Category: Relationship film

Hit Man (2024)

Inventive, playful, funny, sexy and dark this fabulous dark comedy changes gears with confident ease

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Glen Powell (Gary Johnson), Adria Arjona (Madison Figueroa Masters), Austin Amelio (Jasper), Retta (Claudette), Sanjay Rao (Phil), Molly Bernard (Alicia), Evan Holtzman (Ray Masters)

You might not want to hear it, but despite what the movies say there is no such thing as a hit man. In New Orleans, if you are talking to a mysteriously charismatic man who offers to take care of your ‘personal problems’ for a wedge of cash, you are probably confessing your desire to conspire to murder to a police agent. That agent would be mild-mannered psychology professor Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), a bland forgettable person who discovers a hidden talent for charismatic role-play, using his psychological skills to create a persona specific to his target. On a job, Gary becomes attracted to Madison (Adria Arjona), first dissuading her from ‘hiring him’ to kill her husband and then starting a relationship with her ‘in character’ as ‘Ron’. But relationships prove to be as risky for fake hit men as they would be for real ones.

To say where Hit Man, Linklater’s darkly twisted rom-com, heads would be to spoil it (let’s just say I didn’t see where it’s going) and the journey is a fabulous ride. Linklater and Powell collaborated on a (heavily) fictionalised version of this true story and pull together a smart, sexy, witty and at times surprisingly dark film, which make some shrewd points about the extent to which we choose and shape our own identities. Hit Man sees Linklater so confidently shift tone and mood within scenes, that you almost don’t notice how smoothly the film travels from farce to psychological insight to Postman Always Ring Twice sexiness to screwball wit to morally shady action. It’s a terrific ride.

It’s also a superb showcase for Glen Powell, who co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater. This should be a star-making role for Powell, in which he deftly plays mild-mannered and timid and darkly charismatic, often in the same scene. What’s so superb about Powell’s performance is how fluid it is, his two personalities (mild Gary and confident Ron) overlapping and merging into each other from moment-to-moment, or switching in response to sudden changes of situation. Powell and Linklater carry this out with real subtlety from moment to moment but watch the first scene and the last and you immediately notice the difference in our lead from the man we met at first.

Powell is both extremely funny – sequences showing the dizzying array of characters (from red necks to prissy Snape-ish goths) he becomes to lure in his targets are hilariously done – but also wonderfully engaging. Beneath the surface, it’s clear Gary is thrilled by how differently he is perceived when he becomes ‘Ron’, grinning as he overhears his police colleagues confess how exciting and sexy ‘Ron’ is compared to boring bird-watcher Gary. He finds he takes on a whole new confidence – and accompanying sexual prowess – as he throws himself into a dizzyingly sexual fling with Madison, who is also far more excited about the prospect of illicit sex with a killer than she probably would be with sweet rumpy-pumpy with a tenured psychology professor. Powell captures this all wonderfully, throwing himself into a tangled web of deceit with gleeful gusto.

Adria Arjona is similarly excellent as Madison, a woman who becomes harder and harder to read as the film continues. Its early stages really feels like a traditional rom-com – except the ‘meet cute’ features one person trying to hire another for murder, before they charm each other with cat puns – but the relationship shifts as much as the film itself does. Madison seems to come to life, filled with sexually excited recklessness, as she spends time with Ron. But Arjona is able to imply half a dozen things under the surface: is Madison a downtrodden girl enjoying a brush with danger, or is she some sort of manipulative femme fatale?

Linklater uses this to maintain a real high-wire tension in the film, which increasingly becomes impossible to predict. Both Gary and Madison are playing with fire here. If Gary’s dalliance with a former ‘client’ is discovered by his superiors – or if a chance encounter unmasks him to Madison – hell knows what might happen next. And can he keep the pretence that he is capable of ruthless, skilled violence, something much harder to do when your date takes you to a firing range and asks you to teach her? And what is Madison’s game, as it emerges that her break with her boyfriend isn’t as clean as she suggests it is – does she have something in mind that Gary isn’t prepared for?

Hit Man balances this brilliantly with the comedy, in one of Linklater’s most delightfully off-beat films, expertly played by Powell and Arjona. It’s underpinned with a deftly layered thematic message. Throughout we are reminded, by Gary’s psychology lectures to his increasingly engaged students, that people balance their own ids and egos and eventually ‘choose’ where they land. In doing so they create their own personality. It’s what we realise we are watching in this film. Both Gary and Madison decide they like more than a few of the elements of the people they are pretending to be – so why not mix them into their own personality? Suddenly they find themselves effortlessly capable of things they never thought possible – yet still embracing passions their playful alter-egos would find dull beyond belief.

It leads to a surprisingly ending that comes from left-field, but we realise we have been prepared for by Linklater and Powell almost from the film’s opening moments. It makes for a supremely entertaining and rewarding film, brilliantly played by its two leads (and it bears repeating that Powell is sensational here), with excellent support from Austin Amelio as a sleazy cop and Retta and Sanjay Rao as Gary’s more playful police colleagues. Hit Man is a dynamic, funny, sexy and surprising treat.

Scenes From a Marriage (1974)

Bergman’s compelling, emotionally charged film is an intense, impressive and surprising tale

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Liv Ullman (Marianne), Erland Josephson (Johan), Bibi Andersson (Katarina), Jan Malmsjö (Peter), Gunnel Lindblom (Eva), Barbro Hiort af Ornäs (Mrs Jacobi), Anita Wall (Journalist)

A loving couple sit with an interviewer to discuss how happy their relationship is. Ten years later, years after their divorce, they meet in their old weekend cottage for an assignation away from their new partners. Along the way, they’ll lie, fight, cheat but also show time-and-again few people know them better than they do each other. Based on his own marriages and relationships (not least his relationship with Liv Ullman), Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage is a fascinatingly intimate and intense portrait of the contradictory impulses we feel towards the people we know best: how we can, in the same moment, love them, hate them, want to be a million miles away from them and also yearn to take them in our arms and tell them everything.

Skilfully cut down from a six-part TV series – the episode titles become ‘chapter headings’, each signifying a time shift – it becomes a series of intense, almost real-time, conversations between middle-brow professor Johan (Erland Josephson) and successful lawyer Marianne (Liv Ullman). From their ten-year anniversary, their happy-but-functional relationship is shattered when Johan leaves for the (unseen) Paula, heading into divorce, Marianne’s growth in sexual confidence, her little acts of revenge over Johan and their later affair. At all times they prove capable of ripping emotional wounds into each other, but also remaining strangely dependent on love and affection from each other.

