Category: Films about obsession

The Silence (1963)

Bergman’s third film in his “faith” trilogy, is an intriguing Sartresque puzzle

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Ingrid Thulin (Ester), Gunnel Lindblom (Anna), Jörgen Lindström (Johan), Birger Malmstein (Waiter), Håkan Jahnberg (Hotel porter)

Two sisters, Esther (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), mother to ten-year-old Johan (Jörgen Lindström), are travelling home on a train through Europe. Ester, a translator, is already ill and her health takes a sharp downturn, leading to the group being forced to rest in a hotel in a town called Timoka, in an unnamed (fictional) European country. Anna resents what she sees as the judgemental expectations of her older sister and sees her obligation to care for her as a burden. Over a few days in the hotel, the two sisters move awkwardly around each other, avoiding addressing their problems while struggling in a country where neither of them speak the language.

The Silence was the third, and final, film in Bergman’s loose thematic trilogy on the absence of God in the modern world. It’s also possibly his most bleak and Sartre influenced work so far, a film of oppressive silence (devoid of music, the only noises coming from objects in the rooms of the hotel) with events occurring in a disturbing, slightly surreal world, where the normal rules of human interaction seem to be hold. Perhaps that’s because the characters move, like ghosts, through a world where they have no ability to communicate other than stumbled words and hand gestures, residing in a hotel where there seems to be no timescale on how long they are (or have been) there.

It also feels like an entrée to Persona, Bergman’s next major work. Like that, The Silence revolves around a symbiotic relationship between two women, who together seem to form two halves of one personality. Esther is intellectual, reserved but also vulnerable and adrift, dependent on others for help and frequently resorting to drink to dull her pain. Anna is more earthy, sensual but insecure, resentful and feels judged by others, finding temporary peace in casual sexual encounters. Both sisters are locked in a relationship that feels both disconnected and mutually dependent, constantly clashing with each other but living in worlds defined by their feelings for the other.

They are played majestically by two performers at the height of their powers. Thulin seems cold but conveys great depths of pain and suffering beneath what seems like her confidence and assurance. Thulin’s expressive face communicates great emotional turmoil, even with only the slightest movements and gestures. It’s a beautifully delivered performance of a woman who is unknowable, distant, difficult but also highly sympathetic. Lindblom’s physical assurance is counter-balanced by the great uncertainty she manages to communicate in every beat of Anna’s life. Her general demeanour of icy chill, interrupted with emotional breakdowns which alternate rage with tears and hysterical laughter, is faultlessly delivered.

These two characters increasingly feel trapped inside a world where they can’t easily communicate, with the threat of turmoil constantly rumbling on the margins. This unnamed country teeters on the edge of war – tanks and other military equipment make constant intrusions on the streets and the train tracks and the rumble of planes can be heard in the air. They are also rendered increasingly mute and isolated by their inability to speak the language. Communication with people around them is impossible and understanding is only fractured.

This is where Bergman’s views on God slowly take their form. For, as he observed in other films in the trilogy, what is this world but one where we strain in vain for the voice of God? Isn’t that like being adrift in a country where the language is unknown? And if, as Bergman so heartily expresses elsewhere, God is love what does it mean that this film revolves around character who have such negative to indifferent opinions on others. Ester may love – as she argues – Anna, but Anna has interpreted this love as smothering and oppressive her whole life and rejects Anna utterly. Anna seems disinterested in her son Johan (who Ester yearns to be closer to, but can never quite find the way to close the gap) and impatient with her sister. Not only are the characters trapped in a world of silence, they are also trapped in circles of loveless relationships.

It’s striking then that this was Bergman’s most sexual film so far. Bizarrely – for a film as austere, glum and challenging as The Silence – it was a box-office hit. This was, in large part, connected to its comfort with sex scenes. Anna watches a couple sat next to her having passionate (and beautifully lit) sex in an opera house, before engaging in wordless (of course) intercourse with a waiter (Anna even mentions the benefits of the man not understanding a word she says). The more frustrated Ester masturbates alone – no coincidence that she later speaks of her disgust with the sexual act and its bodily fluids. This is a film without love but with a lot of base, meaningless, carnal love in it – all part of a Godless world leaning into its nihilistic close.

The Silence is extraordinary in its filmic confidence. It’s exquisitely shot by Sven Nykvist, his camera (far more mobile than almost any time before in Bergman) tracks down corridors and through rooms of its luxurious but chillingly empty hotel (you can see The Silence’s influence on Kubrick’s The Shining). It uses light, shade and shadow in strikingly meaningful ways, arcs of light suggesting a host of underlying emotions and unspoken longings.

The Silence is a film that invites analysis and theorising, partially because its characters speak in such gnomic, Bergmanesque mysteries. Some have theorised Johan is in fact Ester’s child, raised begrudgingly by Anna, now longed for by his real mother at her end. Some have suggested Ester and Anna are such contrasting sides they may in fact be the same person (traces of Lynch’s Mulholland Drive) others see an incestuous longing in Ester for her sister. Bergman increases the unknowing mystery by presenting much of the film from the perspective of the precocious (not many children read Turgenov) but innocent Johan, a child who sees but cannot interrogate the actions around him.

It makes The Silence feel like a bridge from one era of Bergman to the next. The last hurrah of his spiritual study, before a series of films that would explore the interconnected lives of women whose desires, needs and dependencies motivate and merge into each other. That makes it a fascinating and vital milestone in Bergman’s development – as well as another extraordinary, haunting and fascinating work from a great director.

Shine (1996)

Middle-brow and safe biography that takes easy choices and makes reassuring points

Director: Scott Hicks

Cast: Geoffrey Rush (David Helfgott), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Peter Helfgott), Noah Taylor (Young David Helfgott), Lynn Redgrave (Gillian), Googie Withers (Katherine Susannah Prichard), John Gielgud (Sir Cecil Parkes), Sonia Todd (Sylvia), Nicholas Bell (Mr Rosen), Alex Rafalowicz (Child David Helfgott)

A hugely talented pianist, David Helfgott (played by Noah Taylor then Geoffrey Rush) trained at the Royal College of Music in the late 1960s but developed schizoaffective disorder, a condition that stalled any music career. What happened next is debated, but according to Shine years of mental institutes and sheltered housing eventually led to rediscovery and a life turned round by marriage to Gillian (Lynn Redgrave). This provided a happy home to Helfgott, who had grown up under the domineering hand of his father Peter (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a Polish-Australian who had narrowly escaped the Holocaust and disowned his son after he travelled, against his wishes, to Britain.

Shine repackages Helfgott’s life into a crowd-pleasing triumph-against-adversity biopic which plays fast and loose with facts. Shine makes no mention of Helfgott’s first marriage, it’s portrayal of his father as a misguided tyrant has been disputed by other members of Helfgott’s family and the level of estrangement Helfgott had from his family (his brother claimed David continued to live with the Helfgott family after his return) has been strongly disputed. Shine smooths off all rough edges and emphasises dramatic potential in others to create its stereotypical heart-warming tale.

What it also does is turn Helfgott’s life into a middle-of-the-road biopic, a highly convention film full of expected arcs (struggle, triumph, collapse, triumphant return) and directed with a middlebrow assurance by Hicks. It’s a film that flatters to deceive, offering only cursory insight into its subject and ends with a sentimental scene in which we are all-but-invited to join the characters in a standing ovation for a Helfgott comeback performance (which the film doesn’t even show us).

