Palme d’Or winners

The Palme d’Or is the highest prize at the Cannes Film Festival and has been awarded since 1955, though it also existed in a different guise from 1946 onwards.

2010- Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context.)

Uncle Boonmee is dying. He looks to be in his fifties- too young to die- and reasonably healthy, but he is dying nonetheless. He lives in a secluded part of the Thai forest with his sister-in-law and nephew. They trade mundane conversation. There is no plot to speak of.

One night, Boonmee’s deceased wife appears from thin air while the family sit at the dinner table. They barely react. They greet her like you would greet a casual acquaintance that you hadn’t seen for a while. Boonmee’s son, who had previously disappeared, turns up too, and now he is a monkey. He sits at the table with them and begins talking, gravely and solemnly, apparently still somewhat human. Again, they barely react. We don’t see him again for the rest of the movie.

What does it all mean?

God knows.

The film completely breaks off from this narrative line to present us with a vignette where a woman is complimented by a talking fish and goes on to have a sexual encounter with it. Then we re-join Boonmee and his family for a long sequence featuring very little dialogue where, with no preamble or explanation, they wade through the forest and go into a cave. Then we have a montage sequence- I quite liked this, actually; it was evocative, a little irreverent, and reminded me somewhat of Tabu. Then, after Boonmee is dead- we see neither the death itself, the immediate aftermath, nor the funeral- we have an utterly baffling sequence in a hotel room and then the movie ends.

These descriptions might make the film sound luminous and phantasmagorical. There are some critics who found it exactly that. But for me, such a reading runs counter to the many scenes of people just sitting around a house making pointless, ephemeral, often extremely stilted conversation. To my eyes, the movie was disjointed, incoherent, and often very, very boring. I’ve never seen a film that is both hallucinatory and pedestrian.

Of course, this is my very first Thai movie, so there may be aspects of this film and their culture in general (there is a single, passing reference to Communism and conflict) which are completely lost in translation to a westerner like me. But of all the films I have reviewed so far, this is the one I liked the least. I didn’t understand the film and I didn’t like it. The acting was wooden and the cinematography was downright ugly.

Looking at other media sources that have covered this film, including interviews with director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, it seems that these issues, amongst other things, were deliberate stylistic choices that reference cheap television shows and retro cinema. So perhaps there is something about this film I am just not seeing. Perhaps I am not used to a filmmaker who has had the freedom and inclination to be so flagrant with their idiosyncrasies, whose outré inflections might have been more digestible in a novel or on an album, where you can skip certain tracks. Perhaps I will be more attuned to Weeransethakul’s sensibilities when I tackle the other two films of his that are on the list. But as things stand, I just didn’t get this one at all. I wasn’t on its wavelength and it wasn’t on mine.

2013- Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche)

Now we tackle what is probably the most infamous movie on our list, one whose reputation was preceded, at least initially, by the industrial strength of its sex scenes. You can’t really review the film without addressing them, so it only seems fair that one starts there before moving on to the actual ‘substance’ and ‘depth’ of the film- presuming, of course, that sex scenes generally lack these two things.

It was my initial feeling, when I was maybe around an hour into the film’s three-hour running time, that the sex scenes did not only serve as a diversion from the story of our main character, Adele, and her coming-of-age, but actively detracted from it. We have to keep stepping away from the story to see her and her girlfriend Emma fucking wildly, grabbing each other frantically, breasts and hair flying around, squeezing, licking, writhing, breathless.

Is it necessary? And does it matter whether it’s necessary or not, if this is the way the filmmaker has chosen to tell the story? There are other films which have depicted lesbian sex in decidedly steamy fashion- Mulholland Drive, for example, the Wachowskis’ 1996 movie Bound, or Atom Egoyan’s Chloe- yet not felt the need to go anywhere near as far as this. Those films, however, were noirish and stylised, very tonally different from this one, with sex used more as ‘spice’ to enhance plot intrigue.