It would be easy to say that Scenes of a Marriage is a theatrical piece – it came, originally, from a play Bergman was working on and well over two thirds of its running time features Josephson and Ullman alone on screen. But if the close-up is the language of cinema, Scenes from a Marriage may be the most cinematic film every made. Shot in a cooly observational style by Sven Nykvist, vast swathes of Scenes from a Marriage plays out in searing close-up, the camera studying every inch of the emotional angst its two characters are putting themselves through. Bergman knows exactly how to build the punishing tension in these scenes, frequently climaxing in visceral outbursts.

It is a film about what we say and what we chose not to say and what we decide to hear. The conversation between the couples is framed by their careful considerations: when to hold fire and when to let rip; when to listen and when to choose not to hear. And it’s clear that, when we are first introduced to them, they have mastered the art of not saying anything at all. Smilingly parroting cliches to their interviewer, they later smugly compare themselves to their feuding friends Karatina and Peter (excellent cameos from a searing Bibi Andersson and a provocative Jan Malmsjö). But their conversation never touches on deeper issues (Bergman’s called this chapter ‘The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Carpet’) and their sex life has dwindled to timetabled functionality.

It’s clear they are aware of this growing distance themselves. Johan shares his poetry with a colleague (an expertly reserved cameo from Gunnel Lindblom), complaining Marianne considers it little better than spiritual masturbation and yearns for an expressive freedom he feels is impossible in his marriage. Marianne meanwhile speaks to a client, Mrs Jacobi (a tragic Barbro Hiort af Ornäs), whose story of a lifetime trapped in a loveless marriage with children she never really wanted clearly strikes Marianne as a chilling vision of her own future.

That doesn’t stop Marianne responding with shocked subservience that tips into desperate pleading when Johan announces he wants to leave her. Bergman stages this scene beautifully, with the ridiculous logic people sink into in tragic break-ups. Johan eats a snack meal prepared by Marianne, guiltily confessing his affair, but there is something very real about Marianne’s stunned reaction which sees her planning his packing (because he’s useless at it) and continue their bedtime preparation before she starts pleading him to stay. Just there is something very real in Johan’s reaction: having steeled himself for a fight, her subservience enrages him until he is cruelly tearing verbal lumps out of her. This is the sort of searing emotional up-and-down that rings true, one allowing shock to humiliate them the other transforming shame into defensive, accusatory blame.

But Scenes from a Marriage is a film that utterly understands how much we change under circumstances. Separation is not good for Johan: his new lover doesn’t interest him, his career stalls and he tips into self-pity. Marianne, once the shock and fear of separation passes, discovers she likes her freedom. Her wardrobe shifts to more form-fitting and revealing clothes, she embraces the opportunities of singledom and repays Johan’s desertion with a seduction of him she deliberately doesn’t follow-through on. They now talk more honestly than ever before – and it’s a blistering, verbally and physically violent exchange rammed full of resentment and petty cruelty.

To do this stuff you need actors at the top of their game and who completely trust each other. Bergman certainly has this with his two stars. Josephson’s self-contented smugness moves through arrogant selfishness to desperate vulnerability, his expressive face sometimes puppy-doggish, sometimes drowning in bear-like fury. Ullman is, of course, exceptional. Her masterful ability to react, to let thoughts and emotions play fleetingly across her face was made for Bergman’s close-up film-making and she takes Marianne on a fascinating journey, from near-submissive home-maker to vibrantly confident women of the world while never letting the vulnerability and doubt be too far from her eyes. It’s an extraordinary performance, searing and tender, as raw as knife-edge.

These two play absorbingly off each other, their conversations gripping minefields of repressed then hugely expressed emotions. Their collaboration, guided by Bergman’s close (but not intrusive) camerawork is extraordinary. Fashioned from Bergman’s experiences of relationships, Scenes from a Marriage is, however, strangely hopeful. One of its key themes is that, even when they hate each other, this couple know and trust each other more than anyone else. In times of crisis and pain they always turn to each for a consolatory word or comfort.

There is something strangely warm about their relationship, despite its turmoil, and the film is refreshing in saying friendship and love doesn’t have to end with divorce, but can transform itself into something else, perhaps even something better. Perhaps it’s that strange note of hope that makes Scenes of a Marriage so influential to a generation of filmmakers. It refuses the simple moral standpoints of judgement and suggests the decision to no longer be together (or even faithful to each other) need not be the end all, but instead a bump in a longer journey: that a relationship (and even a love) doesn’t end when a marriage does.

The Big Chill (1983)

Heart-warming, engaging and moving ensemble drama, low-key and all the better for it

Director: Lawrence Kasdan

Cast: Tom Berenger (Sam Weber), Glenn Close (Sarah Cooper), Jeff Goldblum (Michael Gould), William Hurt (Nick Carlton), Kevin Kline (Harold Cooper), Mary Kay Place (Meg Jones), Meg Tilly (Chloe), JoBeth Williams (Karen Bowens), Don Galloway (Richard Bowens)

Growing up is hard, isn’t it? The older you get, the harder it is to cling on to the idealism of your younger days. The past can wind up feeling both very familiar and a very different country indeed. It’s something a group of thirtysomething college friends start thinking about when they gather for the funeral of their friend Alex (the famously cut-from-the-film Kevin Costner, seen only via close-ups of his hands and chest while being prepped by an undertaker). Spending a weekend together they reminisce, argue and remind each of why (and if they are still are) friends.

Kasdan’s sharp script, full of sparkling dialogue and rich (if at times familiar) character arcs attracted a smorgasbord of the cream of 80s American film acting, all of whom give fabulously relaxed, extremely genuine performances, largely devoid of grandstanding. The disparate range of career and life-choices the friends have made influenced an armada of ‘college-reunion’ stories, but it’s a trope that works because Kasdan knew it offered such a rich potential for drama.

The Big Chill is the definitive ensemble piece, delightful because it’s structured not around heavy-handed, overtly dramatic clashes, but everyday conversations full of observational humour and low-key emotional truths. There isn’t really a plot as such in The Big Chill: the pleasure comes from Kasdan pulling off the near-impossible trick of making us feel we have been invited to share the fun rather than watching, with our noses pressed up against the window, a film where the actors are having more fun than us. The Big Chill feels truthful, universal and eventually moving because it is so down-to-earth. We’ve all had social groups where we feel absolute loyalty and love for its members, while still being capable of finding them earth-shatteringly infuriating.