Shine has almost no interest in Helfgott’s illness, what bought it on, how it developed or what he and those around him did to help him function in society (his marriage to Gillian gets barely ten minutes of the film’s runtime). It has very little interest or insight into music – other than Rachmaninov being ‘very hard to play’ and some guff about finding the heart behind the notes which sounds full of import because anything said by John Gielgud sounds important. It takes a fascinatingly conflicted character like Peter Helfgott and bends over backwards to make him as two dimensional as possible, with only a brief throw-away line that leans into how quite possibly his views on the importance of family might just have been affected by the slaughter of the rest of his in the Holocaust. Everything is designed to make us feel that standing ovation is earned.

The film gets a much better performance than it deserves from Armin Mueller-Stahl as Peter Helfgott. Here is an actor with more compassion and insight into his role than either the film or the director has. On the surface everything Peter does is appalling; controlling what his son plays, demanding he wins competitions, blocking opportunities for progress, beating him in a rage twice and throwing him out of the house. But Mueller-Stahl plays the fragility and vulnerability under Peter exquisitely. This is a man so terrified about losing his family that he goes to extraordinarily damaging lengths to hold it together. So much so he destroys it.

And you understand that in every moment of Mueller-Stahl’s sensitive and immaculately judged performance. He looks at his son with tenderness and adoring love. His eyes dance with fear at the prospect of David going out alone into a world he thinks is dangerous. Its fear that leads him to react with violence – the terror of weakness pours from Mueller-Stahl. It’s a rich, layered, superb performance which seems almost smuggled into a film that does it’s very best to present Peter Helfgott as a controlling, destructive bully who (it believes) was the root cause of David’s illness.

The drama of the film – most of its first hour – revolves around the clash between this domineering father and the young Helfgott, played by Noah Taylor. It tells a very familiar story: the quiet, but talented son and the monster behind him, but does it solidly enough. Quiet, mumbling and shy – but with subtle traces of condition we know will seize him later in life, Taylor is marvellous. The training sequence at the Royal Academy, again familiarly reassuring for its pupil-mentor set-up, also allows a lovely showcase for an-almost-swansong role for Gielgud, sparkling, wry and charming.

It’s strange than that the Best Actor awards were poured onto Geoffrey Rush who only appears in two scenes before taking over the role at the 67-minute mark (of a 100-minute film). Rush, then unknown internationally, gives the sort of grand performance beloved of awards ceremonies. I admire Rush enormously: but Shine is all technique and no insight. Rush twitches, talks at a thousand miles a minute and plays the piano like a natural. Never once is he given the opportunity to really get inside what motivates Helfgott. He doesn’t even get the main dramatic meat of the film (he shares one brief scene with Mueller-Stahl). It’s ironically like a note-perfect but professionally smooth piano recital: the sort of role you feel Rush could actually have done standing on his head.

Shine even fudges moments of stand-up-and-cheer. Helfgott has been told he cannot play a piano because it affects his nerves. We frequently see him starring wistfully at a piano. The film opens with a rain-soaked Helfgott barging into a closed café hoping to be allowed to use the piano. The film is clearly building towards the moment when Helfgott plays the piano in that café, wowing the clientele with his virtuosity after a clumsy initial test playing of a few keys. We should have been wondering: does he still have it after all these years? We’re not because Hicks has thrown away Helfgott’s first playing of the piano in years five minutes early by having him hammer the keys with brilliance in a piano in his hostel (the instrument subsequently locked by his annoyed host). Why not have the piano locked from the start, sitting in his room, present but out of reach? Wouldn’t that have made it even more triumphant when Helfgott played like a master in that café one evening?

It’s cack-handed moments like that exposes the weakness in Shine, a film that flatters to deceive, offering only the most conventional and safe perspectives on a life. It boils things down to goodies and baddies and simplifies mental problems into being solved by just a little love and affection. It’s a film that wants us to applaud Helfgott – and, by extension, to feel better about ourselves. But Shine offers very little in the way of insight or understanding and boils all its events down into easily digestible narrative homilies. It’s middle-brow filmmaking of the middlest kind.

Cross of Iron (1977)

Grim war film, full of blood and horror, but lacking the depth it needs to really make an impact

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Cast: James Coburn (Sergeant Rolf Steiner), Maximilian Schell (Captain Stransky), James Mason (Colonel Brandt), David Warner (Captain Kiesel), Klaus Löwitsch (Krüger), Vadim Glowna (Kern), Roger Fritz (Lt Triebig), Dieter Schidor (Anselm), Burkhard Driest (Maag), Fred Stillkrauth (Reisenauer), Michael Nowka (Dietz), Arthur Brauss (Zoll), Senta Berger (Eva)

If War is Hell, it makes sense that Sam Peckinpah eventually bought it to the screen. Cross of Iron is, perhaps surprisingly, his only war film. But, in a sense, Peckinpah’s grim explorations of the brutal realities of violence made all his films war films. And what better setting for his grim eye than the gore and guts of World War Two’s Eastern Front. If war has any rules they fell silent in this hellish clash where no quarter was given and no decency could be found.

Sgt Steiner (James Coburn) knows this. A grizzled soldier, who despises war, Nazism and officers, he fights through the horrors of the front to protect his men. As the Wehrmacht flees, crushed by the late 1943 advance of the Russian army, the only hope is the vain chance of staying alive. But Steiner’s new commander, Captain Stransky (Maximilian Schell) has other ideas: a Prussian elitest, he’s here for an Iron Cross and the fact he’s inept, cowardly and inexperienced isn’t going to stop him. The clash between Steiner and Stransky will leave a trail of futile bodies in its wake.

Cross of Iron may well just be the grimmest war film this side of Come and See. Shot on location in Yugoslavia, Peckinpah films the Eastern Front as a muddy, chaotic mess where no one seems to have the faintest clue why they are there or where they are going. Soldiers huddle in shallow trenches, officers sit in dusty, crumbling bunkers, the sound of machine guns and the explosion of artillery forms a constant backdrop. Battles are smoky, horrific events with bullets flying, ripping through bodies that explode in squippy mess. Bodies are strewn across the battlefield. Even in the progress to the front lines, tanks absent-mindedly roll over bodies left ground into the muddy dirt.

Peckinpah brings his unique eye for violence to bear. Violence frequently takes place in slow motion, bodies twisting and turning in a crazed dance that seems to go on forever as bullets rip through them. The camera never flinches from the blood of war and the films throws us right into the middle of brutal firefights, tracking through smoky, muddied fields full of bodies. The soundtrack is punctuated by distant artillery gun fire. There is no heroism and the sole focus is staying alive. The soldiers have no interest in politics, no passion at all for the war – only one of them, the smartest dressed, is a Nazi. It’s simply something they vainly hope to survive to see the end of. Even the grizzled veteran Steiner hates the killing, hates the violence, hates the waste.

It makes us loath even more Maximilian Schell’s puffed-up braggart Stransky, a man born wearing an officer’s uniform but hopelessly ill-suited for it. Under fire at his first attack, Stransky is hopeless, reduced to bluntly stating the obvious (“My phone is ringing!”) and confusedly rambling about attacking, withdrawing and counter-attacking all in the same breath. Schell was born to play Prussian primma donnas like this, and he gives Stransky a real cunning and survival instinct. Despising Nazism – he sees himself as above the crudeness of the party – he’s a born manipulator, skilfully deducing the sexuality of his aide to blackmail him, but also a rigid stickler for the rules unable to comprehend a world where he isn’t on top.

He’s the antithesis of Steiner, who has everything Stransky wants: respect, glory, guts. Coburn is, to be honest, about ten years too old for the role (his age particularly shows during his brief respite in a base hospital, where he has a convenient sexual fling with Santa Berger’s nurse), but he’s perfect for the hard-as-nails humanitarian, who hides under the surface deep trauma at the horror he’s seen. Steiner is the natural leader Stransky wants to be and has the Iron Cross Stransky wants. Worst of all, Steiner doesn’t give a shit about the medal, when it’s the be-all-and-end-all for Stransky.

