Category: Films about obsession

Serpico (1973)

Pacino is sensational in this sensational and gripping anti corruption thriller

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: Al Pacino (Frank Serpico), John Randolph (Captain Sidney Green), Jack Kehoe (Tom Keough), Biff McGuire (Captain McClain), Barbara Ede-Young (Laurie), Cornelia Sharpe (Leslie), Tony Roberts (Detective Bob Blair), John Medici (Pasquale), Allan Rich (DA Tauber)

Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) is a newly graduated cop in the NYPD. Passionate about changing the world, Serpico wants to clean up the streets – but not at any cost. The aggressive tactics and jobsworth disinterest of many of his colleagues infuriate him while his bohemian style and view that the way to be really effective as an undercover cop is to look like the people he investigates alienates other cops. As Serpico’s experience grows, he discovers the NYPD is overflowing with corruption and on-the-take cops, hoovering up cash and protection money and turning blind eyes. But when Serpico decides to do something about it, he puts himself in the firing line. Literally.

Serpico captures the anti-authoritarian fury of 70s cinema. Who can you trust when your suspicions of those who are supposed to enforce the law are right – they are as dirty, if not more so, than the criminals? Serpico mixes police thriller with paranoid conspiracy thriller, rotoscope filming placing everything in chilling focus, the grimy streets of New York a world where injustice is rampant and the powers-that-be will do anything to maintain the corrupt status quo.

Pacino grips the role of Serpico with the sort of fire-breathing force that made him a phenomenon in the 70s. Pacino transformed himself for the part, prowling the roughest neighbourhoods of New York for research and burying himself under a mountain of shaggy hair. Serpico was shot in reverse, so Pacino could progressively shave off parts of his mountain of hair, starting his work with the jaded, disillusioned Serpico and stripping back into the fresh-faced rookie (there is a neat joke in the fact that the naïve young Serpico looks the spitting image of Michael Corleone).

It’s a performance of bubbling, dizzying intensity, that dominates the film (Pacino is in nearly every scene), with Pacino slowly more and more coiling up with wild, frustrated tension. Edgy, fidgety but searingly naturalistic, Pacino gives this larger-than-life figure a searing sense of moral certainty and rigid principles, a man who slowly realises the world is not what he thought and increasingly furious at its essential shittiness. What Pacino understands is that Serpico doesn’t want to be a crusading whistle blower – he just wants to be a cop, but won’t sit back and watch his colleagues laughing with crooks. It’s a stunning, passionate, technically and emotional superb performance, from an actor at the pinnacle of his powers.

Serpico is a chilling exploration of police corruption. It’s casual, everyday and all evasive. From the free sandwiches handed out by café owners (“If I pay can I get what I want?” Serpico asks and is promptly told to shut up) to the casual brutality handed out to suspects. For a man like Serpico who wants to change the world, it’s a nightmare, even before a stuffed brown envelope is dropped into his hand and he’s urged to take it and shut up. It sits alongside crippling indifference: he can’t even arrest two rapists he spots on the street because the detective running the case is on leave (“They’re here now!” he screams down the phone before taking matters into his own hands.)

All this and more makes Serpico stick out to other cops. In an NYPD still overwhelmingly made-up of white, middle-class besuited guys (the collection of potential undercover cops in a training lecture are hilariously uniform in more ways than one) he’s a bohemian. Interested in the arts, reading books, listening to classical music and watching ballet. In his spare time he dates actresses and hangs out with arty types. He’s a world away from the cops, who view him with mistrust and a potential threat in more ways than one (a fellow cop, disgusted at overhearing Serpico talk ballet, accuses him of soliciting in the department bathroom and won’t be shaken in his belief).

So, he’s in huge danger when he eventually decides he can’t close his eyes to his army of colleagues on the take, but must do something about it. He’s already been warned that the answer “I don’t know” to the question if he would always vouch for any cop is the wrong answer. In a world where Lumet makes clear cops see as sharply divided between themselves and everyone else, where taking some extra payments is a perk of the job, someone like Serpico won’t be tolerated.

Inevitably the system turns on the whistle-blower. Serpico’s fellow cops close ranks, his superiors fob him off or treat him with suspicion. His colleagues move swiftly from offering to hold his cut in trust, to asking why he just doesn’t donate it to charity to finally loathing him. Eventually he’s an isolated, despised figure, padded down for wires, routinely ignored in the precinct and unable to trust anyone (rightly so, since the film opens at the end with Serpico shot after a raid, possibly by a cop, before flashing back to his graduation). And the ‘outside bodies’ he brings in? They move like slugs and Serpico’s disgust at their focus on scalps and not systemic change just re-enforces his isolation.

Serpico was shot quick and dirty on the streets of New York (Lumet shot in 51 days with editor Dede Allen editing each scene as it was finished). Lumet’s immersive camera throws the viewer straight into the gritty world of New York in the 70s, and the city has rarely ever felt more like a wretched hive of scum and villainy. It’s dirty and filthy with danger on every corner. There is virtually no sense of community or public duty and everyone, cops and robbers, are solely out for what they can get. It’s a brutal, terrifying world where injustice and violence are just part of the rations.

Wonderfully directed by Lumet, it’s powered by a tour-de-force performance of sheer, dynamite genius from Pacino in one of his greatest (and most overlooked) roles. Serpico is a searing indictment of a world that creates a friendly atmosphere for corruption and wickedness and where doing the right thing leaves you victimised, isolated and in a hospital bed with a bullet in your cheek.

Othello (1952)

Welles distinctive Shakespeare epic is a masterpiece of turning the Bard into film

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Orson Welles (Othello), Michéal Mac Liammóir (Iago), Robert Coote (Roderigo), Suzanne Cloultier (Desdemona), Hilton Edwards (Brabantio), Nicholas Bruce (Ludovico), Michael Laurence (Cassio), Fay Compton (Emilia)

In the early 1950s Orson Welles was in the wilderness. After the implosion of his career in Hollywood, he was grifting a living in Europe, juggling multiple ventures and paying for things (or not) with cheques from quick film cameos. But the fire was still there. Welles wanted a project which he would have complete control over. Shakespeare was the ideal collaborator: both free and dead, here was a man who offered an ocean of ideas and not a word of criticism, who would make no demands he re-cut the picture. A marriage of convenience but it led to cinematic triumph.

Othello would be an Welles production from top-to-bottom. Largely self-funded, a few investors chucked in liras for a share of profits (you can imagine Welles as Shakespeare in Love’s Fennyman grinning that was fine because “there never are any”) it became a labour of love over years. Welles begged, borrowed and flat-out stole film stock and camera equipment from assorted productions, kept costumes from for-the-money roles he did to keep the operation flowing (famously his Othello coat was a costume which he’d requested a fur-lining added to, that went unseen in the film it was made for but came rolling out in Othello). Actors were summoned, sometimes months apart, to shoot. Scenes would start filming in one location and finish filming months later somewhere completely different. Welles sat in the middle holding the entire film in his head.

It’s extraordinary that Othello is even coherent. The fact that it’s also a masterpiece of film Shakespeare is a miracle. But, cut loose from the bonds of Hollywood studio execs and not giving a damn about the bills (he had the cheek of genius so never picked up a tab) allowed Welles the scope to experiment and do things “his way”. Othello is the most purely “Welles film” since Citizen Kane, and a tour-de-force of cinematic inventiveness with poverty and lack of resources drawing the best out of a director who marshalled all his gifts of editing and lighting to make resourceful use of limited resources. It’s guerrilla film-making that looks like an epic.