Most of them have traded their youthful idealism to change the world for a Reaganite cash-grasping. Sam (Tom Berenger) stars in a hit Magnum PI style TV drama. His former partner in left-wing politics Harold (Kevin Kline) owns a successful running shoes business (named Running Dog in a subtle pop at his own selling out) while his wife Sarah (Glenn Close) is a successful doctor. Michael (Jeff Goldblum) writes shallow celebrity pieces for glossy magazines, Meg (Mary Kay Place) has traded being a public defender for real-estate law. Karen (JoBeth Williams) wanted to be a writer, but instead married an ad executive Richard (Don Galloway).

All of them feel their late friend Alex represents the path they could have taken: a genius scientist who turned down all academic promotions to focus on social work and his old principles. Not that this seems to have made Alex happy. The most like Alex’s seems to be Nick (William Hurt). A former radio-psychiatrist, left impotent after Vietnam, who jacked in his career and is now a drifting drug addict. It’s never quite said, but you can feel the concern of the rest of the group that Nick feels destined to be the next funeral they gathering for.

Much of the tension comes from Nick – largely because he feels more willing to touch nerves the rest are happy to leave unprodded. This is a group that works hard to maintain harmony – after all, Sarah’s affair with Alex hasn’t dented Harold’s genuine grief or his love for his wife, and no one else wants to address it. But there are clear tensions and resentments under the surface: small grudges or irritations many perhaps coming from that uncomfortable feeling of the group seeing their own self-recriminations reflected back at them in their friends faces.

Nick is the only one who raises the scary spectre that decade-old events hold this group together, not their lives today. If they all met for the first time now, would they even be friends? Nick is also willing to take pot-shots at their tendency to self-pitying regret and to provoke the romantic and sexual tensions the others are happy to keep unremarked or compromise on. (Even Jeff Goldblum’s seemingly provocative Michael, avoids trouble by scrupulously taking nothing seriously.)

What makes The Big Chill such a lovable film, despite this, is this doesn’t fracture the group but are islands of tension within a sea of genuine friendship and warmth. Kasdan’s insistence that the company spend a longer time than usual in rehearsal – famously the cast cemented their chemistry via an almost five-hour, Mike Leigh-style, in-character improvisation, involving cooking and eating a dinner together – paid off in spades. They genuinely feel like life-long friends, sharing in-jokes, teasing each other, looking out for each other and making generous offers of help.

There is a lot to laugh at because it feels so universal. We’ve all mucked around with friends while cooking and cleaning. When the group gather to teasingly cheer along with the opening credits of Sam’s cheesy TV show (to his good-natured embarrassment) it makes us laugh because we recognise the affection. The hilarious absurdity of Harold, Nick and Sam chasing a bat out of the attic feels real. Just as the emotions hammer home – Harold’s grief in his eulogy for Alex, Sarah’s tears at a meal, Nick’s tragic middle-distance gloom or Karen’s private ennui among her friends.

It’s all helped by superb performances. JoBeth Williams is excellent in, arguably, the film’s most challenging role, deeply unhappy with where her life has gone, wanting to pretend she can seize the day but not having the conviction to see it through. Goldblum is drily witty but distant as the group’s closest thing to an outsider, Berenger affectingly modest at his sell-out success, Place quietly desperate as a woman whose body clock is ticking down. Kline is very funny and sweet as a man desperate to help those around him, while Close in the flashier (and Oscar-nominated) part as the group’s nominal ‘mother figure’, far more deeply affected by Alex’s death than she is willing to let on.

Perhaps best of all is Hurt, vulnerable, gentle and quietly lost as Nick, his pain manifesting itself in occasional bear-prodding outbursts, but who will quietly apologise the next morning with a gentle, unremarked hug. He also forms a warm and genuine bond with Alex’s younger girlfriend Chloe, played with a sparky energy by Meg Tilly, who (not surprisingly) sees a lot of Alex in him.

Kasdan’s film gently explores the tensions of a group of adults unsure about where their life has taken them, but it does so in a warm and charming structure that makes us really care for the characters all of whom are expertly and humanly drawn. It’s lack of explosive melodrama is a large part of its success, helping ground the film as something relatable that we can feel a real bond with.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021)

Low-key, beautifully made short-story anthology, crammed with wonderfully little touches

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Cast: Kotone Furukawa (Meiko), Ayumu Nakajima (Kazuaki Kubota), Hyunri (Tsugumi Konno), Kiyohiko Shibukawa (Segawa), Katsuki Mori (Nao), Shouma Kai (Sasaki), Fusako Urabe (Moka Natsuko), Aoba Kawai (Nana Aya)

Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy feels deceptively simple. But it’s the Japanese auteur combining an Ozu-inspired sensibility with the narrative flair of Chekhov. In its three acts, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy presents three short stories, each chamber pieces, each revolving around intimate, intense and life-changing conversations between two people. Hamaguchi demonstrates how lives can rotate on their axis in split seconds, with conversations shifting for one or both participants with no warning, generating unexpected, emotionally surprising results.

‘Magic’, the first story, revolves around model Meiko (Kotone Furukawa) and best friend Tsugami (Hyunri). During a long cab journey, Tsugami tells Meiko all about her new romance – only for Meiko to realise, part way through, she is talking about Meiko’s ex-boyfriend Kazuaki (Ayumu Nakajima) with whom Meiko may still love. ‘Door Wide Open’ sees distinguished professor and author Segawa (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) become the unsuspecting target of a honey trap by Nao (Katsuki Mori), after her friend-with-benefit’s Sasaki (Shouma Kai) had his media career-plans derailed by Segawa failing him. Nao and Segawa however find unexpectantly common ground. Finally, ‘Once Again’ has Natsuko (Fusako Urabe) excitedly bumping into her former high school girlfriend Aya (Aoba Kawai) at a train station – only to find, when they return to Aya’s home, both have mistaken the other for someone else. These two strangers however find it easier to talk and bond.

All three of these stories are deceptively simple. Only ‘Once Again’ features any unusual set-up (a computer virus has rendered all computers unusable, a sci-fi insertion that only exists to remove any chance of the mix-up being avoided). Hamaguchi shoots each story with an unaffected simplicity, frequently employing long-takes and staging the bulk of each story (each is about 40 minutes) in single, every-day locations – from taxis to offices to homes.

But Hamaguchi’s approach allows the performances to grow with a subtle, skilful naturalness, capturing intense (but often hidden) changes of mood in the slightest micro-expressions. Each of the three key conversations underpinning the stories develops in utterly unexpected ways and part of the magic of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is immediately wanting to play each of back and try and spot the moments where they changed their participants lives.