Stransky is so out of step, even the veteran front-line officers think he’s despicable. Colonel Brandt (a world-weary James Mason) scoffs “you can have one of mine” when he hears of Stransky’s dreams while his cynical aide Kiesler (a scruffy, shrewdly arch David Warner) takes every opportunity to show his disgust. Stransky is ignored by the soldiers and is rarely filmed away from his bunker, where he reclines on his bunk like an emperor and avoids any trace of conflict.

So, he knows nothing of the horrors of Steiner’s war. We however do. Cross of Iron opens with a successful raid on a Russian encampment. One of the victims, a young soldier his body torn apart by a mortar, is met with barely a reaction by the soldiers (“We’ve seen worse” says Steiner). Another captured Russian boy is later released by Steiner – and promptly machine-gunned in front of him by advancing Russian soldiers. Caught behind the lines, Steiner’s men are picked off one-by-one despite his desperate efforts to keep them alive.

Cross of Iron went millions over budget – largely due to Peckinpah’s chronic alcoholism (he binge drank every day while shooting and spent days at a time unable to work) – and as a result the ending is abrupt and overly symbolic. (Peckinpah and Coburn had about an hour to cobble it together and shoot it before the filming wrapped up). Peckinpah throws in some clumsy fantasy sequences (especially during Steiner’s fever dreams in hospital) and overly heavy-handed reaction shots from Coburn, overlaid with quick cuts to various horrors or shots of lost friends, which over-stresses the horror of war. Much as Cross of Iron skilfully shows the grimness of conflict, it doesn’t balance this with real thematic weight and depth like, say, The Wild Bunch does.

It’s part of Cross of Iron’s flaws. Under the surface, I’m not sure that Cross of Iron has much more to say, other than war is hell. And with Peckinpah’s work here, there is a sort of satanic, indulgent glee in all that mayhem and slaughter, the bodies riddled by bullets. Peckinpah is a sadistic preacher, the sort of sermoniser who is so keen to tick off the evils of the world, that he doesn’t want to miss a thing. The film feels a little too much at times as a grungy, exploitation flick yearning for art.

But it still has a visceral impact that makes it stand out as grizzled war-film, helped by a granite performance by Coburn, with just enough vulnerability beneath the growls. A tough watch and a flawed film, that lacks the real insight and psychological depth it needs, but with some compelling – and shocking – moments.

Oppenheimer (2023)

Nolan’s masterful musing on the morality of science is both challenging and compelling

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Cillian Murphy (J Robert Oppenheimer), Emily Blunt (Kitty Oppenheimer), Matt Damon (General Leslie Groves), Robert Downey Jnr (Lewis Strauss), Florence Pugh (Jean Tatlock), Josh Hartnett (Ernest Lawrence), Casey Affleck (Colonel Boris Pash), Rami Malek (David Hill), Kenneth Branagh (Niels Bohr), Benny Safdie (Edward Teller), Dane DeHaan (General Kenneth Nichols), Jason Clarke (Roger Robb), David Krumholtz (Isidor Issac Rabi), Tom Conti (Albert Einstein), Alden Ehrenreich (Strauss’ aide), Gary Oldman (President Truman), Jefferson Hall (Haakon Chevalier)

“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. These words from The Baghavad Gita are synonymous with J Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project as he witnessed the destructive force of his creation, the atomic bomb. Fittingly, Nolan’s fascinating and ambitious film opens with a reference to Oppenheimer as Prometheus: the man punished for all time for stealing fire from the Gods. Oppenheimer uses everything from thriller to courtroom drama, to explore the moral responsibilities of science: if we can do a thing, does it follow that we must?

J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is a Renaissance man and leading theoretical physicist who dabbled more than a little in left-wing politics. The woman he loves, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), is a die-hard communist, the woman he marries Kitty (Emily Blunt) is a former party member, his closest friends are all members. Associations like these will later haunt him after he is approached by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to use his organisational skills, political savvy and charisma to run the WW2 nuclear programme where maverick scientists work hand-in-hand with the army. Despite his position, Oppenheimer remains untrusted by many. In the aftermath of the war, these suspicions will be used by his opponents, among them Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jnr) ex-head of the Atomic Energy Committee, to bring about his downfall as Oppenheimer preaches disarmament.

Much like Dunkirk, Oppenheimer is told in two timelines, intersecting with scenes replayed from different perspectives in subtly different ways. In “Fission” we see Oppenheimer, effectively on trial in 1954 for his security clearance, recount his life story, chronological flashbacks taking us through the development of the bomb. In “Fusion”, shot in gorgeous black and white, we follow the 1959 senate hearings to confirm Strauss in a cabinet post, and see his reminiscences of Oppenheimer’s post-war struggles to control the monster he has unleashed.

Oppenheimer is a brilliantly made, cinematically adventurous film: you would, of course, expect nothing less from a distinctive talent like Nolan. Brilliantly intercutting multiple timelines, it’s a film that is as much an experience as a story. This is a behemoth, filled with moments of flair and breath-taking use of sound and vision to affect mood. In particular, the film’s oppressive sound design bears down on the viewer like the pressure of the bomb itself. This means moments when we are released from its grip carry real impact. As Oppenheimer – already plagued with doubt – triumphantly announces the successful use of the bomb, the war-like celebratory pounding of scientists’ feet disappears from the soundtrack leaving Oppenheimer’s words echoing impotently around the room.

The pounding score and epic, sweeping camerawork (even more striking, since so much of the film takes place in small rooms filled with conversation) help Nolan to build up Oppenheimer’s mythic status and simultaneously strip him bare. Literally so at one point as, when questioned on his sex life in his hearing, Oppenheimer is seen naked in the room (as exposed as he must be feeling) answering questions with a naked Jean Tatlock astride him, staring into his wife’s eyes.

Oppenheimer labours, with the best intentions, to create a weapon before the Nazis. In its middle act, Nolan’s film focuses on the propulsive excitement of creation. The thrill of obstacles being overcome and solutions being found. The joy of a diverse team coming together for a single goal. We find ourselves longing for problems to be overcome, swept up in the desire for the endgame, as anxious as the scientists when it looks like rain will prevent the vital first Trinity test of the bomb.

Oppenheimer feels the same. Powerfully, intelligently and magnetically played by Cillian Murphy, this is a man who is a host of flaws crammed with impossible genius. A charismatic room leader, who is awkward in personal interactions. A charmer who rudely fails to remember his brother’s girlfriend’s name at a party. An inspiring leader who alienates people with ease. Murphy captures every inch of Oppenheimer’s staggering intellect and delight in intellectual problems, just as he also embodies the man’s arrogance and crushing self-belief.

So, it’s as crushing to him as it is terrifying to us, when the bomb explodes and the realisation hits us. Nolan’s sensory experience of a film fades down to silence as Nolan lets the camera float across the all-consuming fire of the silent explosion (the noise only comes when the shockwave hits) and suddenly the chilling implication of this terrible weapon becomes clear. This is a device that will kill millions. Oppenheimer knows it: he slowly shrivels into haunted guilt, Murphy seeming to shrink into himself as he finally understands what he has done.

Images of nuclear destruction both obvious (ashen bodies and nuclear flashes) and subtle (the out-of-focus vibration of background around Oppenheimer, as if sensing an approach shockwave) will haunt him and us for the rest of the movie. While many scientists – foremost among them Benny Safdie’s bull-headed Edward Teller and Josh Hartnett’s WASPish but decent Ernest Lawrence – feel little guilt. But Oppenheimer, and we, can no longer avoid questions of moral responsibility raised by those such as Niels Bohr (a quietly effective Kenneth Branagh).