In any case, now that I have finished the film, my feelings about the sex scenes are more mixed. I can see now that there is a more pronounced narrative context for them than I thought there was. For one thing, Kechiche insists on an almost-forensic level of intimacy that extends beyond mere sex. In the movie’s intense final hour, when Adele is at her most nakedly vulnerable, we are treated to multiple shots of mucus running down her face, a choice that is less a question of taste or decency than it is an assertion of a director’s willingness- some would say insistence- on a warts-and-all intimacy between character and audience that a filmmaker would more typically choose not to explore. At one point she tells her girlfriend that she eats her own scabs. Another frank scene shows Adele’s emotional turmoil manifest itself in the sucking of Emma’s hand, in public- properly sucking it, really giving it a good old slobber, in full close-up.

There is a question, at least in my mind, as to whether LGBTQ movies tend to more explicit than their heterosexual counterparts (Andrew Haigh’s Weekend comes to mind, as does Below Her Mouth). If so, then there are further questions as to why this might be, and the possible socio-cultural ramifications. Then there are further questions as to how far these ramifications are felt outside the LGBTQ community, or if they are largely confined within it. This film’s themes, for example, would be potentially very relevant and valuable to 15 and 16-year-olds, who, because of the film’s explicit scenes, would be too young to see it (although, it must be said, it is rated 12 in its native France). One wonders, then, to what extent this film is intended as a statement, or a document of a specific socio-cultural moment in time, rather than a ‘regular’ film that one sits and watches and digests without any thought to non-diegetic subtext.

None of this addresses, though, what I am actually supposed to be doing- talking about whether this is a good movie or not. And it is. It’s pretty good. I found it a frustrating experience at times- a little loose, a little uneven, but peppered with powerful moments that generally rendered these sorts of shortcomings minor. One plot-oriented frustration, though (spoiler ahead), centred on the fact that Adele’s reaction to the breakdown of her relationship makes her decision to have an affair, in retrospect, completely bizarre, inexplicable. The man she cheats with is not a full, proper character, he’s not given a personality, and it’s not elucidated convincingly what exactly drove her to do this; our only explanation is that she felt ‘alone’. Interestingly, the cultured Emma reacts by, quite shockingly, slapping Adele and using epithets that would be more readily heard coming from a male mouth. This may be an element of the intimacy- we are now privy to a side of Emma that her urbane circle of friends and colleagues are unlikely to ever see.

The film ultimately becomes another meditation on sadness, loss and regret, themes that have reared their heads many times over this series of films so far, and I’m sure will many times again in the forthcoming reviews. In particular, I used very similar words when I was summing up The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a film populated by characters living completely different lives, on a different continent, in a completely different century, a clear indication of just how universal these themes are, and their place as an indelible part of the human condition.

In echoes of Ida and Fish Tank, our final shot sees Adele simply walking away, her future uncertain, poignancy implied rather than stated outright. Notably, Adele finishes the film with her back to the camera whilst Ida, with firmer steps, strode toward it, implying a level of self-control and focus which the raw, hyper-sensitive Adele generally tends to lack. All we can do is make assumptions about these young women’s futures- we assume that Ida will live a spare life of piety and discipline, at least for the foreseeable. We assume that Adele will carry on with her teaching job, and at some point, sooner or later, begin another relationship with a new partner. Fish Tank’s Mia is the outlier of the three. Conventional wisdom would dictate that it’s Ida- she is forty years removed from the other two, the only one whose life has been ravaged by war, and the only one of the three who will ever even go near a convent, let alone join one. But Mia is the one for whom assumptions and conjecture are far harder, whose future could take almost any direction imaginable. She is the only one of the three who is not alone in their film’s final moments- her friendship with the benign-seeming Billy may turn out to be brief and ephemeral, but she is not alone. And finally, she does not, unlike the other two, feature in the final shot of her movie. She has already left the area. Her next chapter- whatever it is- has already begun.

