – from a war crime as the crew shoot-up what turns out to be an innocent boat, to an attack from unseen tribesmen with spears from the mists of the shore. Sam Bottoms, as surfer-turned-GI Lance, is our guide of a sort here – as he gets more stoned, so narrative logic departs with his senses.

What keeps the film going throughout is the masterful film-making. Coppola shoots the bizarreness with brilliant, visionary imagination. As a social theorist he’s pretty basic – man is, by the way, a savage animal and the Americans didn’t know what they were getting themselves into in ‘Nam – but as a film-maker he’s one of the best. Who else could have made three hours of episodic boat journeys so strangely compelling? The film is crammed full of great scenes and moments which rarely feel like they tie together – in fact, they could almost be watched in any order – and there is barely a character in there, but the film feels like its throwing you into the madness of Vietnam.

Even the sequence with a bit more narrative is still laced with absurdity. Kilgore’s helicopter assault on a village – and its use of Wagner blaring from helicopters to scare the Vietcong – is justly famous. This is a bravura film-making – and as much a tribute to the astoundingly amazing editing and sound work of Walter Murch as it is the photography of Coppola. Like most of the rest of the film it is visually outstanding, but it also has the film’s best writing (in the quotable but also strangely subtle characterisation of Kilgore) and also the film’s most iconic performance in Robert Duvall. Duvall is terrific as the war-loving, but strangely childish Kilgore, obsessed with surfing and with an ability to live totally in the moment.

This sequence doesn’t hesitate in showing both the brutality of war – and also the insanity of our commanders. Kilgore is genuinely dreading the end of the war, and you can see why he would since he is clearly having a whale of a time bombing places. Kilgore is a lovable, quotable badass doing what needs to be done – but the film doesn’t forgot that he is also an insane soldier with no off-switch. And Apocalypse Now never really glamourises war, for all the excitement and beauty of watching those helicopters come over the horizon.

It’s the artistry in its film-making, and the genuine effort and work that helps make it a demented classic. Walter Murch’s sound design and editing is possibly flawless – this might be the best edited and sound designed movie ever – from the opening moment when the helicopter blade sounds transform into a hotel room fan you know you are seeing something special. Scenes such as Willard’s hotel-room breakdown hum with intensity as they feel genuinely real – that scene in particular feels like Martin Sheen exposing part of his tortured psyche at the time. Sheen is by the way perfect as Willard, a slightly unknowable killer with dead eyes and a dead soul, still aware of the vileness of his world.

Apocalypse Now is a sprawling batty film – and in many ways an intellectually empty one straining at a depth that ain’t there. But somehow, for all that, it still is a masterpiece. Which is in itself a bit of a miracle as it really should be a disaster. It’s pretentious. It’s overlong. It’s very full of its own importance as a work of art (the re-insertion of the long-winded political discussion at the French Plantation into the Redux version doesn’t help). Some of its performances are plain ridiculous, verging in Brando’s case on outright bad. But yet, it’s delivered with such force of conviction, it’s so wonderfully assembled, so hauntingly shot and edited, that it hammers itself into your brain. You literally can’t forget it, for all its many, many flaws. Despite yourself, you find yourself forgiving it an awful lot – a lot more than you might expect. A mess, but also a classic.

Three Colours: White (1994)

Zbigniew Zamachowski confronts the problems of revenge in Kieślowski’s Three Colours: White

Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski

Cast: Zbigniew Zamachowski (Karol Karol), Julie Delpy (Dominique Vidal), Janusz Gajos (Mikolaj), Jerzy Stuhr (Jurek), Aleksander Bardini (Lawyer), Grzegorz Warchol (Elegant man), Cezary Harasimowicz (Inspector), Jerzy Nowak (Old farmer), Jerzy Trela (Monsieur Bronek)

The second film in Kieślowski’s ambitious thematic trilogy probably couldn’t be much more different from the first. Whereas Blue was a romantic tragedy, this is a sort of bitter comedy, a kind of anti-farce if you like. Here, the themes of equality are much more about getting even rather than all men being equal. Just as Blue looked at the negativities of liberty, this looks at the dark side of equality, and the blinkered tunnel vision we follow in order to get ourselves even.

Polish hairdresser Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is divorced in Paris by his French wife Dominique (Julie Delpy). In quick succession, Dominique strips him of his home, access to their bank account, his passport and his share of the business, and takes another lover. Reduced to homeless penury on the streets of Paris, Karol finally finds a way to get home to Warsaw by befriending sad-sack successful businessman Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), a fellow Pole, on the Métro. With Mikolaj’s help, Karol finds himself back home and soon in a position to start scheming his revenge.