Are there some discoveries better not made? Because once the genie is out of the bottle, it cannot be stuffed back in again. In this new world every world power must always have more. More bombs, bigger bombs, better bombs. And it explains why, like Prometheus, Oppenheimer must be punished. The tool of his punishment being his communist sympathies, embodied in his yearning attraction to Jean Tatlock (an under-used Florence Pugh). Nolan’s film is very strong on the terrifying paranoia of the secret state, where every word or association can be collected into a terrible portfolio of witnesses you cannot question, evidence you cannot see, testimony you cannot hear.

“Why don’t you fight” cries his wife Kitty, played with a dynamic, intelligent forcefulness by Emily Blunt. I could have done with a third act built more around Blunt’s starkly honest betrayal of a woman ill-suited to being a wife and mother, trapped in a world where that is all women can achieve (and which also trimmed a few witnesses from Oppenheimer’s trial). Why doesn’t Oppenheimer fight? Nolan has his theories, carefully seeded and confidently revealed.

Oppenheimer’s post-war clashes cover much of “Fusion”, anchored by a superbly under-playing Robert Downey Jnr (his finest work since Chaplin) as the outwardly avuncular, but inwardly insecure and bitter Strauss, who sees Oppenheimer as the embodiment of all the elitists who turned their noses up at him (no matter that Oppenheimer himself is an outsider, in a world of science run by WASPish types like Lawrence). Nolan’s film explores how morality is forgotten in an environment so rife with paranoia that the slightest expression of doubt is seen as treason.

Nolan’s film needs its vast runtime to keep as many balls in the air as it tries to. It’s probably a few too many balls. I would have loved more on Oppenheimer’s outsider status, as a Jew in American science (its not mentioned that the J stands for Julius, despite his claims it stands for nothing). Similarly, I would have welcomed more time to explore Oppenheimer’s complicated emotional life, in particular the fascinatingly complex relationship of some love, a fair amount of mutual respect and a large measure of mutual convenience with his wife Kitty.

But the film’s chilling musing on the horrors science can accidentally unleash while focused on progress is superbly explored and leaves a lasting impact. It’s a feeling that continues to be sharply relevant while we struggle with the implications of AI. Was there a need for the bomb? Perhaps there was. Were we ready for the bomb? No. And it is the failure of anyone, including Oppenheimer, to even consider this until it was too late that is the coldest warning in Nolan’s epic film.

Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

Visconti’s realistic family epic simmers with the dangers of split loyalties, but is mixed on gender politics

Director: Luchino Visconti

Cast: Alain Delon (Rocco Parondi), Annie Girardot (Nadia), Renato Salvatori (Simone Parondi), Katina Paxinou (Rosaria Parondi), Roger Hanin (Duilio Morini), Spiros Focas (Vincenzo Parondi), Claudia Cardinale (Ginetta), Paolo Stoppa (Tonino Cerri), Max Cartier (Ciro Parondi), Rocco Vidolazzi (Luca Parondi, Alessandro Panaro (Franca), Suzy Delair (Luisa), Claudia Mori (Raddaella)

Visconti was born into a noble Milanese family: perhaps this left him with a foot in two camps. He could understand the progress and achievement of northern Italy in the post-war years, those booming industry towns which placed a premium on hard work, opportunity and social improvement. But he also felt great affinity with more traditional Italian bonds: loyalty to family, the self-sacrificing interdependency of those links, and the idea that any outsider is always a secondary consideration, no matter what. It’s those split loyalties that power Rocco and His Brothers.

Rocco (Alain Delon) is one of five brothers, arriving in Milan from the foot of Italy looking for work with his mother Rosaria (Katina Paxinou). The hope of the family is second brother Simone (Renato Salvatori), a sparky pugilist destined for a career as a boxing great. But Simone can’t settle in Milan, too tempted by the opportunities he finds for larceny and alcohol. He falls in love with a prostitute, Nadia (Annie Girardot), until she rejects him and then he drifts ever downwards. Rocco, always putting family first, inherits his place first as a boxer than as Nadia’s lover. Problem is, Simone is not happy at being replaced, and the three head into a clash that will see Nadia become a victim in the twisted, oppressive, family-dominated loyalty between the two brothers.

Rocco and His Brothers is a further extension of Visconti’s love of realism – but mixed with the sort of classical themes and literary influences that dominated his later period pieces, themselves in their stunning detail a continuation of his obsession with in-camera realism. Filmed in the streets of Milan, where you can feel the dirt and grit of the roads as much as the sweat and testosterone in the gym, it’s set in a series of run-down, overcrowded apartment blocks and dreary boxing gyms that you could in no way call romantic.

This ties in nicely with Visconti’s theme. Rocco and His Brothers is about the grinding momentum of historical change – and how it leaves people behind. In this case, it’s left Rocco and Simone as men-out-of-time. Both are used to a hierarchical family life, where your own needs are sacrificed to the good of the family and every woman is always second best to Momma. While their brother Ciro knuckles down and gains a diploma so he can get a good job in a factory, Simone drifts and Rocco bends over backwards to clean up the mess his brother leaves behind. Naturally, Simone and Rocco are the flawless apples of their mother’s eye, Ciro an overlooked nobody.

The film focuses heavily on the drama of these two. And if Visconti seems split on how he feels about the terrible, destructive mistakes they make, there is no doubting the relish of the drama he sees in how it plays out. Rocco, by making every effort to make right each of the mistakes his brother makes, essentially facilitates Simone’s collapse into alcoholism, criminality and prostitution. Simone flunks a boxing contract? Rocco will strap on the gloves and fulfil the debt. Simone steals from a shop? Rocco will leave his personal guarantee. Simone steals from a John? Rocco will pay for the damage.

Caught in the middle is Nadia, a woman who starts the film drawn to the masculine Simone but falls for the romantic, calm, soulful Rocco. Wonderfully embodied by Annie Girardot, for me Nadia is the real tragic figure at the heart of this story. Whether that is the case for Visconti I am not sure – I suspect Visconti feels a certain sympathy (maybe too much) for the lost soul of Simone. But Nadia is a good-time girl who wants more from life. Settling down to a decent job with Rocco would be perfect and he talks to her and treats her like no man her before. Attentive, caring, polite. He might be everything she’s dreaming off, after the rough, sexually demanding Simone.

Problem is Nadia is only ever going to be an after-thought for Rocco, if his brother is in trouble. Alain Delon’s Rocco is intense, decent, romantic – and wrong about almost everything. He has the soul of a poet, but the self-sacrificing zeal of a martyr. He clings, in a way that increasingly feels a desperate, terrible mistake, to a code of conduct and honour that died years ago – and certainly never travelled north with them to the Big City. When Simone lashes out at Nadia with an appalling cruelty and violence, making Rocco watch as he assaults her with his thuggish friends, Rocco’s conclusion is simple: Simone is so hurt he must need Nadia more than Rocco does. And it doesn’t matter what Nadia wants: bros literally trump hoes.

Rocco does what he has done all his life. He wants to live in the south, but the family needs him in the north. He wants to be a poet, but his brother needs him to be a boxer. He loves Nadia but convinces himself she will stabilise his brother (resentful but trapped, she won’t even try, with tragic consequences). All of Rocco’s efforts to keep his brother on the straight-and-narrow fail with devastating results. Naturally, his mother blames all Simone’s failures on Nadia, the woman forced into trying to build a home with this self-destructive bully. Rocco’s loyalty – he sends every penny of his earnings on military service home to his mother – is in some ways admirable, but in so many others destructive, out-dated indulgence.