Hamaguchi carefully builds our empathy with these characters, using Ozu-inspired stationary set-ups complemented with unfussy two-shot set-ups, but culminating in moments of complete immersion where POV shots place us behind the eyes of each character, looking directly at the person they are talking with. It’s a superb way of quietly building our connection with the characters and the events they are experiencing and works brilliantly to immerse us in these moments that we know will shape their emotional development over months and years to come.

This gives these small scale – and they are defiantly small-scale – stories real impact. Hamaguchi’s film is about real people facing real problems: lost loves, frustrated ambitions, childhood regrets. The very human feelings in play here help make the stories affecting. It’s helped again by the subtle performances Hamguchi draws from the cast. When Meiko – a marvellous ambiguous Kotone Furukawa – fumes against her ex-boyfriend for moving on, is she angry at him or at herself for letting him go? Does Segawa (a perfectly dour, almost unreadable Kiyohiko Shibukawa) feel fear at his reputation being damaged or because of stirrings of sexual longing he has clearly repressed? Does Natsuko (a gorgeously fragile Fusako Urabe) relish the freedom of speaking her mind to a complete stranger even more than she would talking to the actual person she is recalling?

Hamaguchi mixes this with intriguing moments of fantasy. A deliberately clumsy camera zoom at one point indicates to us a no-holds-barred conversation in a café has just been in the imagination of one of its participants. Sasaki fantasises about himself reporting on the television about his former mentor. Hamaguchi also brings a wonderful sense of magic to everyday locations (not to mention the fairy tale like set-up of the final stories lack of computers, which feels like the aftereffects of a witch’s curse). The escalator Natsuko and Aya meet on takes on a mystic beauty as it moves them past each other on careful tracking shots. Meiko walks through city streets and stares back at a skyline that feels filled with meaning. Hamaguchi isn’t afraid to slow the film down at key moments to soak up atmosphere and observe the everyday beauty in objects around us.

It lends even more power to the sudden changes these characters experience. Each story carefully builds on the emotional impact of the one before, taking us through ambiguity to complex mixed feelings to a final cathartic moment at a train station that carries real emotional force. Every story ends in a very different place from what we expected at the start – or arguably even the middle – without Hamaguchi ever overplaying his Dahlish Tales of the Unexpected card.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a small-scale expression of Hamaguchi’s directorial mastery, a perfect expression of his ability to infuse small-scale stories with great emotional force and psychological depth. It’s a highly skilled piece of short-film-making, pulled together into an effective collection. A clear indicator that this – combined with Drive My Car – marks Hamaguchi out as a future great.

Written on the Wind (1956)

Sirk’s melodrama packs in plenty of tight psychological observation among soap suds

Director: Douglas Sirk

Cast: Rock Hudson (Mitch Wayne), Lauren Bacall (Lucy Moore Hadley), Robert Stack (Kyle Hadley), Dorothy Malone (Marylee Hadley), Robert Keith (Jasper Hadley), Grant Williams (Biff Miley), Robert J. Wilke (Dan Willis), Edward Platt (Dr. Paul Cochrane), Harry Shannon (Hoak Wayne)

Money can’t buy you love. The oil-rich Hadleys live the high-life off the oil-empire built by patriarch Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith). Unfortunately, his children are both deeply unhappy and emotionally stunted. Kyle (Robert Stack) is an alcoholic playboy, Marylee (Dorothy Malone) a lonely woman who plays with other people’s lives to make herself feel better. Both are, in different ways, in love with sub-consciously resentful Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), the poor-boy childhood friend turned geologist who their father sees as the son he wishes he had. Mitch is in love with Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), an ambitious secretary at Hadley Oil – but Kyle also falls for her, marrying her. Marylee is in love with Mitch, who doesn’t feel the same. We already know from the film’s prologue all this is going to end with a bullet.

It makes for gorgeous entertainment in Douglas Sirk’s lusciously filmed melodrama, that helped lay out the template for the sort of soapy Dynasty-type TV monoliths that would follow years after. Sirk’s gift with this sort of material was to imbue it with just enough Tennessee Williams’ style psychological drama. Written on the Wind is awash with the glamour and beauty of wealth but, at the same time, demonstrates the immense psychological emptiness at the heart of the American Dream. What’s the point of all this luxury when those who have it are as deeply fucked up as the Hadleys are?

Their family is so wealthy the Texas town they live in is named after them and the run it like a private fiefdom, with the police running around like their errand boys. It’s not made them a jot happy. Both Maryann and Kyle are deeply aware of their own emptiness, rooted in the lack of attention (and love) from their father, a work-obsessed man who seems to have written his children off at an early age and invested far more time in training up Mitch like some sort of cuckoo-in-the-nest. Perhaps to try and win back their father’s love as much as to try and find meaning in their own, both of them want to possess Mitch: Maryann is destructively desperate to marry him, Kyle seems to want to become him and if one-way of doing that is by stealing the girl Mitch loves, all the better.

Wonderfully played by Robert Stack, overflowing with false confidence, jocularity and an utter, all-engulfing emptiness, Kyle talks endlessly about how Mitch is like a brother to him all while repeating as often as he can gently disparaging references to his poor-upbringing and dependence on the Hadley’s patronage. It’s coupled with his homoerotic (unspoken of course – it’s the fifties – but you can’t miss it!) obsession with Mitch. All of these confused, contradictory feelings wrap up in Stack’s (Oscar-nominated) performance, with the weak Kyle all too-readily believing Mitch might just be bedding his wife.

It’s an idea planted by Maryann, played with a scene-stealing bravado by Oscar-winner Dorothy Malone. Despite her vivacious energy and languidly casual confidence in establishing her pre-eminence over the newcomer Lucy, Maryann is a miserable, disappointed, deeply damaged soul, painfully bereft of any love and seeking meaning in casual couplings with a parade of gas attendants and hotel bellboys. Obsessively in love with Mitch, she dwells like Kyle on their childhood and the lost dreams of what might have been, but never was. This bubbles out over the course of Written on the Wind to an ever-more destructive Iago-like manipulation of the haplessly drunk Kyle, out of a mix of wanting everyone to be as miserable as she is and a desire to either own or destroy Mitch.

Malone and Stack triumph in these show-case roles, successfully building both frustration and sympathy in the audience. Opposite them, Hudson and Bacall (the stars!) play the more sensible, less interesting parts. Bacall’s strength and firmness balance rather nicely the contradictions in Lucy. A clear-eyed realist on meeting Kyle, attracted to the display of wealth while repulsed by his shallow, well-oiled, lothario routine, she never-the-less marries him, at least partly out of a desire to mother this fragile figure (she is genuinely moved by Kyle’s cockpit confessions of inadequacy and self-loathing while he flies her from New York to Miami for a date). From this Lucy confronts the psychological mess of the Hadley family with a stoic determination to make the best of things.