2009- The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)

Early in Michael Haneke’s shimmering White Ribbon, a young boy asks his older sister about death. Is everyone going to die?, he asks. Everyone? Including me and you? It’s a conversation that is both frank and tender- she tries to sugar-coat the news by smiling sweetly and saying that it will not happen for a long time, but she is honest with him.

Yes. Everyone is going to die. Everyone we know. All of us. There is no way out of it.

Everyone.

This sets the tone, really. The White Ribbon is a piece that examines, amongst other things, the way people interact with each other (verbally and otherwise), and what it means to be a human and why we make the kinds of decisions that we do. This is but one of the many conversations that occur across the movie in which characters speak to each other in a manner that is strikingly direct. Sometimes these conversations are antagonistic, sometimes they are relatively civil, but there is an openness to the dialogue which I found served several purposes: it afforded the film realism, it gave a compelling edge to its narrative and characters, and it allowed the viewer a ‘way in’, so to speak, and to effectively get to grips with material that could so easily have been impenetrable, infuriating, tedious.

The film concentrates on a single German community in 1913 and 1914. Their lives are insular- the inhabitants rarely seem to leave the village, and when they do, they don’t go far. With this kind of material, immediate touchstones would seem to be Béla Tarr’s Satantango and Ermanno Olmi’s Tree of Wooden Clogs, both of which I think The White Ribbon surpasses. But they’re different beasts, anyway- for one thing, The White Ribbon operates on a far more caustic level than Olmi’s slice-of-life movie; it doesn’t have a documentary flavour, even when it depicts conversations that have a high degree of verisimilitude. Leviathan might be a more pertinent reference point, although Haneke’s scope is wider than Zvyagintsev’s, and we get to see far more of this microcosmic settlement than we did in that film.

In any case, The White Ribbon is quite the masterwork. Practically everything about it is absolutely superb. The cinematography is stunning, while the pacing and general structure of the piece possess the precision of a finely made pocket-watch.

Director Michael Haneke has commented that his decision to shoot in black and white enabled him to create a ‘distancing effect’. Despite this, I found the film to be a deeply immersive experience, almost to the point that there were times when I felt like I was actually living in the town. Not unpleasantly, either; these people may lead incredibly staid, austere lives, and they are often cold, hard people who behave disagreeably, but there was something about this mesmeric, magnificent film that I found oddly soothing. I enjoyed the sweet, quiet courtship between our narrator, the schoolteacher, and the shy young Eva. For me, it was just as important a part of the movie as any of its political, philosophical or sociological themes. Maybe more.

It was only after I had finished the film, and done some background reading, that I understood the film is meant to comment on the rise of the Nazi Party. I didn’t think about this once when I watched it- after all, the film is set just as the First World War is about to start, not the Second- and subsequently I believe that you can watch the film, and appreciate it, without any thought to Nazi subtext at all, just as you can, for example, take William Basinski’s album sequence The Disintegration Loops as a general lament on death, decay and, indeed, disintegration just as much as you can listen to it as a specific artistic reflection of the September 11 attacks. Perhaps more controversially, I also believe you can watch 25th Hour with that same spirit.

Anyway, as with many other aspects of this movie, the exact ties to Nazism are ambiguous, and involve the viewer exercising their own judgements. Few of the characters or their actions are shown to be outright evil; the exception is the doctor, about whom we are left in no doubt, and his scene of astonishing yet casual verbal cruelty served, for me, as one of the movie’s darkest and most portentous moments. Things are slightly more ambiguous when it comes to the pastor. He is tough with his children, yes, and emotionally cold, and some of this toughness may possibly cross the line into cruelty, but his intentions seem to be decent enough, and this is 1913, and we’ve been led to believe that that’s what things were like back then, so it’s to be expected, right?