And it does nothing for Simone. Superbly played by Renato Salvatori, he’s a hulk of flesh, surly, bitter but also vulnerable and self-loathing, perfectly charming when he wants to be – but increasingly doesn’t want to. His behaviour gets worse as he knows his brother is there as a safety net. It culminates in an act of violence that breaks the family apart: not least because Simone crosses a line that Ciro (the actual decent son, who Visconti gives precious little interest to) for one cannot cross and reports him to the police.

That final crime is filmed with a shocking, chilling naturalism by Visconti, horrific in its simplicity and intensity. But I find it troubling that Visconti’s core loyalties still seem to be with the out-of-place man who perpetrates this crime and his brother who protects him, rather than female victim. Rocco and His Brothers could do and say more to point up the appalling treatment of Nadia, or at least make clearer the morally unforgiveable treatment she receives from both brothers (she’d have done better disappearing from Milan after Simone’s attack and never coming back, not playing along with Rocco’s offensive belief that Simone’s assault was a sort of twisted act of love).

Saying that, this is a film of its time – perhaps too much so, as it sometimes feels dated, so bubbling over is it with a semi-Marxist view of history as a destructive force. But it’s shot with huge vigour – the boxing scenes are marvellous and their influence can be felt in Raging Bull – and it ends on a note of optimism. The film may have disregarded Ciro, but there he is at the end – happy in his choices, settled, making a success of his life. Rocco and Visconti may see the drama as being exclusively with the old-fashioned brothers, making their counterpoint a paper tiger, but it ends with him – and (I hope) a reflection that Ciro’s path may be duller and safer, but also nobler and right.

Escape from Alcatraz (1979)

Siegel’s quietly observed prison break drama masters the small details

Director: Don Siegel

Cast: Clint Eastwood (Frank Morris), Patrick McGoohan (The Warden), Fred Ward (John Anglin), Jack Thibeau (Clarence Anglin), Larry Hankin (Charley Butts), Frank Ronzio (Litmus), Roberts Blossom (Chester “Doc” Dalton), Paul Benjamin (English), Bruce M Fischer (Wolf Grace)

In 1962, three men dug their way out of the cells in Alcatraz, climbed into a raft made of raincoats and sailed into San Francisco Bay and mystery. Not a trace was ever seen again of Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood), John Anglin (Fred Ward) or Clarence Anglin (Jack Thibeau), but their story became a cause celebre. Some say they disappeared to South America – many more believe they drowned in the freezing cold water of the Bay. Siegel’s film covers the details of the escape attempt – and leaves more than a hint that they escaped.

Escape from Alcatraz is a quintessential prison movie. It’s got the complete genre checklist: sadistic wardens, bullying in the courtyard, the threat of rape in the showers, solitary confinement, boring routines and jobs, unfair access to privileges, cagey alliances, the little details of a plan coming together, hair’s-breadth escapes from being caught and a “we go now or not at all” climax. It’s all mounted extremely well by Siegel, shot on location with such a searing coldness you can practically feel the chill the prisoners suffered all the time.

Alcatraz is made up of two things: quiet and time. Siegel’s film therefore delves into both of these things. From its opening montage detailing Morris’ arrival at the prison – on the boat, checking-in, cavity searches and tramping naked down to his cell – images and silence tell their own story. For the guards, words are formulaic and repetitive. Eastwood as Morris is barely ever out of shot but doesn’t speak for ten minutes. It’s the same for many other sequences, detailing prison life: quiet conversations in the yard, the pointless moves from place to place, the grinding procedure.

Time stretches without meaning in Alcatraz, so it’s no great sacrifice for Morris to work out that he can scratch away the brickwork around the drain in his cell and create a hole large enough to allow him to get to the unguarded ventilation corridors on the other side. (He works out it connects – eventually – to the outside by observing a cockroach crawl out of his cell.) Morris then reckons he’s got nothing better to do than to scratch away at that wall with a stolen nail pick, a labour that will take him months to extend the hole to something he can climb through.

Siegel also makes a great deal of this through his long-earned knowledge of how best to work with his star. This is one of Eastwood’s finest performances, a slate of determined, dry-witted stillness that communicates great thoughtfulness and ingenuity behind a stoic exterior. Morris maybe a compulsive thief, but he’s no fool – and he doesn’t suffer them either. He’s contemptuous of the self-importance of many of the warden and unrelenting in his determination to use whatever he can lay his hands on to help facilitate his escape attempt.

You’d be desperate to escape from Alcatraz too. Grim, very cold and crowded with bullies like Wolf (Bruce M Fischer), a puffed-up psychopath looking for a new punk (though as Quentin Tarantino said in a recent book, no one alive would look at Clint Eastwood and believe he’d be an easy shower victim). Meals are vile and the punishment of solitary is beyond tough: pitch black cells, only interrupted by the door being flung open so a high-pressure hose can ‘shower’ you with cold water (even Morris is reduced to something close to trembling wreck after a month of this treatment in the hole). It all leads into his determination to use anything he can to get out.

Siegel’s film loves the tiny details of small, inconsequential items converted into the means to escape. Unwanted magazines from the library become papier-mache to craft dummy heads to disguise the gang’s absence from their beds while they make preparations the other side of their wall. An accordion case smuggles goods around the prison. Makeshift candles are assembled. A set of portrait paints are used to paint the dummies and create a cardboard fake wall to place over the newly created hole. We see the painstaking effort to assemble enough coats to create their life-raft, the puzzling out of what is needed to get them from the ventilation roof to the other side.

Escape from Alcatraz presents these Herculean labours with simplicity but a patient eye for detail that makes them become strangely noble and hugely tense. You put aside your knowledge that these are hardened criminals – the film does everything it can to downplay their offences – and instead focus on them as victims of an unjust system, with “the man” crushing any hope from them.

As such, Patrick McGoohan has a huge amount of fun in a lip-smacking role as the prison warden. (It’s fun to see the world’s most famous Prisoner as the man handing out the numbers.) McGoohan’s unnamed warden has everything the men have not – not least words. He’s not starved by silence, but pontificates at pompous length about his theories of incarceration and the inevitable pointlessness of rehabilitation. Just to make sure our sympathy for the prisoners is complete, he’s also a vindictive bully, stripping prisoner “Doc” (Roberts Blossom) of his painting privileges because he doesn’t like a portrait made of him (tipping Doc into depressive self-harm), then provoking old-timer Litmus (Frank Ronzio) into a risky physical altercation. He’s unjust, unfair and mean.

So when he says at the end that he’s certain the prisoners died, of course we don’t want to believe him. Not least since we’ve been with the prisoners every minute of their desperate throw of the dice. In real life, they almost certainly froze to death in the Bay, their raft not being strong enough to help them complete the mile long swim before the icy water paralyzed them. But Escape from Alcatraz makes you want to believe they could have got away.

Hardcore (1979)

Familiar ideas from better films are mixed together in this revenge thriller

Director: Paul Schrader

Cast: George C Scott (Jake van Dorn), Peter Boyle (Andy Mast), Season Hubley (Niki), Dick Sargent (Wes De Jong), Leonard Gaines (Bill Ramada), Dave Nichols (Kurt), Gary Graham (Tod), Larry Block (Detective Burrows), Ilah Davies (Kristen van Dorn), Marc Alaimo (Rattan)

A man prowls the urban streets, his face fixed with disgust at their degeneration, looking for a soul to save, the whiff of potential violence strong on him. He hunts for a lost family member, in an obsessive quest where it’s not even sure he will want to take her back even if he finds her. If that makes Hardcore sound like a remix of Taxi Driver and The Searchers… well that’s because it is. Schrader’s film is a well-made, initially well-executed riff on familiar themes that eventually tries to settle for something far easier to digest, with an ending that stinks of a shallow Chinatown.