When does she start to develop feelings for Mitch? Mitch is clearly smitten on first sight, glancing fascinated at her legs while she stands behind a display board. But Sirk uses Rock Hudson’s similar stoic quality to great effect, turning Mitch into the epitome of duty, loyal enough to the Hadley family to bend over backwards to support the Kyle-Lucy marriage, all while clearly carrying an immense candle for Lucy. Saying that, part of the fun in Written on the Wind is wondering how much the patient Mitch is a conscious cuckoo, displaying all the intelligence, dedication and aptitude that Jasper so publicly lambasts his children for lacking (and whose fault is that?)

All these psychological soapy suds bubble superbly inside Sirk’s intricately constructed world. Every shot in Written on the Wind is perfectly constructed, splashes of primary colours dominating a world of pristine 50s class. Sirk frames the picture gorgeously, notably using mirrors effectively to place the characters in triangular patterns (Mitch at one point strikingly appearing in a mirror standing between Kyle and Lucy) or to suggest psychological truths (one shot angled to show Lucy brushing her hair in a mirror where we see a reflection of the reclining Maryann and don’t forget that marvellous closing shot of Dorothy subconsciously mirroring her father’s pose in the painting behind her while caressing a phallic model of an oil drill).

Sirk keeps events just the right side of melodramatic excess. A brilliantly staged sequence sees Maryann – dragged home from an assignation by the police – dance with a wild abandon in her bedroom while Jasper, horrified at realising how his disregard has warped Maryann, collapses to a heart-attack on the stairs. It’s a sequence that could be absurd but has just the right amount of reality to it, grounded as it is in Maryann’s self-loathing. Just as Kyle’s belief that impotence is going to consign him to being as much a failure in continuing the Hadley line as he is in everything else. Particularly since he’s constantly reminded of his inadequacy opposite the taller, smarter, better-at-everything Mitch who everyone else in the film openly seems to prefers to him.

It’s an extraordinary balance Sirk keeps, treating the characters with utter respect and affection while placing them in an over-the-top structure full of elaborate sets and overblown, melodramatic events and heightened feelings. Perhaps because Sirk never laughs at the concepts and content he’s created, we invest in both its truth and ridiculous entertainment quality. He does this while avoiding any touch of self-importance, never forgetting this is an old-fashioned melodrama. It makes Written on the Wind a hugely enjoyable, and surprisingly rich, character study mixed with plot-boiler.

Challengers (2024)

Dynamic, mature, hilarious and moving relationship drama, an absolute delight

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Zendaya (Tashi Duncan), Josh O’Connor (Patrick Zweig), Mike Faist (Art Donaldson), Darnell Appling (New Rochelle Final Umpire), AJ Lister (Lily Donaldson), Nada Despotovich (Tashi’s mother), Naheem Garcia (Tashi’s father), Hailey Gates (Helen)

Tennis superstar Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) is on the slide after six majors – he’s lost his click and can’t even struggle past up-and-comers from the lower rungs of the tour. His coach, manager and wife Tashi (Zendaya) has an idea for how to get his groove back: he’ll enter a lowest-rung Challenger tournament, chalk up an easy win and return to confidence. Problem is, Art’s estranged former friend and doubles partner Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) is also in the tournament and the two of them now line up for a grudge match in the final. But there is more going on than meets the eye, as Guadagnino’s film unfolds in a non-linear style to reveal the complex, confused and frequently ambiguous sexual, emotional and sporting tensions that have beset the three over 13 years.

Challengers feels like it might be a ripe piece of teen click-bait fluff – but reveals itself to be a whipper-sharp, funny, involving and cleverly open-ended film stuffed full of excellent dialogue by Justin Kuritzkes that frequently catches you off-guard with its plot developments. Challengers is a thrillingly mature, adult and very truthful exploration of the underlying attractions and tensions between three people, all of whom seem confused about their exact feelings and motivations.

What is clear – as made explicitly clear by an intensely erotic late-night encounter in a hotel room between the three of them thirteen years earlier – is the rich, unspoken attraction they all share. Art and Patrick are strongly attracted to Tashi, she seems equally interested in different aspects of each of them, while Art and Patrick’s homoerotic bond (clued in before this by their affectionate, casual physical intimacy as well as their intense celebrations on winning the Junior US Open) is immediately clear to the savvy Tashi and briefly embraced by the two men.

Sport – particularly mano-a-mano games like tennis – has an undercurrent of sexual energy to it. Adrenalin-filled men pounding away at each other from across the net, bodies glistening with sweat? Teammates grasping each other in victory with an intensity often beyond anything they would show to a romantic partner? Challengers explores how close a dance sport and sex is, the remarkably similar effects both have on our bodies. It’s what Tashi – a former tennis sensation whose career was ended in tragic circumstances – is getting at when she says the best tennis matches aren’t about tennis. They are semi-romantic couplings, the perfect rally being two bodies in perfect harmony.

This all develops thrillingly in the inter-relationships between the three leads, each excellent. Zendaya is superb as a woman forced to live her tennis dreams vicariously through her husband, who values the loyalty of Art while being quietly troubled by his neediness, infuriated by Patrick’s arrogant performative selfishness while being deeply attracted to his don’t-give-a-damn independence. She has a tight knot of tension throughout that is compelling, a constant sense we are watching a woman struggling to find some sort of resolution from a lifetime of competing resentments and desires.

Equally superb – revelatory in fact – is Josh O’Connor, who makes Patrick a cocksure, confident, selfish but immensely charming guy. Patrick scraps a career from natural skill that he never bothered to hone (witness his bizarre crooked-arm serve), embraces his sexual confidence, bounces around with a breezy bro-confidence and does everything he can to hide the lonely, lost boy he really is. This is breathtaking work from O’Connor, from hilariously funny when shamelessly pimping himself on tour for a roof over his head, and tragically vulnerable in bashful confessions with Tashi.

Mike Faist has the least flashy role but is equally wonderful. Art is – if you will – the most closeted of the three, the least confident, most dutiful, who dedicates himself to things and doesn’t stop to think deeply about his true feelings. You suspect the unspoken intense romantic bond between Art and Patrick remains unspoken in their youth because Art himself is uncertain (scared?) about what he feels. Just as he buttons up and represses his own resentments and anger towards Tashi.