What you could argue Othello is not is a truly original look at Shakespeare’s play – or really an actor’s piece. Welles’ passions for Shakespeare always felt as much about having a grand canvas of poetic language to impose his own vision on, cutting and changing as needed. Thematically, Othello is pretty much what you would expect. Welles’ Othello is the noble Moor pushed into a spiral of jealousy. Michéal Mac Liammóir’s (the finest performance) Iago is a dastardly liar, with faint hints of sexually motived envy. Desdemona is as pure as the driven snow, Emilia a faithful servant, Rodrigo a simpering idiot, Cassio a pretty boy. Our sympathies lie firmly where Shakespeare would expect.

Everything that is unique about the film lies in its telling. Othello is a breath-takingly beautiful film, which uses its locations to astonishing effect. Column lined castle rooms and towering walls create caverns of light and shadow. Welles uses the fixed points of columns to add a dizzying level of speed to camera movements that see these columns whip past the frame. The shadows of grills are frequently cast across faces and light creates looming shadows across the floor. Welles plays into this with the creation of light pools, concentrating it on single fixed points, often faces, with the surroundings bathed in black. The film presents real locations in defiantly expressionistic ways, giving each of them an elemental power that heightens the tragedy.

It’s a film made up of stunning set-pieces. It’s opening funeral cortege – like Citizen Kane, Othello starts at the end with Othello and Desdemona dead and Iago in chains – follows a march over city walls, playing out in striking shadow against the brightness of the sun, with booming, Gothic music giving the sequence an imposing sense of inevitability. Iago is paraded by a mob and placed in a cage, lifted above the city wall (this same cage frequently appears throughout the movie – including, once, having Iago walk nonchalantly under it – as a grim reminder of where this is heading). It’s a perfect marriage of sound and music, disguising the small scale with cinematic force.

Taking advantage of limitations time-and-again makes Othello great. Another striking sequence was born from necessity. With most of the costumes impounded for non-payment of shipping bills, the attempted murder of Cassio is re-staged in a Turkish bath (who needs costumes when we have towels!) a decision that turns the sequence into a masterpiece of light through steam, increased by the frenetic energy Welles shoots the sequence with culminating in its Lang-inspired super-imposing as Iago thrusts his sword down into the floorboards to dispatch Rodrigo.

Othello is frequently filled with imaginative camera angles. Often characters observe others from great heights – twice through sky lights, starring down at conflicts, murders and suicides. Iago and Rodrigo spy on Othello’s gondola romance with Desdemona from a distant bridge. The ramparts of Cyprus provide towering angles, over soldiers or wave-crashed rocks below. The camera also takes a number of low-angle positions, making characters (often Othello) tower over us. Clever angles and perspective work create whole ships out of sheets of fabric and basic models.

It’s also a triumph of editing. Welles assembled the film from a never-ending supply of fragments. Frequently actors appear with their backs to the camera while we hear them speak – as Welles said, a sure sign the actual actor wasn’t there. Like few other films, Othello feels like a film excavated from its shooting. It’s a film almost constantly in motion, rarely stopping to focus on an actor delivering a line (Othello’s first speech, parts of Iago’s speeches and Emilia’s speech to Desdemona being the main moments the film focuses on actor’s delivery – no doubt connected to those three actors being the ones Welles trusted).

Away from that, the camera often fast cuts and delivers scenes in motion, with actors speaking off camera as we focus on the events around them. This means the dialogue is repeatedly chopped, changed and trimmed to meet the needs of the scene. It helps make the film even more pacey and frighteningly interior – conversations become snatched and fast, words flung from angles we cannot see, ramping up the paranoia. Large chunks of it is redubbed by Welles himself – a light version of his distinctive tones clearly emerges from Robert Coote’s mouth and Michael Laurence’s Cassio has a familiar cadence. In some cuts, Welles also replaced Suzanne Cloultier’s voice with Gudron Ure (with whom he played the role on stage).

If there is a major flaw in Othello it’s probably the acting, frequently looking under rehearsed, with Welles himself a leading culprit. His Othello is underpowered and feels under-defined. There is little sense of an interior to his mind and Welles’ surprisingly somnolent delivery tends to crush much of the emotion. It’s hard not to think Welles was so focused on juggling every other factor, that he compromised on his acting. Only Mac Liammóir, Compton and Edwards look truly comfortable with their roles – and even they offer traditional readings.

But Othello is about turning Shakespeare to cinema and if Shakespeare himself is slightly sacrificed in the push, it doesn’t detract from the stunning theatrical beauty we get instead. Othello becomes a lean, pacey thriller, crammed with stunning imagery and imaginative flourishes (Rodrigo’s faithful dog, following sadly after his master, is a gorgeously little playful touch). It’s a film where light and shadow are major plays, where footsteps in subterranean water pools create ripples of motion and echoes of noise, that shows the greatness that can be born from necessity. It’s one of the greatest Shakespeare films.

Napoleon (2023)

Scott’s epic of the most famous Frenchman of all time looks good but is empty at heart

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix (Napoleon Bonaparte), Vanessa Kirby (Josephine Bonaparte), Tahar Rahim (Paul Barras), Ben Miles (Caulaincourt), Ludivine Sagnier (Thérésa Cabarrus), Matthew Needham (Lucien Bonaparte), Sinéad Cusack (Letizia Bonaparte), Édouard Philipponnat (Alexander I), Ian McNeice (Louis XVIII), Rupert Everett (Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington), Paul Rhys (Talleyrand), Catherine Walker (Marie-Antoinette), Mark Bonnar (Jean-Andoche Junot)

Is Bonaparte cinema’s White Whale? Filmmakers have often tried and failed to bring this epic life – who else so dominated their era that’s its literally named after them? – to the screen. Abel Gance’s silent epic could only squeeze his early years into five-hours and the planned five sequels never materialised. Famously, Kubrick spent decades planning a Napoleon film (he had a veritable library of Napoleonic research) but could never deliver. Napoleon has popped up in films as wide ranging as Time Bandits and Waterloo, but the definitive film has never been made. Is Scott’s Napoleon it?

Napoleon takes a rather old-fashioned approach to the biopic. The fashion now is to focus on a single event that becomes a window into its subject’s life. Napoleon, in its two and a half hours, takes a far more cradle (or revolution) to grave approach. We join Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) as an anonymous artillery captain and leave him (via 13 Vendémiaire, Egypt, the 18 Brumaire coup, self-coronation, Austerlitz, Borodino, Moscow, St Elba, Waterloo and Helena) dying in exile. It’s as swift and pacey a run-down of his life and times as it sounds like, with the film’s main focus being on his complex, love-loath relationship with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby).

Scott’s film is a visual treat – don’t those uniform’s look gorgeous! – and it works best as a coffee-table book of the life-and-times of one of History’s most controversial figures. What it doesn’t work as is as film where you feel you gain any real understanding of what motivated Napoleon or where the charismatic energy that made millions of soldiers flock to him time-and-time again came from. Scott’s Napoleon emerges as a maladjusted, emotionally-stunted oddball, apt to glower and sulk who is never the master of events or people. It’s a revisionist view that doesn’t ring true.

It’s not helped by a surprisingly low-key performance by Joaquin Phoenix, bulked up and lumbering, playing up the “Corsican Brute” angle that so alienated the Emperors he negotiated with. Phoenix’s performance is all pout and emotionally inarticulate self-pity, with small flashes of domineering force that come across as childish sulks. But it’s never the performance of a man who looks like he could motivate a nation to march with him into a mincer (several times!). Nor a performance that brings a sense of the fierce-ambition of a man who wanted to control and reshape the world. It focuses instead on one small aspect of his personality and misses vast swathes of his rich, autodidact personality.