The White Ribbon is a probing, questioning film, disguised somewhat as an elegant period piece, and leaves these sorts of issues nestling in its undertones for you to pick through and analyse yourself. I wrote of Melancholia: ‘Maybe von Trier is making a direct comparison between the literal end of the world and instances where peoples’ own small, insular worlds ‘come crashing down’, and purposely making the point that the latter can somehow feel just as bad.’ There is something of a parallel here in The White Ribbon’s latent suggestion that the kind of everyday cruelty we have all seen and experienced is part of the same behavioural tapestry as the Holocaust; one may be far more extreme than the other, but they essentially draw from the same stagnant well of human impulse. This is a bold proposal, and one which has the potential to draw a storm of criticism from those factions who believe that if you compare one thing to something else, it is automatically saying that these two things are just as bad as each other, that they have an equal level of insidiousness. But the Holocaust simply wouldn’t have happened were it not for the in-built human tendency to bully and to subjugate, and consequently I am among those who think that these theories and hypotheses have genuine sociological weight.

I called Almost Famous ‘a snapshot of a moment’, and of course this is too, as we engage with a world that is teetering on the precipice of the most momentous conflict modern civilisation had ever seen up to that point. As the screen fades to black on an ensemble shot of the whole town’s populace, we again find ourselves in a position of making presumptions about these characters’ futures. We know their lives will be unimaginably upended not once but twice over the next thirty years; for some of the adults, old age, if nothing else, will have done for them by the time 1939 rolls around. What we’re seeing are the final moments of peacetime, and regardless of whether you like these characters or not, or whether they necessarily deserve to live their lives undisturbed, there is a deep, icy, melancholic beauty in that.

2002- The Pianist (Roman Polanski)

I haven’t seen many holocaust dramas. The only one I can think of off the top of my head, before The Pianist, is Schindler’s List. That is, then, my first point of reference as I try to sum up what is, necessarily, one of the most serious and historically important films on our top 100.

The first thing to notice was that The Pianist was more immediate and involving than Schindler’s List. We are given insight into family life and interpersonal minutiae that was, to my memory, completely absent in the Spielberg film. We feel the creeping menace as the situation gets worse and worse; we see first-hand a Jewish person’s defiant refusal to leave- a decision that, reverberating across the annals of history, looks stupid, but makes perfect sense in the context of the film. People are complex- they don’t always do what they ‘should’, and they base their decisions on an intertwining melange of experience, circumstance, inherent personality traits and the influence of others. Spielberg took a different approach- his movie was far more consciously a ‘document’, and he portrayed man’s inhumanity to man through a series of impassive set-pieces which saw the camera-eye itself view the victims as nameless and, to some extent, disposable. I respect that approach, and I understand its worth, but as a piece of cinema, I preferred The Pianist, and I would proffer that if you had only one film to try to explain the holocaust to someone who knew nothing about it, The Pianist would perhaps be the more useful of the two.

Schindler’s List looks like a newsreel, and also plays like one at certain points, but in The Pianist, it is brought home more pertinently that these people are real characters, they could easily be your friends and neighbours, they could literally be you. It could have happened to any one of us. And this movie addresses far more directly the question: what would you do in this situation? You wouldn’t just be scared, you would be angry, too, and that anger would influence your thinking to some degree.

Something else happened with The Pianist, though, which I wasn’t expecting: I was entertained. It had a strong, solid narrative through-line, it was well-structured and it was technically impressive. It’s a considered piece of work which generally keeps emotional manipulation and melodrama to a minimum. Neither is the violence overstated- if anything, it’s sanitised, as we see people being shot in the head at point-blank range without any of the brain splatter or viscera that we’ve come to expect from such an act. This is an interesting decision, as we do not get the sense that Polanski is trying to present the events as less shocking than they actually were (although you could make the argument that no movie could ever really be shocking enough to completely capture the scale of this colossal blot on humanity). Rather, I suppose, the choice to downplay violence comes from a desire to keep the work tonally consistent, avoid alienating more casual viewers, and ensure that due emphasis is retained on its core substance- its maturity, its gravitas and general import, its use of dramatic irony, its scenes of excruciating fine margins and blind luck.