Challengers switches and re-aligns these characters beautifully and constantly leaves us guessing. When Tashi (and by extension Art) refuses to see Patrick after her injury, is this because she genuinely blames him for unsettling her before the match or because she just needs something other than random chance to blame? Does she drive Art into becoming a Grand Slam winning machine out of love, a vicarious desire for success or anger (as she shapes into something he isn’t) because she blames him as well? Does Art know or care? Does he realise how much his depression comes from severing connections with his alter-ego Patrick and does Patrick slog it out on the circuit because it’s the only way he can still feel in-any-way close to the only two people he loves (but won’t admit?).

Watching all this unfold, seeing each scene reveal a new piece of information that refocuses what we thought about each character, is compelling – helped a great deal by the vibrant, emotional and intensely sympathetic performances from the three leads. Challengers is also a superbly assembled film, sharply and snappily edited and with an electric, emotionally well-judged score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that skilfully uses refrains to link back to key emotions and sensations. It’s also a film that shoots tennis more electrically than any other. With sweeping crane shots, hand-held camera and every trick in the book, we see matches from the perspective of everything: the players, the ground, even the ball itself. It’s stunningly visually inventive.

It culminates in a truly wonderful, open-ended, emotionally satisfying ending that I actively adored. It’s a film about love, about three people who feud over petty things for years but need each other to be complete, who find there are elements of each other’s personalities that serve to complete themselves. Who are fiercely sexually attracted to each other, but also have a deep, intense emotional bond they need more than they realise. Challengers is an absolutely gorgeous, delightful, superb film – another emotional, mature triumph from Guadagnino, with three brilliant actors working wonders with a sharp script. It’s a film to love and treasure.

Maestro (2023)

Well filmed and acted Bernstein biopic, that doesn’t really get to the heart of its subject

Director: Bradley Cooper

Cast: Carey Mulligan (Felicia Montealegre), Bradley Cooper (Leonard Bernstein), Sarah Silverman (Shirley Bernstein), Gideon Glick (Tommy Cothran), Maya Hawke (Jamie Bernstein), Matt Bomer (David Oppenheim), Vincenzo Amato (Bruco Zirato), Michael Urie (Jerry Robbins), Brian Klugman (Aaron Copland), Zachary Booth (Mendy Wager)

You can’t fault his ambition. In bringing the family life of legendary composer, conductor and cultural icon Leonard Bernstein to the screen, Bradley Cooper pulls out all the stops in a medley of inventive staging mixed with single shot trust in actors. Maestro is, in many ways, a perfect capturing of Bernstein: dazzling, giddy film-making that never lets you really peek into its subject’s soul. It’s a hugely impressive sophomore effort, but not quite fully satisfying as a film.

It opens with the life-changing night in 1943 when a 25-year-old Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) stands in (with no rehearsal) to conduct the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall for a packed crowd and millions listening on the radio. From there, Bernstein never stops his ascent, becoming one of the world’s leading conductors and a composer who triumphs in every genre. He also marries successful actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), in a marriage full of mutual love and support. But Bernstein is the epicentre of his own fame, whose primary sexual attraction is to men. Over the decades, his marriage bends, fractures and reforms as Bernstein’s numerous affairs and party-filled lifestyle increasingly alienate the loyal Felicia.

Maestro is shot with all the zest and energy Bernstein himself was full of. Cooper keeps the pace the brisk and frequently transitions between scenes with a bravura trust that we can keep up. We see Bernstein receive the phone call for that fateful stand-in performance in his apartment: jubilant, he runs out the door (stopping only to playfully slap the bottom of his lover David en route), the camera taking an angle above to watch the pyjama-clad Bernstein run through a series of halls and emerge into the auditorium of Carnegie Hall.

It’s one of several transitions that mix reality and fantasy. Felicia will turn around from Leonard, during a flirty date in an empty theatre, to stride forward to applause from a packed audience. Felicia and Leonard run from a snobby garden party straight into a theatre (again with an overhead shot tracking them in a single smooth cut) where dancers from On the Town pirouette on stage as a visual representation of Bernstein explaining his work, the dancers eventually luring Leonard, Felicia and several other characters into an impromptu ballet. It’s a playful mix of reality and fantasy. At other times, the film skips years in seconds, successes dizzyingly referenced in throwaway lines.

The film’s focus is Leonard and Felicia’s complex, multi-layered marriage. Two people, in many ways soulmates, deeply stress-tested by Leonard’s frequent selfishness. Cooper, in a remarkable physical transformation (his capturing of Bernstein’s voice, mannerisms and conducting style is faultless) makes the composer a force of nature, high on his own genius: garrulously charming, a man who can focus all his attention on one person as easily as he can absent-mindedly drop another. The sort of man who excitedly introduces his fiancée to his lover David (a sensitive Matt Bomer) and then abashedly apologises immediately after for springing the news on him.

It’s part of the message of that On the Town ballet: living with Bernstein is a never-ending, dizzying pile of social engagements that doesn’t stop ever. Felicia feels she is ready for that: but the drift of Bernstein’s primary emotional commitment away from her and towards protégé Timothy Cothran (Gideon Glick) deeply hurts her. It’s part of Bernstein’s increasing lack of care to at least pretend to keep his promiscuity under semi-wraps, including awkwardly dismissing unspecified “rumours” that have distressed his daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke, very good) as nothing more than “jealousies”.

As Felicia, Carey Mulligan delivers what might just be a career best performance. Luminous, she makes Felicia savvy, loving but realistic about the “sacrifices” loving Bernstein involves. It’s a marriage where she is often in Bernstein’s shadow – at one point literally so, a shot showing Bernstein’s giant conducting shadow dwarfing Felicia in the wings. Mulligan’s performance mines deep emotional depths, Cooper frequently showcasing these in long, still takes. Most strikingly, a dynamite argument in New York after the opening of Bernstein’s Mass plays out in one visceral shot as Mulligan conveys the release of years of tension, in angry home truths. She is also heart-breaking during the film’s affecting chronicle of Felicia’s cancer, another striking single-shot scene showcasing Mulligan’s skill at letting all pain play behind her eyes while talking to visiting friends.

Maestro is about the underlying strength between these two who always turn to each other at hours of need or emotional triumph. Felicia’s successes on stage are shared with Bernstein, while it’s she who accompanies him (after their unofficial split) to his ground-breaking Mahler concert in Ely (another virtuoso sequence, directed and acted by Cooper with aplomb). Bernstein abandons his career – and all other relationships – to nurse Felicia, their bond finally something that could not be shaken by his thoughtlessness.