It doesn’t help that filtering Napoleon’s life through his relationship with his wife feels like a gossipy approach used because tackling Napoleon’s complex attitudes towards his Corsican ancestry, contradictory interests in instituting democratic systems in a dictatorship and desire to bring peace to Europe via a series of destructive wars would be too tricky. Instead, we get a Napoleon who plans his movements and campaigns to compensate for his sexual inadequacy at being cuckolded by his wife, rushes back from Egypt to confront his cheating wife and seemingly escapes from exile because he’s pissed at his wife flirting with the Tsar. It’s not helped that the most interesting mechanism in their relationship – she was older and more experienced than him, with two children already – is compromised by Vanessa Kirby clearly being far younger than Phoenix.

Saying that Kirby is good in the film, conveying a complex set of emotions towards a husband who sometimes amuses her but, just as often, repels her with his bullying possessiveness (not to mention his militaristic sexual technique). Napoleon uses their relationship as a constant frame to interpret events, not only as motivation but also as a narrative device, letters between them constantly updating us on events off-screen. But the film only lightly sketches what drew them together in the first place (basically his attraction and her use of her sexuality to win protection) and the film ends up stuck in the same cycle of fall-out followed by Napoleon’s desperation to possess her again.

The time given to sketching out the broad strokes of this relationship means we never get a sense of history behind events or where the qualities, that made Napoleon the guy who governed most of Europe, came from. Scott’s film is (which, with its stressing of the deaths caused in his wars, settles for an anti-Napoleon stance) plays up his negative qualities and gifts him few positive ones. Phoenix’ performance is almost perversely anti-charismatic: he never laughs, is constantly shown as a pompous windbag who only children are wowed by, loses all his raconteur charm and is frequently victim to events – be that panicking at his attempted coup (where he’s bailed out by his brother) or only at Austerlitz looking like he has any particular military skill.

Still the film bowls along, too fast to ever really engage with events. A host of strong British Actors pop-up (their character names and functions plastered on the screen), but their appearances and dialogue are often so truncated it’s hard to really understand why they are there. Julian Rhind-Tutt’s Sieyes pops up to announce he plans to seize power with Napoleon and is never heard of again. Ben Miles and Paul Rhys rush through exposition as Caulaincourt and Talleyrand. A host of actors playing Generals stand in the background and snatch lines when they can. There are a few inadvertently comic casting choices – I did snigger when former News Quiz host Miles Jupp pops up as Francis I.

This historical gallop means years frequently pass between scenes and we often get very little idea why developments are taking place: for example, Napoleon seems to become Emperor on the basis of a half-muttered suggestion from Talleyrand. Conquests of whole countries are skipped over in seconds. Josephine’s offspring appear as children and are next seen as adults. Other than them, no one ages at any point over the film’s near 20 year span, with Phoenix and Kirby in particular looking little different at the end as they did at the start. (The film also rewrites heavily the comparative ages of its two leads – Josephine was in fact several years older, partly why conceiving an heir became such a problem.)

The battles are impressive though – even though they take up not quite as much screen time as you might think. The campaign in Egypt boils down to essentially a single cannon ball pot-shot at the Great Pyramid (never happened of course). Borodino is a cavalry charge. Austerlitz and Waterloo are the only battles that get real screen time, with both offering remixes of the actual history (Waterloo, incidentally, looks less impressive and smaller in scope than the Bondarchuk film managed). The photography is beautiful (as it is throughout) and the film doesn’t flinch on showing the impact of bullets and cannon balls. But it has no interest in understanding Napoleon’s actual strengths as a general (essentially, skilful movement of forces from a distance) substituting them with him leading not one but two cavalry charges – a suicidal risk he never took.

“At least it looks good” pretty much sums up the strengths and weaknesses of Napoleon. It’s enjoyable enough and buffs might enjoy the odd Historical Easter Eggs, but it never gets to the heart of understanding its subject and settles for a ticking off events and personalities rather than placing them into an informative context. You’d come out of this wondering how this guy got to where he was – and that makes you feel the film has failed to answer its implicit question in the tag line “He came from nothing. He conquered everything.” How, eh? How?

Caché (2005)

Haneke’s fascinating puzzle is a profound and challenging modern masterpiece

Director: Michael Haneke

Cast: Daniel Auteuil (Georges Laurent), Juliette Binoche (Anne Laurent), Maurice Bénichou (Majid), Lester Makedonsky (Pierrot Laurent), Walid Afkir (Majid’s son), Annie Girardot (Georges’s mother), Daniel Duval (Pierre), Bernard Le Coq (Georges’s boss), Nathalie Richard (Mathilde)

Is any film more aptly named than Caché? Haneke’s film keeps its cards so close to its chest, it’s entirely possible revelations remain hidden within it in plain sight. Caché famously ends with a final shot where a possibly crucial meeting between two people we’ve no reason to suspect know each other plays out in the frame so subtly many viewers miss it. It shows how Haneke’s work rewards careful, patient viewing (and Caché is partially about the power of watching and being watched), but also how unknowable the past can be. It’s a chilling and engrossing film that fascinates but never fully reveals itself.

Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) lives a life of success. A wealthy background, host of a successful TV literary debate show and living in an affluent suburb of Paris, he’s married to publisher Anne (Juliette Binoche) and father to young champion swimmer Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). But there’s a serpent in his Garden of Eden. Georges and Anne are plagued by a stream of videos arriving at their house. These show long, static shots of their home and are accompanied by crude, graphic drawings. Someone is watching their house and the dread that this could escalate at any time is consuming them. But does Georges know more – do the messages chime with guilty memories in his past?

Haneke’s film is a multi-layered masterpiece, a haunting exploration (free of clear answers) into the things we prefer to forget, the hidden horrors we supress. It’s a film all about the shame and guilt buried amongst the everyday. Haneke even shoots the film on hi-definition video so that the surveillance footage of Georges and his home visually merges with the ‘real’ images of the couple. Within that, Caché starts to unpack the hinterland we hold as individuals (and, quite possibly as entire nations) of the guilts of our past that keep bubbling to the surface to bite us.

Caché is shot through with Haneke’s genius for menace and veiled threat. Can you imagine anything creepier than a camera set up outside your home, filming everything you do – but never knowing where it is? It’s an invasion of privacy that is insidious and covered in the additional menace that, at any time, it could escalate to something worse. The creeping, invasive tyranny of surveillance is in every inch of Caché, its omnipresence giving every interaction the feeling of being watched (something Haneke plays up – watch a man watching Anne when she sits in a café with a friend).

So gradually the book-lined world of the Laurents becomes a base under siege, a feeling amplified by Haneke’s mix of smooth camera movements adrift from establishing shots: constantly the camera glides through a space where we feel we neither truly understand the geography or are confident about the time. It’s accentuated by the window-free room the Laurents largely inhabit. In fact, their whole home feels window free, with curtains frequently drawn and rooms plunged into darkness, the family throwing up a shield to protect them from the outside world.

Or is it to cut them off from the unpleasant facts of life? It becomes clear Georges has built a world around himself, where he is the hero and all traces of the unpleasant or disreputable in his past have been dismissed to the dark recesses of memory, never to be accessed. Played with a bull-headed arrogance by Daniel Auteuil, under his assurance Georges is prickly and accusatory, liable to lash out verbally (and perhaps physically, considering the threat he carries in two key scenes). Auteuil masters in the little moments of startled panic and stress that cross Georges’ face, a man so used to a world that matches his needs, that anything questioning that is met with rejection.

It’s why he lies to Anne about his growing suspicions about the source of the tapes. The cartoons hint at a series of (deeply shameful) interactions, when he was a child in the 60s, with a young Algerian boy, Majid, who his parents considered adopting after the death of Majid’s parents. It was Georges lies that forced this boy out of his perfect farm-house into the cold-arms of the unfeeling French orphanage system. This is the original sin of Georges’ life, arguably the foundation of his success – a guilty secret that so haunts and disgusts him, even the slightest mention of it brings out the muscular aggression he otherwise keeps below the surface.