White is, let’s be honest, a lot less of a triumph than Blue. That was a film that combined stunning visuals, directorial invention, profound depth and emotion. It was a story that looked at universal themes from a fascinating series of new angles. White,however, is more of a shaggy dog story. It feels like it’s aiming for some sort of Chaucerian fable, but it never really goes anywhere in particular, and it never really engages as much as it should while it tries to get there. While it’s not unentertaining film, it’s at best a good one rather than a great one.

My main problem is that Dominique’s character just never clicks. Why does she do the things she does? No idea. We are never given any insight into her character – she remains a cipher, bordering on a trope of the wicked beautiful seducer. Why does she jilt Karol? Surely it can’t be because of his (rather obvious) impotence ever since he arrived in France, and felt isolated in his new home? Why does she take such a delight in persecuting him, even down to audibly having sex with her lover when he calls her (“Perfect timing” she says before getting frisky)?

It’s hard not to get the sense of a film which has a slight suspicion of women. I don’t imagine that this a suspicion Kieślowski in any way shares – sensitive and humane portrayals of women are central to his films (not least Blue) – but when the only female character in this is the distant and unknowable Dominique it’s not good. Without any sense of why she has done the things she does, it’s hard to feel comfortable with the semi-comic destruction of her Karol plans.

But then that is part of the film’s point: Karol is obsessed (without even really knowing it) with his wife. Not even so much with revenge for that matter – just getting the chance to take on his wife in a one-sided struggle makes him feel closer to her. The only possession he takes home from Paris is a bust that reminds him of his wife (and which he painstakingly repairs after it is smashed to pieces). Much as tries to build a new life, it’s a monofocus – he only gets what he gets in order to use the resources against his ex-wife.

So equality is in Kieślowski’s design, not a good thing. Shy, sweet Karol basically ends up entrapping himself and his wife in equally frustrating positions: she in prison, he faking his own death without a penny. What was the point for Karol? No wonder he looks up at her in prison with tears rolling down his face – he’s still in love and he’s got nothing to really show for his equality, other than their joint misery.

All of this sits alongside Kieślowski’s brilliant understanding of post-Cold-war Poland, a bustling land of opportunity to make a quick buck, where simple peasant farmers can be bamboozled out of their land by smarter guys who know businesses from the West are just dying to buy up properties. Karol shares this understanding of Poland. No wonder he’s all at sea in the rest. The instant he arrives back he’s delighted, relaxed and more confident – “I’m home!” he cries joyfully, even when his first view on arriving in Poland is a mass rubbish dump.

Moments like that show Kieślowski’s dry comedy. There are plenty of other moments, helped by Zamachowski’s pretty lovable performance of the naïve-but-growing-in-confidence Karol. Karol and Mikolaj (an excellent Janusz Gajos) put together quite an excellent double bill of bromance laced with darker themes of depression (it’s no real surprise who Mikolaj is talking about when he tells Karol that he will help him if Karol can help his “friend” who wants to die but can’t kill himself). Karol’s hapless fate in Paris raises a few smiles, as does his surreal escape stuffed in a suitcase.

But there aren’t quite enough of them. Too much of the film either doesn’t connect or hold together. I could have certainly done without Karol’s sexual prowess returning once he is confident and rich in Poland (yawn!). Dominique’s non-character remains a serious problem, and there just isn’t enough meat on the bones here. Compared to the richness of the first entry in the series, this feels remarkably empty. It’s also a lot less visually arresting and imaginatively done than the first film: I’m already struggling to remember any of the visuals.

Kieślowski may well have wanted a sort of anti-comedy to be the pivot of his trilogy, but it doesn’t really work here. He ends up with something that feels so slight and underdeveloped that it doesn’t stick with the viewer, and doesn’t engage them either. While it has moments, as you would expect from a great director, and some very good actors, it doesn’t have nearly enough of them.

Three Colours: Blue (1993)

Juliette Binoche seeks liberty from grief in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece Three Colours: Blue

Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski

Cast: Juliette Binoche (Julie de Courcy/Vignon), Benoît Régent (Olivier Benôit), Emmanuelle Riva (Madame Vignon), Florence Pernel (Sandrine), Guillaume de Tonquédec (Serge), Charlotte Véry (Lucille), Yann Trégouët (Antoine), Hélène Vincent (La journaliste), Zbigniew Zamachowski (Karol Karol), Julie Delpy (Dominique)

There are few foreign language films that have cemented themselves in film’s cultural history more than Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy. These three inter-linked films – made with French and Polish money – looked (individually) at themes of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, while using a colour palate and design that reflected one colour of the French flag each. The first film in this interlinking trilogy is Blue, a sombre, intriguing, intimate drama that perhaps wears its intelligence a little heavily on its sleeve.