However, Maestro fails at times to really show how this relationship buckled. The giddying speed with which it moves through events means the middle act and, in particular, the sense of Bernstein’s numerous affairs gets lost. When Felicia finally does erupt, it’s easy to think it’s due to one late night and Bernstein holding his lover’s hand during the Mass premiere, rather than years of slow emotional distancing. It’s one time when a montage, stressing the repetitive nature of Bernstein’s self-obsession, would have really made a positive impact.

It’s also a film that focuses so much on the relationship, it leaves Bernstein himself a curious enigma. Strangely, despite sampling Bernstein compositions throughout the film, its almost as dismissive of his musical theatre work as it implies Bernstein himself was. West Side Story gets barely a passing mention, On the Waterfront is bundled up with “film scores” and almost nothing of the rest of his work is placed in any form of context. The epic Mahler concert in Ely is brilliantly restaged, but its artistic importance never explained and it’s easy to come out of the film not really appreciating either Bernstein’s cultural or musical impact.

Instead, Bernstein remains somewhat of an enigma, a charismatic figure who, for all the excellence of Cooper’s performance, remains a showman we never get to really know, someone capable of great care and intimacy (he’s extraordinarily tactile) for people, but also keeps them (and us) at a distance. The affairs have a veil tastefully drawn over them. There is very little overtly gay content in Maestro, which feels a conservative choice.

It’s hard not to think at times Cooper is more focused in Maestro on demonstrating his own directorial invention and pushing himself to never go for the obvious shot. Maestro is a dazzling dive into the playbox of film technique – it changes in aspect ratio and colour stock to reflect the cinematic era (though an odd decision for a film about a composer, that never explores his connection to cinema) and offers a host of interesting visual compositions and daring long-takes. Cooper and especially Mulligan are superb, but it’s a film that perhaps leaves more questions in the mind. A dazzling piece of film-making, but not always a dazzling piece of story-telling.

The Lives of Others (2006)

Breathtaking, heartfelt and in-the-end deeply moving film which leaves you with a profound sense of hope for humanity

Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Cast: Ulrich Mühe (Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler), Sebastian Koch (Georg Dreyman), Martina Gedeck (Christa-Maria Sieland), Ulrich Tukur (Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz), Thomas Thieme (Minister Bruno Hempf), Hans-Uwe Bauer (Paul Hauser), Volkmar Kleinert (Albert Jerska), Matthias Brenner (Karl Wallner), Herbert Knaup (Gregor Hessenstein), Charly Hübner (Udo Leveh)

For almost half the twentieth century, Germany was a country divided. West Germany was a world we might recognise today. East Germany was one George Orwell would have found eerily familiar, a surveillance state, where neighbour reported on neighbour, conversations and opinions were monitored and controlled, and the Stasi had ultimate power. Everything was designed to undermine personal loyalty, introduce mistrust into every relationship and keep in power apparatchiks who enjoyed privileges beyond the imagination of others. But what happens when humanity comes up against this system? Can the lives of others affect what the system’s agents think and feel?

1985, East Berlin. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is the perfect cog in the Stasi machine. Emotion isn’t an issue when he interrogates dissidents for hours at a time, or sits overnight listening to every word spoken in a suspect’s bugged house. All that starts to change when Wiesler is ordered to carry out an operation against noted playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). Dreyman appears to be the perfect citizen, but is suspected of dissident sympathies. More dangerously for him, he’s having a relationship with famed actor Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) who has attracted the lascivious attentions of the corpulent and corrupt Minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme). As Wiesler listens to Dreyman and Sieland’s lives, he finds himself deeply affected by exposure to art he has never experienced and begin to question the certainties of his world-view.

The Lives of Others is a moving, humane debut from von Donnersmarck, offering a rich and chilling insight into the horror of living in a country where thoughts are not free and words are strictly monitored. It carries such emotional impact because it gives us hope that, no matter the strictures of the world around us, common humanity and decency can break through and change us – even the most mechanical servants of a regime. The Lives of Others does this with realism and a lack of sentiment, showing life and the after-effects of our decisions in non-romantic detail, while also giving us hope that goodness can shine through no matter the cost.

Shot in a series of cold colours reflecting the featureless surroundings of East Germany, The Lives of Others exposes the beige hopelessness of Soviet life. It opens with Weisler’s long interrogation of “Prisoner 227”, cutting between it and a lecture hall, where Weisler plays tapes of it to teach a class. He shows no emotion of any type in either setting for the distressed, exhausted prisoner he’s talking to, and matter-of-factly marks down the name of a student who questions the ethics of what he’s doing. Weisler’s life is one of quiet exactitude: his apartment is featureless, his meals are bland pasta with ketchup, he has no friends and barely seems able to smile.

He contrasts totally with Geog Dreymon. Played with an ebullient innocence by Sebastian Koch, Dreymon has accommodated himself with the regime’s requirements. Does he believe in socialism? It’s one of the film’s mysteries – Dreymon may have an intellectual romanticism but he’s averse to making pointless protests or stands that will only lead to him being silenced. He is willing to accept the shelving of his director friend, for his works to be pushed into a realist factory-setting by plodding directors. His charm sees him befriend the high and mighty (“it was a gift from Frau Honecker” he tells a Stasi officer who questions his possession of a Western book) and he has boyish innocence, like someone who has never known the Orwellian horrors he lives amidst.

His friends however have. His director friend Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert) is an ‘unperson’ whose presence is an embarrassment at parties. Another is a closet radical who feels he should take a stance. Above all, Christa-Marie (a marvellous Martina Gedeck) lives with the abuse of Minister Thieme. This corrupt man – who orders Stasi investigations against people he doesn’t like and is the only character who looks overfed and well-dressed – fondles Christa-Marie at parties and forces her into sexual encounters in his chauffeured car. Corrupt men run this state – similarly Wiesler’s Stasi superior Grubitz (a wonderfully smug Ulrich Tukur), is interested only in promotion.

The system is propped up by men like Wiesler. But all that changes as listening to Dreymon’s life pulls something out of Wiesler he has never thought about before. What pivots this? Perhaps Wiesler truly listening to the warmth and vibrancy of Dreymon’s home life? Perhaps exposure to art? Von Donnersmarck masterfully shows (with complimentary camera moves between two locations) Wiesler teary, spellbound listening to Dreymon’s playing of a piano sonata. It opens up a new world of artistic and cultural understanding to Wiesler, who is drawn to the books in Dreymon’s apartment and begins turning more than a blind eye to Dreymon’s flirtation with dissidents.