Of course, it’s hard not to see an echo of France’s colonial past. One of the things that works so well with Caché, is that this subtext is there without Haneke ever stressing it. Just as Georges’ lies forced Majid into a life of depression and misery, so France’s treatment of Algeria is the terrible shame the nation would rather forget. Majid’s parents died in a famously brutal stamping out of an Algerian protest in Paris in October 1961 (the deaths of over 200 people at the hands of French government forces only came to light decades later). The anger many show when presented with inconvenient, horrible past deeds (both personal and national), only feels more relevant today with our culture battles over history.

Georges sees himself as a victim of a vicious campaign. But, when Georges meets Majid, played with startling vulnerability by Maurice Bénichou, he seems light years away from the sort of man who could possibly be capable of such a campaign. Indeed, when a video of Georges encounter with Majid is widely shared, it is Georges (as even he admits) who appears the bully and aggressor. Majid has been demonised in Georges’ memory – in his nightmare he becomes an axe-wielding monster-child – but he’s an innocent, who had everything taken from him in a micro-colonialist coup carried out by a 6-year-old Georges. A coup the adult Georges has let himself forget, making him little different from France itself. (We are reminded the cycle continues, with constant background news footage of Iraq, ignored by the Laurents.)

The mistakes repeat themselves, but they don’t trouble the complacent middle-classes who benefit from them. Georges will even use his influence to have Majid and his son bundled into a police van. Of course it leads to an outburst that will shake this world up. Haneke’s films have always been realistic when it comes to the visceral horror of violence, and Caché contains an act of such shocking violence that it will leave the viewer as speechless and distressed as the witnesses.

And still the question hangs: who? It could be anyone. At one-point Georges storms out of his front door to confront the mystery video-sender, only to return to find a video wedged in the door. It’s literally impossible for this video to be placed without him seeing it done. Haneke is so uninterested in the whodunnit part that, perhaps, he’s implying the perpetrator is the director himself, using the mechanics of film-making to entrap the guilty parties. It fits with the coldly intellectual steel-trap part of Haneke’s mind, the part that uses films (like Funny Games) to tell off and preach. What other director would be more likely to set himself up as unseen antagonist in the film?

And does Georges learn anything? He will continue to confront characters who challenge his world view and dispatch (like nations) his guilt to the recesses of memory. His begrudging peace with his wife – a superbly restrained Juliette Binoche, increasingly resentful at her husband’s secrets – seems built on the shaky ground of their continuing mutual comfort. And suspicions linger over his son, an increasingly hostile figure who (just perhaps) is learning more about the flaws of his parents than they would be comfortable with.

Of course, this might all be open to interpretation from multiple angles. After all the film is called Caché. Haneke has hidden enough subtle implications in it that it can reward analysis from multiple angles. Shot with his characteristic discipline that suggests a dark, creeping fear behind every corner, it’s a masterclass in suggestion and paranoia. Brilliantly unsettling and constantly reworking itself before your eyes, it’s a masterpiece.

The Killer (2023)

Fincher’s lean, spare film is a perfectly constructed thriller and an intriguing character study

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Michael Fassbender (The Killer), Tilda Swinton (The Expert), Charles Parnell (The Lawyer), Arliss Howard (The Client), Kerry O’Malley (Dolores), Sophie Charlotte (Magdala), Emiliano Pernia (Marcus), Gabriel Polanco (Leo), Sala Baker (The Brute)

A man sits in monastic silence, starring out of a window at the best hotel in Paris that money can buy. He moves only to sleep, exercise with a monotonous rigour and consume a carefully calculated daily calorie amount from McDonalds. He wears gloves all the time, never moves from the sheeting he lays across surfaces and sometimes assembles and reassembles his rifle. He’s a nameless hitman for hire (Michael Fassbender) and a freak accident on this job will shatter his world of pristine order and leave him hunted by his employers and on a campaign of revenge to guarantee his safety.

The Killer is a lean, slimmed-down thriller full of Fincher’s love for procedure and detail, that delights in every beat of its detailed look at how a professional killer might go about his daily business. Be it lock-ups crammed with mountains of equipment, from guns to false number plates and endless zip-bound folders of fake IDs (all using character names from 70s and 80s TV shows) to the practised ease with which he penetrates even the the highest security building with an Amazon purchased card copier and light-fingered pick-pocketing. All of it assembled with Fincher’s pin-point precision and clockwork eye for detail.

On the surface, you might expect The Killer to be a sort of twist on Le Samouri, Melville’s look at a zen-like hitman. The Killer seems to fit much of the bill. Embodied with an athletic suppleness by Fassbender (his body seems to be almost elastic in the parade of physical stretches and exercises he performs, not to mention the fingertip press-ups he relentlessly pumps his whipper-thin body through). But Fincher gives us a seemingly never-ending insight into the Killer’s inner-mind, via a prolonged (near continuous) monologue of his inner thoughts, ideologies and mantras that dominate much of the film (the first twenty minutes plays out in near on-screen silence, just watching Fassbender and listening to his voiceover).

What’s fascinating is this interior monologue is only a shade away from a stream of corporate middle-management think. (It’s even implied the Killer was originally recruited while training as a lawyer). There are mantras with the air of an assassin’s version of positive thinking (“Stick to your plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.”) and passive-aggressive demands to hit a personal standard (“Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability.”). Far from the glamour of an unknowable force acting to a mystical code, this Killer sounds alarmingly similar to a self-doubting white-collar worker using Sun Tze to plan out his pitch meetings.

Beneath the sheen of Fincher’s beautifully dark film, is the suggestion we are watching a character study of a man perhaps only partially aware that his life, and his inner picture of who he is, is falling apart. For starters, despite his mantra of perfection and continued assurance of ‘every detail covered’ and ‘every angle anticipated’, our Killer makes a host of errors. Almost everything we see him do goes wrong in some-way: from that initial hit that takes out the wrong target, to stabbings that leave victims bleeding out faster than he intended, doses of knock-out drunks that are incorrectly calculated, house invasions that fail to surprise the victim… The mantra is clearly an ideal not quite a reality and the Killer’s greatest strength actually turns out to be his ability to improvise in unexpected circumstances.

In addition, for all he maintains he acts only professionally and things are never personal, the entire film chronicles a campaign of revenge in which he takes out a host of targets for personal reasons. The idea of the killer as a man separate from connections is already shattered from his obvious distress, returning to his home in the Dominican Republic after his botched hit, to find his girlfriend seriously assaulted and hospitalised. Michael Fassbender’s mastery of micro-features throughout the film, suggests waves of doubt and insecurity flooding behind the eyes of a man who has tried to master himself as an unfeeling violent limb of faceless masters.

As such, The Killer is a sort of pilgrim’s progress of a man discovering small, unexpected elements of himself while as impassively as possible knocking off anyone he considers a threat (effectively anyone who might know where he lives). No attempt is made in this to make the Killer entirely sympathetic – he ruthlessly kills at least one completely innocent person, and doesn’t hesitate to murder those he has identified, no matter how much he might sympathise with them.

But the monastic chill he aspires to is cracking. You can see it in his conversation with “The Expert” played with a mix of relish and resignation by Tilda Swinton. A professional killer like him, the Expert has not let this stand in the way of “a normal” life outside her trade. She’s married, is a popular regular at a posh restaurant and has achieved a level of compartmentalism the Killer can only dream of. Is the envy and self-doubt in his eyes as he listens to her emotionally articulate reflection on the life they have chosen?