2011- The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)

Of all the films I’ve viewed so far, The Tree of Life is the one which opens itself up most broadly to accusations of pretension, and indeed, there was more than one moment when I was intending to outright call it pretentious when I came to begin my review. This compulsion was most keenly felt when characters solemnly intone short, fragmented phrases in voiceover- phrases that are often whispered, don’t really make much sense, either in or out of isolation, and generally come off contrived and precious, even to the point that they could induce small peals of cynical laughter. While Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, for example, had the ‘excuse’ of irreverent and absurdist undertones, should they be needed, to assuage potential accusations of pretension, The Tree of Life has no such safety net.

Brave, or stupid? Or neither? I don’t know. During the first half, which contains sustained periods devoted solely to imagery, deeply impressionistic, without characters or traditional dialogue, it is questionable whether a viewer whose tastes are exclusively mainstream would even consider this a ‘movie’, by the commonly understood usage of the word, and might assert that it would be more accurately described as a succession of images and sounds, without a unified purpose, or perhaps something more derogatory. The film appears to target areas of the psyche that lie dormant much of the time, areas that deal with memory, and matter, and primordialism, amongst other things, and that our aforementioned mainstream movie viewer is unlikely to respond well to in any way.

Some of it, almost by default, is mesmeric, and resembles what might transpire if Zvyagintsev dialled up the natural imagery in his films and dialled down the more traditional narrative elements, though a narrative does become more foregrounded in the movie’s second half. Then again, I don’t think it carries the inherent grace of Zvyagintsev- it’s kinda clunky. The storyline is weak by most standards- it’s the 1960s, there’s a family, and their three adolescent boys do what Sixties children do; they play, shoot toy guns, chase each other, bicker amongst themselves, and receive admonishments from their father. Most of the film’s second hour is bound up in this cycle. I feel that these scenes might have been more meaningful, and more interesting, if they formed a portrait of the man that this childhood had formed, but they don’t- Sean Penn’s role as the adult Jack is an entirely non-speaking one which didn’t really require an actor of his reputation and stature. I feel that practically any professional actor of the right age and look, certainly one with plenty of experience, could have handled it.

Again, like The White Ribbon and The Return, we see a parent- another male- who administers strict discipline, although in those films, with the exception of The White Ribbon’s clearly abhorrent doctor character, I found their behaviour to be relatively understandable. Not so in this one. There is something decidedly ugly when someone- anyone, but usually a father- is exercising control over a household, and pulling out arbitrary, impromptu new ways to exert power, clearly in exclusive service to their own needs despite any claim to the contrary.

Earlier, I namechecked Malick when reviewing The Assassin, and I can say at least that I did much prefer The Tree of Life to that film. There’s far more to latch on to for a viewer like myself who is not an art film connoisseur but wants to watch films that are thoughtful and substantial, even when I feel that they somewhat fail in their aims. We’re never impelled to look at a given image for more than around 10 seconds, and I would query as to whether this qualifies as ‘slow cinema’ at all; it isn’t what I would have in mind where the term is concerned.

Ultimately, my feelings on the movie are very mixed. It made more sense to me, and was more digestible, than Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, but still, I have full sympathy for someone who made sure they watched the entire film, so they could have an informed judgement, and made every effort to watch it with an open mind, then subsequently wondered what the hell Terrence Malick was playing at, and why the dinosaurs and the cosmos were necessary or relevant in the overall context of the piece. The extent, however, to which the movie is an entity unto itself is such that it almost seems impervious to criticism. It would be like criticising a rock formation, or a field, or a flock of birds. You might not always be stunned into silence by their majesty, but it matters none- it won’t change their course, they’re gonna do their own thing either way. Then again, maybe I’m giving the film too much credit in comparing it to indelible, and inherently beautiful, aspects of the natural landscape. I haven’t gilded any other film thus far with that kind of stately comparison, and there’ve been a great many that I’ve liked far more. Maybe it’s the flow of the film that gives off this impression, as it sometimes seems to reflect the organic progression of nature rather than conscious, contemplated, human choice.