Jake van Dorn (George C Scott) is a devoutly Calvinist businessman in Michigan. A single father, whose wife has left him, his beloved daughter Kristen (Ilah Davies) disappears one day after a church-sponsored visit to California. Van Dorn leaves no stone unturned to investigate, eventually hiring sleazy PI Andy Mast (Peter Boyle), who discovers an 8mm porno film starring Kristen. Was she kidnapped? Is she in danger? Van Dorn will find her, throwing himself into the seedy world of porn in an obsessive quest where no line will be uncrossed until he brings his daughter home.

There are many things to admire in Hardcore. Shot by Taxi Driver veteran Michael Chapman, it’s immersive seedy view of the underbelly of California is extremely striking. Schrader also quite neatly counterpoints this with the picket-fence conservatism of van Dorn’s stomping grounds at home. Van Dorn starts as a man who expresses hesitation that a shade of blue in his office might be too garish, and ends donning fake wig and moustache alongside loud shirt to pass as a porn baron.

What’s interesting about Hardcore is that, even though its actually Schrader’s second film, it feels like an over-anxious debut. It’s blatant stylistic and thematic call-backs to Taxi Driver – hammered home as we watch van Dorn cruise the streets of California, the porn shops and theatres neon signs reflected in his windows – makes you feel Schrader wished he had held on to the rights to direct that film himself. It’s extremely on-the-nose pinching of most of the structure of The Searchers feels like a loving tribute from a director yet to find his own voice.

Schrader however does an excellent job with much of the film’s first half. The oppressive tension build-up from the moment Mast arrives (Boyle’s casting, of course, being another eerie reminder of Taxi Driver) really grips. Scott’s stunned, shattered and increasingly appalled, primal reaction to watching his daughter in a porno is delivered with the sort of gusto and commitment that only a great actor can pull off. His increasingly-obsessive, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer delve into the world of porn – from knocking shops to porn film sets – has just the right sense of van Dorn slowly developing into a time bomb that could go off, while never losing our sympathy.

Hardcore is contemptuous of porn. Sharing van Dorn’s perspective of the industry, the film cements the industry as being based in a Danteish circle of hell, with violence, exploitation and misery round every corner. Schrader also enjoys poking fun at the porn industry and the film industry (a flashy porn director trained at UCLA, much like Schrader’s contemporaries). Searching for witnesses, van Dorn sets up fake auditions for a new porn movie, attended by a series of optimistic, hopeful guys with show reels and CVs. The money-first producers look and sound like any other Hollywood executive – it’s just they openly trade in skin.

The problem is Hardcore can’t settle for this: as if worried that poking some fun at the seedy industry might get in the way of us relating to the gut-punch horror van Dorn feels. In the second half, Schrader sets up (out of the blue) a snuff film premise, with an anonymous big bad behind it all (a figure so undeveloped that the most interesting thing about him is he’s played by Marc Alaimo who played Deep Space Nine’s villain Gul Dukat) just so we can have someone so obviously unspeakable that we have no mixed feelings at all when the violence kicks off.

Which is a shame because Hardcore looks, for a moment, like it is about to go somewhere more interesting. Van Dorn is broken from his obsessive focus only by meeting with Niki (played with just enough ballsy cuteness by Season Hubley), a girl on the margins of the industry dreaming of an escape. The two of them are drawn together in unexpected ways: she respects his religion in a way no-one else does, while van Dorn becomes the only man who doesn’t see her as a sex object, treating her with a fatherly gentleness you suspect he never showed his actual daughter. The film’s ruthless jettisoning of this plotline strives for hard-nosed reality, but ends up feeling like a too obvious attempt at pathos.

Despite all this Hardcore has its moments, not least thanks to George C Scott’s fire-cracker performance in the lead. Scott may have hated Schrader (allegedly begging him to never direct a film again), but he breathes life into this Ethan Edwards-Travis Bickle clone, making van Dorn just the right mix of pained, aggrieved and dangerous. Unfortunately, the film settles for something far more conventional, a revenge thriller with an obvious and inarguably horrible character created solely to make us feel good when he is dispatched.

The Piano (1993)

Searing emotion, passions and fascinating enigmas abound in Campion’s brilliant landmark masterpiece

Director: Jane Campion

Cast: Holly Hunter (Ada McGrath), Harvey Keitel (George Baines), Sam Neill (Alisdair Stewart), Anna Paquin (Flora McGrath), Kerry Walker (Aunt Morag), Genevieve Lemon (Nessie), Tungia Baker (Hira), Ian Mune (Reverend), Peter Dennett (Head seaman), Cliff Curtis (Mana)

What’s really striking about The Piano is how literary it feels, despite the fact it’s an entirely original cinematic work. Every moment of Campion’s intelligent, beautifully constructed, often enigmatic and unreadable film feels like it has been plucked from the pages of a lost Booker Prize winner. Juggling themes of feminism and sexual awakening alongside colonial and masculine thinking, it’s a richly beautiful film awash with superb performances and a heightened, literary reality buried inside a film grounded in the mud and squalor of reality. It remains Campion’s finest achievement.

Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) and her nine-year-old daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) arrive on the coast of nineteenth-century New Zealand. Having refused to speak since the age of six, Ada communicates through sign language and the precocious Flora. Silent in person, her treasured piano gives her a voice and allows her to express passions she otherwise keeps carefully controlled. Ada is to marry landowner Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill), but he baulks at carrying the huge piano from the shore to his home through the forest. Instead, it falls into the possession of neighbour George Baines (Harvey Keitel). George, besotted with Ada, offers her the chance to earn it back one key at a time, in return for allowing him to “do things” while she plays it in his house. The arrangement leads to a complex, sexual love triangle between Ada, George and Alisdair that will see passions explode.

I wonder sometimes if The Piano is a bit of a problem for some campaigners today. You can discover plenty of retrospective reviews that find it hard to mask their disappointment that the film doesn’t offer a more pointed condemnation of its two male characters. Many want The Piano to show Ada rejecting Alisdair as a repressed potential rapist and George as a manipulative sexual predator. But Campion is telling a far more nuanced, feminist story than this easy-to-swallow structure. The Piano is not about pigeon-holing people into easily definable roles. Rather it looks at how unexpected bonds can rise and how darker, deeper passions can flair in unexpected ways.

Because George’s at-first manipulative, outrageous offer actually awakens something unexpected in Ada. George is perfectly played by Keitel as outwardly a lump of inarticulate, labouring flesh but inwardly far more sensitive and strangely poetic – and his desire is based as much on a curious romantic longing and a sensitive fear of rejection. His requests are often based around the briefest of physical touches, the desire to see Ada’s shoulders and legs. He’s timid, shy and becomes increasingly open about his feelings for her.

Even more strikingly, Ada discovers that (after initial shock) she enjoys the bartering negotiation of the arrangement (offering more in-depth contact for a higher number of keys) and finds her ability to provoke desire in George both sexually liberating and exciting. So much so that, when George ends the arrangement (recognising that he cannot get what he really wants – Ada’s love – as long as it stands), her reaction is one of anger, more like a spurned lover, then a relieved victim.

This simmering desire is at the heart of Campion’s passionate work. Rewatching it’s striking how vital touch is in the film, how much it is linked to emotional and sexual connection. Campion focuses in extreme close-up on George stroking Ada’s skin through a tiny hole in her stockings – to her initial shock and increased pleasure. The slightest contact of hands between these two carries an emotional and sensual charge. It’s exactly the lack of this that becomes impossible not to notice in the relationship between Ada and Alisdair. Contact between them is minimal and when it occurs it carries darker meanings: most obviously the impotent, frustration Alisdair half-heartedly uses with Ada, then in the rain-soaked fury he will unleash when her betrayal is revealed.