Fincher’s film quietly explores this alongside some skilfully assembled sequences. In many ways the film mirrors its lead character: limber, dedicated, obsessive, executing its sequences with clockwork exactitude and following a fit-bit like a metronome. But it’s also a dark character study of a man (perhaps) realising how empty he has made himself, drowning out doubts with the music of The Smiths. Fassbender is the perfect actor for this, few matching his skill to be both blank and overflowing with suppressed emotion at the same time.

It makes The Killer a fascinating film, a Fincher film that feels at first like a minor work but offers more and more depths for reflection. On one level an auteur John Wick, which brilliantly outlines each trick of its expert lead character. On another level, a sort of dark character study of a man in the midst of an epic breakdown, falling back on mantras and mottos, processing his doubts and guilt through the only thing he really knows how to do: kill people.

Murphy’s War (1971)

This heavy-handed anti-war Don Quixote story is far from a success

Director: Peter Yates

Cast: Peter O’Toole (Murphy), Siân Phillips (Dr Hayden), Phillipe Noiret (Louis Brezan), Horst Janson (Captain Lauchs), John Hallam (Lt Ellis)

In the dying days of World War Two, the merchant ship Mount Kyle is sunk in the Venezuelan Orinoco by a German U-Boat. Surviving the machine-gunning murder of the crew is Irish engineer Murphy (Peter O’Toole), who is treated at a Quaker mission by Dr Hayden (Siân Phillips). Murphy at first seems happy to be out of the war: but that changes, after the murder of fellow survivor Lt Ellis (John Hallam) by u-Boat captain Lauchs (Horst Janson), hunting the survivors. Murphy, assisted by Frenchman Louis (Phillipe Noiret), decides to take revenge, kitting out a crashed bi-plane to launch a series of increasingly obsessive attacks on the u-Boat with Murphy succumbing to a vendetta.

Peter Yates takes an action-adventure novel and adjusts into an anti-war epic that becomes increasingly shrill as it reaches its nihilistic ending. This shift led to several clashes between Yates and the film’s producer Michael Deeley, who was looking for a box-office hit with a charismatic star. While Yates’ film is complex in its eventual structure, the overall impact of the film is confused and blunted, its sympathies mixed and logic often flawed. It has its moments but doesn’t quite work.

As part of its anti-war set-up, Yates believed it was essential to humanise the German sailors (after all, he wanted the viewer to feel unease at Murphy’s destructive crusade). Unfortunately, creates a dissonance in the film. The first thing the German sailors do is ruthlessly machine-gun the Mount Kyle’s sailors as they tumble into burning waters. Graphically shown is every beat of the fear, as charred machine-gunned bodies fill the frame while the Germans show not a moment of regret (indeed we next see them celebrating the Captain’s award of an iron cross). The captain murders Lt Ellis with a face filled with regret, but his execution involves bullets causing Ellis’ body to jerk in its graphic death throws. How are we supposed to sympathise with them after that?

The focusing on such brutality fits the anti-war hell the film wants to lay out. But it fatally undermines the film’s aim to sure Murphy’s campaign to destroy the u-Boat as an obsessive and destructive campaign. With no reason given for the brutal war crimes committed by the u-Boat (for good measure they also machine gun the Quaker settlement, killing many of the villagers), its hard not to feel that actually Murphy has a point and that these guys deserve punishment. Would a throwaway line about a secret German mission or a need to hide have hurt the film?

The film can’t have it both ways. It can’t luxuriate in the destruction and murder war soldiers commit and then ask us to sympathise with these same soldiers when their death is threatened by another obsessive soldier on a quest for revenge. In a better developed film this sort of clash of sympathies might feel more natural. Instead, the Germans are either monstrous or sympathetic depending on the needs of the scene while Murphy himself makes an awkward shift late on from a guy with righteous anger into a destructive figure we are invited to condemn.

This is a particular shame as there is a lot in Murphy’s War to admire. Yates directs with an assurance and sense of epic scale. The Venezuelan scenery is shot with a real beauty by Douglas Slocombe and the film is edited with a professional excellence by future-Bond-director John Glen. The film’s first half hits a “boy’s own adventure” tone very effectively – making the later shift into 70’s anti-establishment nihilism more awkward – with inventive sequences as Murphy, McGiver-like, reassembles the downed biplane and jerry-rigs some home-made bombs.

A big part of any success is the charismatic performance of Peter O’Toole, who tears into the role of this Irish rebel with relish. Mixing insouciant wit with a bitter irony that slowly gives away to a sociopathic gleam as obsession takes hold, this is an excellent performance. O’Toole manages to make a character who is, in many ways, slightly incoherent work effectively. After all this rebel we hear condemning war with counter-culture cool, who fights to the bitter end; a guy who expresses indifference for his colleagues but goes to unimaginable lengths to avenge them. These contradictions don’t feel naturally developed, but ideas that are put in place to ease the plot.

Saying that, the film has some interesting beats as Murphy collapses more and more into Don Quixote like obsession, tilting at his underwater windmill. (Yates clearly had a passion for this angle as he would make two attempts to make a film of Don Quixote before finally making a TV version in 2000). O’Toole is perfect for this increasing severing from reality and as his Sancho Panza, Phillipe Noiret contributes a warm, humane performance as reluctant Louis, who silently acquiesces in a campaign he clearly feels is misguided and delusional. Equally good is Siân Phillips, balancing exasperation and affection for Murphy, finally unable to brake through his walls of aggression.

There are good ideas and moments in Murphy’s War but its poor-plotting (its story is also strikingly slight, with the preparation of the biplane and its test flight filling an elongated stretch of the film) and jumbled mix of adventure and anti-war sentiments eventually fatally undermine its effectiveness. Despite fine work from Yates and a charismatic and highly watchable performance from O’Toole it’s, at-best, an interesting failure.

M (1931)

Lang’s masterpiece, a thrilling and complex crime drama that explores the horrors of crime and mob justice

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Peter Lorre (Hans Breckett), Gustaf Gründgens (Safecracker), Otto Wernicke (Inspector Lohmann), Ellen Widmann (Mother Beckmann), Inge Landgut (Elsie Beckmann), Theodor Loos (Inspector Groeber), Friedrich Gnaß (Franz, the burglar), Fritz Odemar (Cheater), Paul Kemp (Pickpocket), Theo Lingen (Conman), Rudolf Blümner (Beckert’s defender)

A murderer prowls Berlin’s streets. For weeks children have been murdered and the citizens are at fever pitch. The police are desperately trying every weapon in their investigative arsenal. The heightened police presence on the streets hampers the lives of regular criminals: they too decide to take matters into their own hands, pooling their resources to catch the killer. And the killer himself? Not a mastermind, but a peculiar, timid man (Peter Lorre), a slave to uncontrollable impulses.

All this forms Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, his first sound film and one of the greatest German films of all time. A rich, psychologically detailed procedural thriller it is a stunning indictment of mob violence, a detailed look at the flawed assumptions of the official forces and an unflinching look at the horrific personal impact of crime. Lang’s film is extraordinary, a brilliant mix of impressionistic insight and documentary realism covered in an all-revealing social tapestry. It’s gripping and extraordinary.

Lang’s film was heavily inspired by real-life cases, most notably Peter Kürten (“the Vampire of Dusseldorf”) and the structure of the Weimar police department. Just like the real Berlin, his fictional one has a criminal underworld governed by a sort of German mafia, the Ringvereine, who a bizarre social set of rules among criminals. M tied into debates around the death penalty: was it right to take a life, even for unspeakable crimes? Is a life in a psychiatric prison fair for the murderer of several children? M is fascinating as it provides enough ambiguity to support either side (Goebbels claimed, when watching it, that it was a sure sign that Lang would become “one of us”).