I suspect that The Tree of Life might be better understood as part of Terrence Malick’s wider filmography, especially 2016’s Voyage of Time. This may have been the case, too, regarding the quiet, mild charms of The Gleaners & I, made as it was by a filmmaker with a sixty-year career whom Martin Scorcese called ‘one of the gods of cinema’. And Certified Copy may well make more sense as part of Abbas Kiarostami’s substantial filmography. In any case, like Margaret, The Tree of Life also exists in a second, significantly longer version, another potential source of clarity and context. Unlike Margaret, this longer version is not purported to be closer to the director’s vision, but is simply a new, different cut, which I will watch and review separately later.

2012- Amour (Michael Haneke)

Amour is about an elderly French couple, married for many years, who are living out a quiet but satisfying retirement in a spacious Parisian apartment, filled with books and other indications of the intellect that has thus far defined their lives. One day, the woman, Anne, suffers a stroke. It doesn’t look too bad at first.

But it is. And physical incapacitation soon becomes mental degradation. And Anne’s slide into dementia is swift and merciless. As it progresses, Amour carries with it the uneasy feeling that Haneke is deliberately crafting a cruel picture that is as feel-bad as possible. But perhaps it serves to show us just how much sugar a typical movie has in it, to the point that we barely notice, and just how unwilling a typical director is to make one that has nothing in the way of comfort. We’ve seen films before that didn’t offer any easy answers- Lost in Translation was one, and Inside Llewyn Davis, with more pointed levels of anguish and despair, was another- but both of those examples featured far more in the way of general filmic vibrancy; for one thing, the characters in those two movies move around, they visit places. We’re not just staring at the interior of the same apartment for two hours.

Another potential problem is that Haneke’s sympathy for these characters is underplayed and sometimes barely in evidence at all. Again, maybe this is just an indicator of the amount of ‘sympathy’ most filmmakers will readily shoehorn into their movies and spoon-feed to the viewer just because that’s the standard, that’s what’s expected. Maybe they’re worried that if they make a film that’s not warm or tactile enough, it won’t make as much money, something that doesn’t seem to concern Haneke at all, or other artists in this mould such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

It is alienating though. For one thing, there’s something too intimate about how closely we are shown Anne’s condition; a condition that, were she real, she would want kept private from her family and friends, let alone the general public who are able, under these circumstances, to observe her like a bug under a microscope- pitilessly, should they choose to. There’s also something decidedly unfair about all this- she’s led a cultured, dignified life, and all that is irrelevant as Haneke’s camera chooses to show us these wretched days instead. Her husband, Georges, is depicted at his worst too. The inference, amongst others, is that this is what we all become in the end, even if we’re lucky enough to avoid dementia- shells of our former selves, regressed to a quasi-pathetic state, taking up space and arguably better off dead.

It shares some superficial thematic fabric with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but its approach and the conclusions ostensibly drawn by the respective movies are diametrically opposed. One important difference is, of course, that Jean-Do Bauby had a full team of medical professionals tending to him at all times, and Anne Laurent doesn’t. Another, possibly even more crucial difference is that he hadn’t lost his mind- on the contrary, one of The Diving Bell’s most defining characteristics was the power and vitality of Jean-Do’s psyche, and how much solace he was able to take in its vigour.

My DVD is rated by the British Board of Film Classification as a ‘12’. I think a ‘15’ would have been more appropriate, even though the movie contains no sex, very little bad language and no explicit violence. Why? Well, I suppose because it’s shocking. It’s a shocking film which I found to be deeply unpleasant, containing themes and concepts which are far too mature for a 12-year-old to process, that even someone of my rapidly advancing years struggled with.

Yeah, I had a hard time with this one. Enter at your own risk.