Julie de Courcy (Juliette Binoche) is the only survivor of a car crash that kills her husband, a famous composer, and her daughter. Lost in grief, Julie decides that she will separate herself from the world and live entirely independently. She rents out her home, distances herself from friends, takes back her maiden name and destroys what she believes to be the only copy of her husband’s final composition – a concert for the unification of Europe. But Julie finds that liberating herself from all worldly connections is not as easy as she hoped.

Blue is a heartfelt, gentle film that throbs with emotional intensity, much of it coming from Binoche’s searing performance of a woman consumed with a mixture of grief and survivor guilt, who sees complete isolation and “liberty” from all connections as the only chance for sanity. Kieślowski’s direction is masterful – patient, stable, quiet and with a brilliant eye for small details. The film is crammed with small moments that speak of peace and quiet reflection – from watching a lump of sugar being soaked in tea, to lingering studies of everything from rooms to streets.

The opening sequences of the film convey this masterful confidence from Kieślowski. The camera is a still observer, alternating between subtle POV shots and gentle, perfectly placed observation of Julie. Every moment of the shocking discovery of Julie’s loss is wonderfully assembled – from the stumbling news from the doctor, to the crackling mini-TV on which she watches her family’s funeral being broadcast. Quietly we see Julie return to her own home – and Binoche bottles up emotion with a resolve that suggests as much her determination not to engage with the pain as it does self-control. No wonder her housekeeper bursts into tears at the fact that Julie isn’t crying.

This all ties in very interestingly with the film’s theme of liberty. Conventionally, we would have had Julie escaping from something to find her own life. Kieślowski’s film more interestingly explores the positive and negative of liberty. Julie chooses freedom from all of life’s connections – but this is shown constantly to be not only impossible, but also less than healthy. Her surface liberty is instead crushing her under the pressure of isolation.

At the same time, the film is partly about Julie learning to free herself from her survivor guilt. Cutting herself off from the world denies her a genuine emotional connection with her husband’s friend Olivier (a puppy doggish Benoît Régent). In the first months of her guilt she sleeps with Olivier, hoping it will get her a bit of peace (it doesn’t). Inevitably, as Julie finds out more about her husband’s life – and as we find out that his music output was heavily reliant on Julie’s secret collaboration – the film becomes a question of whether Julie will allow herself the liberty from her past to continue living.

Because in a way this is an anti-tragedy: it starts with a trauma and is about the survivor learning to continue her life. Kieślowski peppers the film with moments of falling, from items to bungee jumpers on the TV. Slowly, these images of falling progress to include being caught, or shots of the bungee cords snapping the person back from oblivion. It’s a neat, subtle continual reference to Julie’s unconscious search for support.

Particularly as it’s made clear that Julie’s entire personality is all about giving, about loving and supporting people. From her silent collaboration with her husband, to her patient caring for her mother suffering from increasing dementia (another perverse form of liberty), to her forming a reluctant friendship with an exotic dancer in her block of flats (who the rest of the tenants are trying to drive out), it’s clear that Julie’s attempt to distance herself is never going to truly work. A character late on even tells her that her husband had always described her as kind and forgiving – qualities Julie learns to re-embrace.

The wider world that Julie is trying to escape is represented brilliantly throughout by the score of her husband’s (her?) music for Europe. This score – a richly exuberant piece of music by Zbigniew Priesner – constantly intrudes into the action, accompanied by moments where Kieślowski seems to suggest time has stopped as Julie becomes lost in her reflections. Kieślowski uses colour changes and slow zooms to suggest throughout these beats where Julie temporarily becomes lost in the past and memories. The continual presence of the music is perfectly done.

The one element I was less keen on was the over use of blue. From filters on the camera, to backlighting, to objects present in every frame, there is a lot of blue in this movie – every shot has something blue in it. Although this is clever, and clearly thematically intentional for the whole trilogy – I’ve got to be honest spotting this stuff probably took me out of the film at moments. I imagine on a second viewing this will be dramatically reduced – but it’s one of those curses of a trilogy of films that have been so hyped up on the arts circuit, that you are aware of some of its subtle tricks so much that they cease to be subtle.

But Three Colours: Blue is still a masterful, quiet study of grief, loss and yearning, that avoids the obvious and explores different types of liberty and freedom. Binoche is brilliant in the lead role, and Kieślowski sears the brains with images (I still wince remembering a sequence where Julie deliberately scrapes her knuckles over a wall she walks past) and his direction is impeccably sensitive and unshowy, letting the film speak for itself. I can’t wait to watch the other two films in the trilogy – and see how this might affect my views on this first one.