Ada increasingly uses touch to control. She caresses and strokes Alisdair’s naked body at night – never allowing him to touch her in return – both to manipulate him but also, partly, to satisfy her own newly-discovered itch for sexual power, just as she grew to give herself over totally to the hold she had over George. Dressed in restrictive black, that covers almost her whole body, The Piano is about a flowering of a newly confident and sexually awakened woman from a repressed shell.

The language of the body ties into this. Campion reverses the expectations of nudity. Instead, it’s the male form of George we first – and almost predominantly – see. It turns this physically imposing man into someone vulnerable and sensitive. Like a romantic lover, he cleans the piano naked. He will reveal his body to Ada with shyness. When they first make love, he focuses on her pleasure rather than his own. He contrasts with the stiff-backed Alisdair, trapped in his formal clothes (compared to George’s indigenous tattoos and garments) who, even when Ada seduces him, uncomfortably tries to pull his trousers up over his bare buttocks.

Alisdair – superbly played by Sam Neill in a challenging role – is not a bad man, just a deeply unimaginative, repressed and self-satisfied one. He sees a woman’s duty as wife and nothing else. Just as he can only see the Māori on the land around them as simple savages, clinging to naïve superstitions (he cannot understand why they do not wish to sell or farm the land their ancestors are buried on), so he can find no common ground with Ada. He’s even subconsciously aware the piano is a means of emotional expression she refuses to share with him, causing him to do everything he can to remove it from his house with the same loathing he would have for a rival. But he’s also a timid, needy soul – witnessing George and Ada coupling, he watches from his concealment with a curious mix of envy, longing and sadness at something he will never have.

The Piano places Ada at the centre of this complex junction of feelings and emotions. Played with awards-laden brilliance (including the Oscar) by Holly Hunter, this is a woman who never speaks but whose complex emotional journey is always clear. Stubborn, difficult and demanding, we learn this is defence mechanism against a world she has so cut herself off from, so much so she has literally refused to speak for decades. Her piano is the only outlet she allows herself in a world with strict rules for women. Finding something alternative to this is a frightening and alluring prospect.

It’s one not necessarily understood by her daughter Flora (a brilliant Oscar-winning performance by Anna Paquin) who is so precocious in some ways – forcefully communicating her mother’s wishes – and so young in others. Flora understands little – with fateful consequences – of the emotional and sexual tangles around her and, like a child, often accepts the path of least resistance. She also sees the strong bond between mother and daughter as threatened by the presence of George – in a way she cannot comprehend, even after spying their intimacy together.

Campion’s film superbly ties these literary themes into a film of complex enigma and aching beauty (it’s beautifully filmed by Andrew McAlpine). The film is aided enormously in its emotional charge by the radiantly lyrical score by Michael Nyman (his distinctive sound makes the film sound like the finest film Peter Greenaway never made). The Piano offers challenging, thought-provoking and intriguing scenes at every turn, powered by a brilliant script and wonderful performances. Avoiding the obvious, it’s power and reputation has rightly only grown in the decades since its filming.

Manhunter (1986)

Mann’s visually striking thriller doesn’t have quite the dark subversiveness it needs but is an unsettling thriller

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: William Petersen (Will Graham), Kim Griest (Molly Graham), Dennis Farina (Jack Crawford), Brian Cox (Dr Hannival Lecktor), Joan Allen (Reba McClane), Tom Noonan (Francis Dollarhyde), Stephen Lang (Freddy Lounds)

Before The Silence of the Lambs, there was an earlier attempt to bring the twisted world of Thomas Harris’ gothic thrillers to the screen. Michael Mann’s Manhunter has grown in reputation since its release, along with an increased regard for the visually stylised and cold modernism of Mann’s work. Truthfully, Manhunter lacks the Hitchcockian dark wit, and is far less effective at exploring the dark links between investigator and psychopath, than Silence of the Lambs. But it remains an intriguing – and often disturbing – curiosity.

FBI profiler Will Graham (William Petersen) is called out from extended leave by Agent Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) to investigate chilling serial killer, the Tooth Fairy. The killer breaks into family homes and brutally murders the occupants, leaving bite marks and broken mirrors behind. Graham has an empathetic gift for understanding the mindset of killers, something he used to capture cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox), now imprisoned in a mental institute. Graham’s quest to catch the Tooth Fairy leads to him becoming ever more obsessive, including reconnecting with Lecktor to help profile the killer. Meanwhile the Tooth Fairy, Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), a lonely photo developer obsessed with William Blake’s Red Dragon and desperate to ‘become’ something greater begins his first meaningful relationship with blind colleague, Reba (Joan Allen).

Manhunter is set in a crisp, modernist world of clean, soulless buildings, glass fronted houses and offices and precise, featureless rooms. Mann and cinematographer Dante Spinnotti film everything with a series of tinges – strong, cool blues, drained out and striking whites, murky greens. All is designed to give the film a deliberately forensic feeling, like we watching something play out in a crime lab. It fits with a film that is fascinated with the procedures of investigating and profiling and delights in the intuitive, deductive leaps Graham makes.

Mann’s film attempts to draw parallels between Graham and Dollarhyde, both men uncomfortably in touch with their darkest, twisted impulses. As Hannibal Lecktor observes, Graham can so completely inhabit the interior world of killers, because he secretly longs for the buzz of killing himself. That’s easy to see in William Petersen’s focused, intense performance. Reluctantly dragged back in, Graham is noticeably unphased by the horrific crime scenes he witnesses (however much he is furious at the loss of life) and becomes ever more fixed and lean as the hunt continues, increasingly more-and-more like the obsessive prey-hunting psychopath he is investigating.

In doing so he sidelines his family – even putting them in danger – and increasingly cuts off human connections to feed his laser-focused quest. This contrasts him with Dollarhyde, a damaged, isolated and self-loathing man who flirts with the last vestiges of humanity. A man who sees nothing in himself that anyone could love, Dollarhyde becomes as giddy as a schoolboy when Reba sees him as a kind, attractive and decent man. Behind his eyes, Tom Noonan shows a quiet struggle between the obsessive monster, driven to destroy, and a man considering changing his path. This intriguing contrast between the family-man who leaves tem to hunt killers and the killer who flirts with settling down is a thread you wish the film had more patience to explore among its neon-lit, filtered style.

But Mann doesn’t quite have the patience to draw these threads together. Perhaps not helped by, skilled and intelligent as Noonan’s performance is, always presented Dollarhyde as an imposing, Frankenstein-monster style heavy rather than someone we invited to feel the sort of twisted empathy for that the film needs. We should be feeling something of what Graham says when he talks about feeling pity for the abused child and disgust for the twisted killer that child grew up to be. We never truly do.

Perhaps that’s partly because Dollarhyde is a character the film can never build up the same interest in, as it does with the looming shadow of Hannibal Lecktor (the spelling was unique to this film). Appearing only in three scenes, Lecktor dominates the film. Basing his performance on Scottish serial killer Peter Manuel, Cox brings the part a chillingly studied delight at his own intelligence with an air of quiet politeness which only vaguely masks his malice and cruelty. A ghost of a smile is behind every cruel, hurtful word and action he carries out and his every action is motivated only by a desire to harm. It’s a mesmerically terrifying, low-key performance that overwhelms the film.

It contributes to the film’s second half never really matching the first. As Lecktor recedes and Graham focuses on the Tooth Fairy, the lack of personal connection between hunter and hunted (and the film’s unease to draw too distinctive a comparison between them) makes the final hunt less compelling ironically than when the Tooth Fairy was an unknown, unseen adversary. Noonan’s most effective scene is his terrifyingly soft-spoken interrogation of smart-aleck reporter Freddy Lounds (a braggart Stephen Lang), but the film isn’t brave enough to give him enough potential humanity to make the character really interesting – or the Satanic charisma that Lecktor has.