This stems from Lang’s superbly detailed, anthropological filming style, which throws the viewer into the centre of a world that feels extremely real. Streets are lined with beggars and an array of adverts, posters and political messages. The camera prowls down streets and over tenement blocks, catching shadows and gets lost in cigarette smoke. It captures every detail of the Berlin police department: forensic labs that breakdown fingerprints, annotated maps, criminal psychologists pontificating on the intellectual make-up of the killer based on his handwritten notes to newspapers. Detective Lohmann (an increasingly harried Otto Wernicke) puffs cigars, pulls together facts and fails to make any real progress, looking increasingly buffeted by events rather than controlling them.

It’s one of the film’s subtle criticisms of the political situation at its time. The official forces have every resource going, but seem powerless. Instead, Lang contrasts them ever more closely with the criminal underworld or use brute, uncontrolled, unordered force to tackle the problem. Is it my imagination, or is there the stench of Nazism in this group? Their nameless leader (Gustaf Gründgens) strides, with a leather-clad firmness, emotionlessly forward, fixated on the end result – despite, with at least three murders on his score card, arguably not being that different from the man he’s chasing killer. He instructs the criminals to effectively throw a dictatorial cordon around the city, their solution being stamping out freedom and taking unilateral action.

Lang’s film is sharply critical of the kneejerk horrors of this mob justice. Crowds are whipped up by press coverage (which they excitedly read, the papers hitting the streets with a special edition after every murder) into a mob desperate to lash out, crowding around posters offering rewards for catching the killer. A man giving the time to a child in the street is nearly lynched, a raised camera angle reducing him to a tiny figure compared to his aggressor towering over him. A group of people playing cards in a bar descend into blows after one accuses the other of behaving suspiciously. The criminal put together a show trial (with a token, powerless defence counsel) where the killer is allowed a few brief words before his pre-ordained lynching (no legality with Nazism).

Again, it’s hard not to consider the growth of street violence in Germany in 1931, an atmosphere where justice was slowly dying as the Nazi party argued people had the right to take violent action against those who they see as enemies of the state. The criminal organisation here are worryingly efficient and organised. Lang brilliantly intercuts between two meetings, both in smoke-filled rooms, as the police and the criminals plan their operations. Sentences started in one location are finished in another. Complementary camera angles echo each other. In the police meeting there are also calls for unilateral action. Lang criticises the authorities who are active but ineffective (and some sympathetic to the criminal’s viewpoint), as much as the brutal mob justice of the criminals.

And the killer himself? Brilliantly played by Peter Lorre (who resembles a perpetually frightened paedophilic toad), Hans Breckett is weak, feeble, as scared of himself as he is of others, unable to understand or control his urges. He is driven by a whistling tune of In the Hall of the Mountain King for Grieg (a whistling that he sometimes produces, at others seems to hear around him) and consumes the things he desires – be they apples, drinks or children – with an impulsive immediacy. His letters to the papers suggest he is desperate to be seen. But when he is, chased by the crowds, he’s weak, terrified and utterly unimposing, trembling amongst the flotsam of a factory almost indistinguishable from the debris around him. At his trial he attempts to vindicate himself with a whining desperation. But, as Lang quietly suggests, do we have the right to kill him?

After all, Breckett is almost certainly a war veteran. He shares that with several other characters – as we are reminded by beggars with wooden limbs. Maybe his split personality – perhaps that’s why he stares with curiosity at his own face in the mirror, as if he doesn’t recognise himself – is a relic of a conflict where men were encouraged to kill, then returned back into society where expected to do the opposite. Perhaps the same feelings also lie behind the ease so many people have with mob justice – and also those in the criminal jury who show some sympathy for Breckett’s forbidden urges.

As well as balancing these complex ideas, Lang’s film is also a masterpiece of visual and aural technique. A child’s death is suggested by a newly orphaned ball rolling into frame. A gorgeous hand-held camera shot wanders through the beggar’s bar, where beggars gather used cigars, rescued sandwich fillings and sign up to be the criminal’s eyes on the street. Sound transitions between scenes are handled with an extraordinary confidence. The silence of armies of policeman walking through the streets turning into burst of noise as they move through raids. The Grieg leitmotif is used to brilliant effect.

Lang’s film though never forgets the victims. we start and end with the parents. The mother of the film’s first victim, Elsie Beckmann, waits with increasing panic in her apartment, each knock of the door promising her daughter’s return but disappointing (we’ve already seen Elsie disappear, hand-in-hand, with Breckett’s whistling shadow). It’s to her the film returns to her at the end, her tear-stained face telling us no sentence will bring back the dead. Appearing over a wordless scene of Beckett’s actual trial (the result of which we never discover), its Lang’s subtle reminder that mob justice brings only false satisfaction, that killing never heals the wounds of loss and our effort would be better directed to protection rather than revenge. It’s a message that feels particularly poignant in a German film made in the final years before Nazism would lead the country into devastation.

Filled with stunning film-making confidence, mixing documentary realism and brilliantly confident visual and audio mastery, Lang’s M could be argued to be one of the greatest film noir detective dramas ever made – and also a brilliantly insightful look at human and social nature. M is a masterpiece, as gripping and relevant today as it was Lang filmed it.

The Omen (1976)

Extremely silly horror with a great score, more interested in inventive deaths and genuine fear or dread

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Gregory Peck (Robert Thorn), Lee Remick (Katherine Thorn), David Warner (Keith Jennings), Billie Whitelaw (Mrs Baylock), Patrick Troughton (Father Brennan), Leo McKern (Carl Bugenhagen), Harvey Stephens (Damien Thorn), Martin Benson (Father Spiletto), Robert Rietty (Monk), John Stride (Psychiatrist), Anthony Nicholls (Dr Becker), Holly Palance (Nanny)

“Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666.” One of the sweetest things about The Omen is that the number of the Beast was considered such an unknown concept to original viewers, that its painstakingly explained to us. In some ways The Omen is quite sweet, a big, silly Halloween pantomime which everyone involved takes very seriously. If The Exorcist was about tapping into primal fears, The Omen is a gory slasher (with a cracking score) that’s about making you go “Did you fucking see that!” as actors are dispatched in inventively gory ways. It’s brash, overblown and (if we’re honest) not very good.

Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck, selling every inch of his innate dignity for cold, hard lucre) is an American diplomat told one night in Rome that his pregnant wife Katherine (Lee Remick) has given birth to a stillborn child. “Not a problem” he’s told by an absurdly creepy Priest (Martin Benson) – just so happens there’s another motherless new-born child in the hospital tonight so he can have that one, no questions asked, and his wife need never know. Flash forward five years: Thorn is Ambassador to the Court of St James and young Damien (Harvey Stephens) is a creepy kid, with few words and piercing stare. In a series of tragic accidents people start dying around him. Could those people warning Thorn that his son is in fact the literal anti-Christ himself, be correct?

Want to see how powerful music can be? Check out how The Omen owes nearly all the menace it has to it imposing, Oscar-winning score from Jerry Goldsmith (wonderfullyGothic full of Latin-chanting and percussive beats). It certainly owes very little to anything else. The Omen is an exploitative, overblown mess of a film, delighting in crash-zooms, jump-cuts and extreme, multi-cut build-ups to gore. Richard Donner never misses an opportunity to signpost an approaching grisly death, by cutting between the horrified face of the victim, the object of their demise and then often back again. For the best stunts – including a famous demise at the hands of a sheet of glass – Donner delights in showing us the death multiple times from multiple angles.

This slasher delight in knocking off actors – people are hanged, impaled, crushed and decapitated in increasingly inventive manners – is what’s really at the heart of The Omen. None of this is particularly scary in itself (with the possible exception of the hypnotised madness in the eyes of Holly Palance’s nurse before her shocking suicide at Damien’s birthday party) just plugging into the sort of delight we take in watching blood and guts that would be taken in further in series like Halloween (which owed a huge debt to the nonsense here). Donner isn’t even really that good at shooting this stuff, with his afore-mentioned crude intercutting and even-at-the-time old-fashioned crash zooms.