In fact, Wiesler morphs from Dreymon’s dark shadow to his protective guardian angel. He awakens in himself a care for people around him, from the son of a neighbour to Dreymon and Christa-Maria. He conceals Dreymon’s involvement in a scheme to smuggle someone across the border (tragically the plan is a fake, designed to test if Dreymon’s apartment is bugged). He does his best to reassure Christa-Maria, “bumping into her” anonymously to provide her a moment of solace with a stranger and subtle counselling on her relationship with Dreymon. As Dreymon carefully writes an article, to be smuggled to the West, critical of the regime, Wiesler fills his reports with imagined plot details and quotes for the Lenin play Dreymon claims to be writing.

Dreymon is actually writing an article about the suicide rate in East Germany. Suicide becomes a heart-wrenching central theme. An oppressive, domineering regime like East Germany offers only one real escape: death. A state designed to make its own people suspect and turn on each other is designed to grind you into a choice between blank conformism or taking your own life. And we see the effects of this on multiple characters, as people are separated from the things that give their life meaning, stripped of their own identity, or made to betray those they love. For some, this is more than they can bear.

In this world, just displaying humanity is the victory. Ulrich Mühe’s breath-taking performance slowly fills with growing doubts, longings and passions under the surface of an impassive, quiet man who suddenly realises the world is larger and more magical than he ever imagined. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, he starts burrowing in the bowels of Stasi HQ, his eyes fixed only on what is in front of him. The film’s victory is turning this man into one who makes huge, unrewarded, sacrifices to protect another, the very attitude he quietly deconstructed in the film’s opening. Mühe is superb, the film constantly exploring his face for unspoken depths.

von Donnersmarck’s film ends with an extended coda of life after reunification. Some things are not as triumphant as hoped: Wiesler lives in poverty, the streets are lined with graffiti and tramps, cockroaches like Thieme remain in authority. But it is also a place where hope and friendship are possible, where things can be spoken rather than suppressed. It culminates in the sort of free-publishing Dreymon could never dream of and a tribute that could never have been spoken before.

After the crushing misery and suicidal pressures of the East, a world of possibility and freedom is one where we all could change our stars like Wiesler, to find an inner contentment from doing the right thing for no reward. Brilliantly filmed and deeply moving, The Lives of Others is a masterpiece.

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.

Rocky II (1979)

Rocky Balboa rides again, in Stallone’s enjoyable virtual remake of the first film

Director: Sylvester Stallone

Cast: Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa), Talia Shire (Adrian Balboa), Burt Young (Paulie Pennino), Carl Weathers (Apollo Creed), Burgess Meredith (Mickey Goldmill), Tony Burton (‘Duke’ Evers), Sylvia Meals (Mary Anne Creed), Joe Spinell (Tony Gazzo)

It’s minutes after the end of that shock title fight won (just) by Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers – very good here as a curled ball of frustration), but already the champ is smarting since the moral victory was won by plucky challenger Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone). Now Apollo wants a rematch. It’s the last thing Rocky – or his soon-to-be-wife Adrian (Talia Shire) want: Rocky’s eyesight is shot and he wants to retire to a well-earned career of cashing in on his fame. But when his money dries up, Rocky has no choice but to saddle up once again – only this time he and trainer Mickey (Burgess Meredith) are “gonna eat lightnin’ and crap thunder” till Rocky wins the bout outright.

I like to think of Rocky II as being, just like Rocky semi-autobiographical. If the first Rocky was about plucky small-timer Sylvester Stallone getting a shot at the big-time, Rocky II is about the hero returning to the scene of his success, but only on his own terms. Stallone had followed up Rocky with a film he wrote and starred in about union politics (F*I*S*T) and a would-be epic on an Italian-American family Paradise Alley which he wrote, directed and starred in that flopped. I’m guessing part of him didn’t want to be (at that time) just the guy who did Rocky. He wanted more.

That’s the vibe I get in a film where Rocky spends the first hour telling anyone who’ll listen he doesn’t want to fight no more. If he can’t make a career in advertising – and Rocky’s stumbling inarticulacy and border-line illiteracy quickly show that a filming career ain’t a goer – he wants a job in an office. Like Stallone pushing higher-brow passion projects, Rocky wants a new chapter. And, just like (I assume) Stallone was met by executives saying “just make another Rocky” so Rocky meets a (admittedly sympathetic) office manager who basically politely asks him “why don’t you just go back to fighting”

Just as Rocky fights Creed on his own terms, because it’s his decision, Stallone made Rocky II on his own terms: he would direct. The film we end up with is decent, but honestly little more than a retread. This is designed for people who saw and loved the first film – and at that time might not even have seen it since the cinema. It’s a nostalgia vehicle after only three years!

The basic structure is the same. Rocky shuffles around, bashful and quiet. He tries to be something he’s not and does his best to fit in (buying a home, car and posh new coat) but he never loses track of his fundamental decency. He still has a sweet relationship with Adrian – their ice rink date is basically restaged here with a zoo-set proposal (a neat joke since Rocky said in the previous film he couldn’t imagine a date to a zoo). Just as they had a brief will-they-won’t-they, so the couple have a crisis as Adrian struggles to support Rocky’s decision to go back into the ring and falls into a brief coma after a painful delivery of their son.

The training is all pretty much the same – as it would be in almost every film to come – including a call back to Rocky’s epic run up those steps, this time as the culmination of a run around seemingly the whole of Philadelphia, with half the cities kids running behind him cheering. Then he takes to the ring for another 15-round, mano-a-mano face-off with Apollo, sweat, blood and fists flying, Rocky switching to right-hand from southpaw.

Rocky II is entertaining – but it’s a diet coke rehash of Rocky, with all the same tricks but an ever-so-slightly diminished reward. Probably because nothing about it surprises you one little bit. It’s a film that’s looking to recapture that warm glow from 1976 and doesn’t aspire to anything more. It even ends with our hero bellowing “Adrian!” at the end. You’d have a decent quiz if you cut the two films up and threw random scenes at people and asked them to guess which Rocky film they were from.

Saying that, the franchise pretty much exhausted its kitchen-sink roots here. By the time we get too Rocky III there was no way the film was going to remember that Rocky’s eyesight was going or that he was a plucky underdog fighter. From here, Rocky would turn into a chiselled slab of marble and Rocky would fight Hulk Hogan, hire a robot butler and bring down communism. Compared to the nonsense that would follow in films 3 and 4, Rocky II really does look like the last time we had a Rocky film that might just have been directed by Ken Loach.