Manhunter culminates in a disappointingly run-of-the-mill shootout (edited with a curiously ham-fisted jaggedness) and an unsatisfactory Graham family reunion that feels like it hasn’t got the energy or desire to explore any of the lasting impact the darkness we’ve discovered in our lead character would surely have. Manhunter not only changes the title of Harris’ book (there was fear that Red Dragon was too easy to mistake as a martial arts film), but it also benches the emotional and psychological obsession of Dollarhyde (even the character’s famous tattoos don’t appear in the film). It becomes a strikingly shot, intriguingly fast-paced thriller which doesn’t manage to make the psychological complexities its striving for either as fascinating or unsettling as it should. It has plenty to haunt you – its creepy POV home-invasion opening is nightmare-inducing – but Harris was better served by Lambs mix of playful dark-horror and focus on acute psychological insight.

Beau Travail (1999)

Denis poetic, art-house classic is intense, searing and transformative, crammed with beautiful images

Director: Claire Denis

Cast: Denis Lavant (Adjudant-Chef Galoup), Michel Subor (Commandant Bruno Forestier), Grégoire Colin (Légionnaire Gilles Sentain), Richard Courcet (Légionnaire), Nicolas Duvauchelle (Légionnaire)

I think it’s fair to say Beau Travail will not be to everyone’s taste. For every person (a bit like me) who comes out of the film humming ‘Rhythm of the Night’, they’ll be another who will never have made it far enough into the film to even understand why anyone would. Denis’ poetic film, shot like a combination of art project and choreographic exercise almost wilfully foregoes plot and character in favour of experience. Framed around a voiceover that could be almost anything from a diary, to a letter to a suicide note, Beau Travail is a film that wants you to be as uncertain about its aims and intents, as its lead character is about his own.

Denis’ film is a remix of several literary sources, most notably Melville’s Billy Budd – though you can also make a case that there is more than a trace of Othello in there. Set in a French Foreign Legion unit based in Djibouti under the command of veteran Forestier (Michel Subor), our focus is his Adjudant-Chef Galoup (Denis Lavant). Galoup is a rigid stickler for duty and an obsessive legionnaire, distant from those around him. He takes an almost instant, irrational, dislike for new recruit Sentain (Grégoire Colin) who can form easy rapport with those around him. Galoup schemes to destroy Sentain. In a framing device, Galoup recounts the story having left the Foreign Legion.

It should probably be restated that this brief summary of the plot pretty much covers every detail in this brief but poetically open-ended film. It takes over a third of the film’s runtime for the unexplained conflict at the film’s heart to even begin and Denis scrupulously avoids anything you could categorically call an answer. Which in a way is an answer in itself. Because Beau Travail is, it is easy to forget, a memory piece. It’s framed with Galoup remembering his career in the Foreign Legion, and everything we see in the film is filtered through his recollections. How reliable are these? How much do the strangely intricate, beautifully choreographed desert training sequences reflect reality and how much are they the result of an unreliable narrator?

Perhaps Galoup’s motiveless loathing for Sentain is rooted in his own inability to understand himself and his own longings. Embodied in a performance of immense physical exactitude by Denis Lavant, Galoup is a tightly drawn spring, a mass of careful, well-chosen movements. He’s naturally content with the labours of the French Foreign Legion: scrupulously ironing creases into his clothes, making his bed with careful perfection, striding through the desert wilderness. At the nightclub with his men, he’s a distant observer – he can’t even really take part in their campfire sing-alongs. He only finds physical ease in their ritualised training sequences.

These training sequences are extraordinary, more like Gene Kelly dance sequences than anything you might associate with training. While in the dance clubs the men are awkward movers, on the training field they have sinewy grace. Ritualised fight training sees their bodies move through pre-set positions with a striking, musical beauty. Even back and leg stretches see twenty men moving with perfect co-ordination in the desert sand, leaving matching trails in the dust.

There is a reason why the title translates as Beautiful Work. The film is a continual stream of military tasks in the desert, most of which seem pointless. Camps are built, holes are dug, rocks are smashed. It’s combined with a series of domestic tasks treated with an equal almost fetishistic relish. Men whip water from their laundry as they peg it up to dry. In unison they iron their shirts into a perfect finish. Potatoes are peeled with casual ease. The training they undertake, powering through assault courses, sees them move with a graceful physical ease. There may never seem to be a point to all the things they do but it’s done with a real beauty. You can totally imagine this idealised vision of unison is exactly how Galoup would want to remember his days in his beloved Legion.

Denis’ transformation of Galoup’s memories of the Legion’s work into unspoken dance sequences, also points towards the increasing homoerotic undertone. This feels like more than a clue about Galoup’s undefined hostility to Sentain who is in many ways a spiritual brother-in-arms. But Lavant’s simmeringly intense, buttoned-up (literally) Galoup could never express such feelings. Is that why some of these training sequences that he remembers feel oddly sexualised? A wrestling practise session, bare-chested, feels like nothing less than aggressive competitive hugging. In one training session Galoup and Sentain walk around in an ever-decreasing circle in what feels like the entrée to a tango or a romantic clinch.

It’s not just Galoup. Michel Subor’s professional soldier Forestier watches the topless training sessions with an unspoken (unrealised) fascination. Galoup’s idolisation of his commander – he even carries a dogtag bracelet of Forestier’s in his exile like a totem – is another motivation, jealousy clearly on his mind as his commander takes a shine to the brave new soldier. Galoup it’s suggested is a man who barely understands himself, let alone others, lashing out with violence and aggression at others due to longings he barely feels or understands in himself.

All of this plays in Denis’ slow, observant, film full of carefully composed cross-cuts taking us in and out of the camp and nearby town and throws up a chorus of Djiboutian women who observe the men and interject at crucial points. Beautifully shot by Agnes Godard, it’s a film of striking images often beautifully composed into intriguing montages that go from nightclubs, to deserts, to seemingly abandoned military vehicles. It is I think vital, at every point, to remember that everything we are seeing is being framed through the memories of a man who, Denis implies, is deeply repressed in (possibly) several ways.

Frequently we see scenes Galoup can have no knowledge of. Others– like Sentain finally provoked into striking his senior officer – are played out with a near-dream like unreality. The eventual fate of a character in the desert could be wish-fulfilment for Galoup – after all he could have no idea. Does he imagine his Legionnaires singing to him as he boards his flight to exile? Above all, as he wanders without purpose through the streets of Marseilles, what is he intending to do? Why is he writing his reflections (if you can call such vague narrative interjections that)? Is it an elaborate suicide note?

All of this comes to a head in Denis’ fascinating and beautifully striking final scene. As Galoup lies on his bed – perfectly made – gun in hand, the camera pans across his body to focus on one of his arm muscles twitching rhythmically. Then we cut to Galoup in that Djubati nightclub: but now he looks like a different man, casually dressed, relaxed – and he explodes into a no-holds-barred dance to Rhythm of the Night, full of the frentic, effortless, improvisationary energy he’s denied himself utterly. Is he imagining a fraction of the life he could have had if he was able to embrace feelings and emotions in himself he can barely understand? (A critic observed, Galoup may be so repressed the closest he can get to imagining being gay is relaxed dancing.) Denis told Lavant to dance ‘as if between life and death’. Is this his idea of an afterlife?

Beau Travail won’t be for everyone – and even at its slim 93 minutes, it’s refusal to interject much in the way of pace or characterisation (aside from Galoup, almost every other character is a cipher and Galpoup has crushed almost any trace of personality in himself). But go into it expecting not a throbbing tragedy (as I did at first) but instead something almost akin to a half-remembered dream and it will provide an experience you will be eager to revisit and explore.

Further reading