With Goldsmith’s score providing the fear, The Omen similarly relies on its actors to make all this nonsense feel ultra serious and important. They couldn’t have picked a better actor than Gregory Peck to shoulder the burden of playing step-dad to the Devil’s spawn. Peck has such natural authority – and such an absence of anything approaching fourth-wall leaning playfulness – that he invests this silliness with a strange dignity. Of course, Atticus Finch is going to spend a fair bit of time weighing up the moral right-and-wrongs of crucifying with heavenly knives the son of Satan! Peck wades through The Omen with a gravelly bombast, managing to not betray his “for the pay cheque” motivations, and investing it with his own seriousness of purpose.

Peck’s status also probably helps lift the games of the rest of the cast. Lee Remick may have a part that requires her to do little more than scream (and fall from a great height twice) but she does manage to convey a neat sense of dread as a mother realising her son is not quite right. David Warner gives a nice degree of pluck to a sceptical photojournalist (while also bagging the best death scene). Troughton and McKern ham it up gloriously as a drunken former devil-worshipping priest and an exorcist archaeologist respectively. Best in show is Billie Whitelaw who filters her Beckettian experience into a series of chillingly dead-eyed stares as Damien’s demonic nanny.

The Omen does make some good hay of its neat paedophobia. Harvey Stephens with his shaggy hair, impish smile and pale skin (not to mention darkly sombre wardrobe) looks like your worst nightmare – he’s creepy enough that the film doesn’t need to gift him a vicious rottweiler as well. Donner’s decision to never have Damien show a touch of any real emotion for most of the film also pays off, meaning even something as silly as Damien inflicting slaughter from behind the pedals of a child’s tricycle seems scary.

Of course, if Damien was savvy enough to present himself as a bright and sunny child perhaps Troughton, Warner, McKern and co would have struggled to convince Peck he was the Devil’s seed. In that sense he takes after his dad: Satan loves an over-elaborate death, and from a storm herding one victim to a fatal impalement under a tumbling church spire to popping the handbrake of a glass-bearing van for another, no trouble is too much for Satan when bumping off those who cross him. (The Omen could be trying to suggest that maybe everything is a freak accident and Thorn goes wild and crazy with grief – but that Goldsmith score discounts any possibility other than Damien is exactly what we’re repeatedly told he is.)

The Omen trundles along until its downbeat, sequel-teasing ending, via a gun-totting British policeman who sticks out like a sore thumb in a country where the cops carry truncheons not pistols. Donner balances the dialled up, tricksy, overblown scares with scenes of po-faced actors talking about prophecies and the apocalypse, all shot with placid straight-forwardness. There is a really scary film to be made here about finding out your beloved son is literally a monster, or how a depressed father could misinterpret a series of accidents as a diabolical scheme. But it ain’t The Omen – this is a bump-ride of the macabre. The Devil may have the best tunes – but he needs to talk to his Hollywood agent.

Persona (1966)

Bergman’s masterpiece, a fascinatingly brilliant Rorschach test that challenges and rewards the viewer

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Bibi Andersson (Alma), Liv Ullman (Elizabet Volger), Margareta Krook (Doctor), Gunnar Björnstrand (Herr Volger), Jorgen Lindstrom (Boy)

Even Bergman considered Persona a moment he “had gone as far as I could go…touched wordless secrets that only cinema can discover”. Persona, Bergman’s most consciously artistic and psychologically challenging work is a mass of contradictions and puzzles that defies easy categorisation (even Bergman claimed to be only half sure what definitively was happening). A whirling mix of themes, haunting moments and unknowable incidents all within a framework that constantly reminds us we are watching a film, Persona has been influencing, challenging and fascinating viewers for over 60 years. If cinema’s Everest is Citizen Kane, Persona is its K2.

The plot seems simple. Famed actress Elizabet Volger (Liv Ullman) fell silent for a minute during a production of Electra, then carried on. A day later she stopped speaking and hasn’t spoken since. Her doctors can’t find an answer so she is sent to an island to recuperate, with the support of a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). On the island, Alma fills the silence with long monologues that become more and more confessional, intimate and personal. Does Elizabet betray these confidences in a letter to her doctor? Does Alma plot revenge? Are these events even happening? As the personalities of the two women blur, merge, swop and consume each other the film fractures (at one point literally so) until we are left as uncertain of who and what is real as perhaps the women themselves.

There is, in some ways, no understanding Persona. It perhaps best resembles a cinematic Rorschach test. I’d argue it’s a fool’s journey to stare at it for a definitive answer. Different days, different moods, different conditions will make the picture re-shape and resemble something else. Bergman has created a film devoid of traditional ‘clues’, that provides no trace of an ‘answer’, but instead asks – demands? – us to take away only what we choose.

Throughout, Bergman makes it vitally clear film is a constructed, artificial representation of reality. Persona starts and ends with film literally spooling through a projector, the arc lights cranking up to project a reality. The opening prologue is a host of suggestive images which may, or may not, relate to what we are about to watch. Their meaning is almost deliberately vague – much as the epilogue’s brief shot of Bergman and crew shooting the film is – but it lets us know beyond doubt this is a subjective presentation of a series of images, not real life. Perhaps reading meaning into it is as impossible a task as trying to interpret the contents of a library from the page of a single book.

Which is to say, I think Bergman is both inviting us to interpret the film but also warning us that this isn’t a jigsaw, but a deliberately obtuse and open-ended work, our experience of it controlled by the director. Film is after all a dream – a world where we think we move freely, but in fact we never do. Which might make you think Persona is Bergman’s punking the world, a Thermot’s Last Theorem designed to infuriate. It isn’t because it’s made with such grace, humanity and honesty.

To understand Persona you can only discuss – and wonder – at the complex, multi-layered themes and decide which speaks most to you on the day. A lot of this boils down to how you are affected by the breathtaking, seismic performances from Andersson and Ullman. Playing two characters whose identities merge, shift, mirror and absorb each other both performers give outstandingly intelligent, infinitely challenging and unreadable performances. For Andersson the film is virtually a monologue, where the more Alma talks, the more our grasp on who (or what?) she is slips through our fingers. Ullman’s impassive face, awash with micro-expressions (caught in scintillating close-ups) constantly disorientates – is that a sneer or a smile? Is that head-turn impatience or a desire to know more?

At several points I find myself falling into the trap Bergman lays of wanting to categorise the film, as I became convinced first one than the other of these women was just an element of the psyche of the other. It’s not as simple as that. They are both the same and different, two people and one. Bergman frequently frames their bodies overlapping and, in one horrifying moment, their face literally merged half-and-half. Elizabet, we think at first, is a near vampiric figure sucking the life out of Alma, drawing confessions from Alma to restore herself. Then Elizabet becomes a ghostly figure, moving in the margins of Alma’s life, a horrific silent figure from her subconscious holding her back. Then you feel Alma to be nothing more than Elizabet’s id, demanding her right to be independent.

The unreadability of the film becomes ever more acute at the half-way point. After an enraged Alma deliberately leaves Elizabet to cut her foot on glass, the film pauses, burns away and then restarts with an echo of its earlier montage. Has the story restarted? Did all or any of what went before actually happen? Or is everything from this point a cinematic fantasy? Later in the film Bergman throws in a sequence with Alma and Elizabet back in the hospital before returning to the island – is this a flashback or a dream or a vision or something else entirely?

Bergman’s mastery of horror comes to the fore. The haunting repeated shot of Elizabet embracing Alma from behind, the two of them starring into a mirror (and the camera) at times seems sexually charged, at others disturbingly possessive at others supernaturally controlling. Is Bergman’s point that the context of an image can change its meaning? These hazy definitions of truth and reality lie throughout. The confrontations between the two taking on an increasingly surreal nature.

In a stunning sequence, Bergman repeats the same Alma monologue twice, one focused solely on Elizabet (her face contorted with pain as she hears of her rejection of a child), the second on Alma (now dressed identically to Elizabet), Alma’s bitterness now taking on a totally different light. Alma, back in nurses’ outfit, confronts Elizabet screaming that she is her own person even as her words collapses into an incoherence that might as well match Elizabet’s silence. Which is projection and which reality? When they leave at the film’s end, do they go their separate ways or merge? Does Alma imagine herself with Elizabet’s husband, or when Elizabet’s husband recognises Alma as his wife is he tipping the nod to us?

Bergman gives no clear reasons for Elizabet’s silence. It could be connected to horror at the world’s terrors (Vietnam and the Holocaust are referenced). It could be shame at her own post-natal depression. It could be that the silent Elizabet is a projection of the Alma-Elizabet’s own turmoil and isn’t real in the first place. After all the hospital we are introduced to Elizabet in doesn’t feel like a real place but a sparsely dressed film set (and shot like it).

Sex weaves it’s way tellingly through the film. The sexual bond between Alma and Elizabeth, physically, seductively close and possibly sleeping together is clear. Alma relates a hugely erotic monologue about an orgy she and a friend initiated on a beach, the only time she describes herself a purely happy and content. Is this her memory or a fantasy of Elizabet’s? If Alma is Elizabet, is this what she longs for or the thing she finds missing now from her own life? Alma talks of wanting a family – but in a haphazard, casual way and has already had an abortion. Elizabet has a son but doesn’t want him – is Alma what she dreams she could be, or is Elizabet the truth Alma doesn’t want to face? At various points both, all or nothing of the above could be true.

The film opens with a mysterious boy starring at a blurred series of images of female faces. We never learn who he is (theories abound from Elizabet’s son to Bergman himself). He wakes seemingly from the dead, but perhaps he is given life by the film. Perhaps, Bergman is saying, Alma and Elizabet are themselves given life only by the film. That both of them are fictious illusions, as unreal as the blurred pictures on the wall. Persona is the sort of film only a director of pure courage could have made. An object that fascinates and frustrates but always leaves you wanting to reconsider and reposition it to see if the picture becomes clearer or if new truths are presented if you look at it from a different angle. Maybe Elizabet is a succubus. Maybe Alma is an angry inner self, longing to escape and liver her own life. Maybe Alma is the silent actress. Maybe Elizabet longs for the simpler life of the nurse. Perhaps every single idea is true and perhaps none of them are. That’s part of the mystery that makes Persona one of the greatest films ever made.

The Lesson (2023)

Sinister family mystery, full of good moments that don’t come together into something that really works

Director: Alice Troughton

Cast: Daryl McCormack (Liam Sommers), Richard E. Grant (JM Sinclair), Julie Delpy (Hélène Sinclair), Stephen McMillan (Bertie Sinclair), Crispin Letts (Ellis)

Liam Sommers (Daryl McCormack) strides onstage for an interview about his literary debut, that has set the world alight. How did he get the inspiration to write about a domineering patriarch in a rich country house? Flashback to Liam’s summer spent as an English tutor to Bertie (Stephen McMillan), who is trying to get into Oxford to impress his domineering father JM Sinclair (Richard E Grant), Britain’s leading literary novelist. The Sinclair household bubbles with suppressed grief over the accidental drowning of JM and Hélène’s (Julie Delpy) older son Archie in their private lake. As Sinclair puts the finishing touches to his new novel – and ropes in Liam to help him as “final lap amanuensis”, what secrets will Liam uncover about this family?

The Lesson revolves heavily around its oft-repeated pithy mantra from JM Sinclair – “Great writers steal”. So often is this repeated, that it drains much of what little surprise there might be about the true origins of JM Sinclair’s latest tome. It’s a fitting mantra from the film that feels like a mood piece, assembled from little touches of other filmmakers (Kubrick for starters), reassembled into something just a little too pleased with its reveals and secrets-within-secrets structure, but is well enough made that you are willing to cut it some slack.

Effectively all filmed in a single location, the Sinclair’s luscious house (a mix of the modern and the classical) set amongst rich private grounds, it’s well directed by Alice Troughton, who makes effective use of angles and transitions (particularly its cuts back and forth between the working practices of Sinclair and would-be novelist Liam, which subtly stress both their similarities and differences) to enhance mood and an air of unknowable menace. The camera drifts with a chilling intimacy across the fateful lake, giving it a sense of ominous power and mystery.

The film is at its strongest in its opening sections (like Sinclair’s novel, it is divided into three parts with short prologues and epilogues). Within a self-contained theatrical space, tensions and resentments between the family are carefully but not pointedly outlined. The father who switches between indifference, annoyance and gregarious enthusiasm. The mother who feels like both a dutiful supporter and a resentful slave. The prickly, difficult son scared of affection, who attempts (unsuccessfully) to ape his father’s authoritarianism, but is crying out to be hugged. Troughton skilfully cuts between these characters, frequently positioning them at opposing sides of the frame, setting them at visual odds with each other.

In the middle of this, Liam becomes an out-of-place, equally unreadable presence. Very well played by Daryl McCormack, full bluntness mixed with inscrutability, Liam is impossible to categorise and totally outside the upper-class formality of the Sinclair home (with its servants, home fine-dining accompanied with classical music and casually displayed artwork). He’s Irish, working-class, Black and sexually ambiguous. But he’s also hard for us to read: is his admiration for Sinclair something that could tip into resentful violence? Does he really like Bertie, or does he see him as a tedious, brattish child? As the prologue sets up, is he an innocent or a destructive, vampiric presence?

These beats are neatly set up in The Lesson’s opening parts, added to by the presence of a Pinteresque butler (a fiercely polite Crispin Letts) whose status and loyalties prove equally hard to read. Liam’s slowly becomes an intimate figure in the house, moving from a servant occasionally allowed to dine with the family, to Sinclair’s IT consultant, proof-reader and one-sided sounding-board for conversations about his novel, becoming an object of sexual fascination for Bertie and Hélène and given the late Archie’s clothes to wear (adding an Oedipal frisson to his flirtation with Hélène).

Ambiguity however slowly gives way as The Lesson continues, as it fails to weave its initial jarring mood into a reveal that feels truly satisfying, logical or surprising. This effect is magnified by the fact the more time we spend with Sinclair, the more it’s made clear he is less complex than we think, but simply an egotistical monster. Richard E Grant has huge fun with this larger-than-life braggart, a man so competitive that he feels compelled to aggressively slap down Liam’s draft novel as “airport trash” and smilingly telling him he has “done him a favour” by encouraging him not to write. But Sinclair’s monstrous, bullying self-importance sign-posts a little too clearly where the plot is heading.

The final reveal that we have been witnessing a secret plot unfold in front of us feels like a flawed attempt to add a narrative coherence to a series of events that would be impossible to pre-plan. This also relies on chance events and skills (events hinge on Liam’s near-photographic memory). The final ‘answer’ is also too clearly sign-posted from the opening, leaving you expecting a rug-pull that never comes.

The Lesson has a good sense of atmosphere in its opening half and some strong performances – Julie Delpy is very effectively unreadable as the enigmatic Hélène – but for all its sharp direction, its plot is too weak to be truly rewarding on a first viewing or give you a reason to want to return for a second lesson. Despite some good scenes, a bravura Grant and a subtle McCormack, the resolution of its quiet atmosphere of tension and inscrutability doesn’t quite ring true.