2007- 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days concerns two young women, Otilia and Gabita, student roommates in the late stages of Ceauşescu’s Romania, over the course of a single day. It’s going to be a terrible day for both of them, though that’s not evident from the start, as Mungiu meters out information sparingly, later leading to some resounding revelatory moments of very effective drama. The camera is more interested in Otilia than Gabita, and we can surmise that her day is ultimately worse. It’s certainly more busy- Gabita, for some reason, seems to do very little, especially in contrast with her friend, though some of this, through circumstance, is relatively understandable.

Such inferences are observable from an early stage as Otelia spends a sizable portion of her morning going from dorm to dorm trying to locate a particular brand of cigarette for her roommate, while Gabita, who as I’ve said spends much more of her time off-camera, presumably just relaxes in their room. At this stage, it’s not really indicative of anything overly untoward, as for all we know they take such a thing in turns, and maybe even Gabita has been performing this chore, or others, far more than Otelia lately; nevertheless, it sets a tone, and as the movie progresses this sort of supposition becomes increasingly unlikely.

Roger Ebert is extremely hard on Gabita, calling her ‘possibly the most clueless young woman ever to have the lead in a movie about her own pregnancy’, before going on to opine that ‘the notion of taking responsibility for her own actions is completely unfamiliar. We wonder how she has survived to her current 20-ish age,’ expressing views that I do not necessarily share myself. Gabita may have many traits- laziness is highly implied to be one of them, though I wouldn’t wish to level a definitive accusation based on the evidence of a single day- while tendencies toward manipulation and advantage-taking are also perfectly feasible. She didn’t strike me, however, as stupid, and I don’t think Mungiu, or the actress portraying her, Laura Vasiliu, intended her to.

Roger goes on to exhort that ‘if I were Otilia, I would never see Gabita again’. My reaction to her wasn’t quite that strong, but it was certainly odd the extent to which Otilia ran around after her, correcting her mistakes and clearing up her messes. It suggests that maybe Gabita has got some leverage on Otilia, some damning information, or possibly that she has done something comparable for her in the past and is owed a massive favour. It’s even possible that the two of them might be having a clandestine lesbian relationship, with Otelia finding herself in the role of a frustrated, put-upon lover- while not hinted at in any way during the movie’s runtime, such a circumstance would certainly explain a lot about Otilia’s actions, not least her decision to return to the hotel, not the dorm, at the end of this most testing of days, though one can also speculate that under these circumstances she would take any company over the prospect of solitude.

I hadn’t seen the movie before this project, but I was aware that it had a reputation for being harrowing, and it is. It’s a caustic, acidic film that left a sour lingering aftertaste and made me feel out-of-sorts and grubby. It is also unquestionably a work of substantial artistic merit and significant achievement, both from a narrative, scriptwriting standpoint and a performance-based one (spoilers ahead). Somewhat perversely, I found the most excruciating section to be one where Otelia merely sits at a table with her boyfriend’s family; only we and her know what has just happened before she arrived, and in a single, unerring shot that lasts several minutes, the scene pulses with nauseating incongruity and grating juxtaposition.

Again, as with Son of Saul, I would not recommend this film for some breezy weekend viewing or date night. It’s a quieter, calmer movie than the holocaust drama, but it unsettled me more, not least when Otelia appeared to break the fourth wall and stare at us in the film’s final seconds. To reiterate, she shares the horrors she’s endured only with us- even if, for example, she tried to describe the horrible family dinner to Gabita, and Gabita uncharacteristically took genuine interest, it would probably not sound all that bad in a recounted oral context. Even if she tried to put across how horrifying she found the experience of roaming the pitch-dark streets carrying a dead foetus before tossing it into a garbage chute, Gabita would probably be apt to think Well, at least you’re not the one who actually had the abortion, so you got off easy. People, and by extension life, can be like that, unfortunately.

2011- The Tree of Life (extended alternative version) (Terrence Malick)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. This review also covers a cut of the film which was released in 2018 and is not the version which won the Palme d’Or.)

Just over an hour into this extended edit of Terrence Malick’s hulking opus, Brad Pitt’s father character, Mr O’Brien, is extolling his worldview to his three boys in the car. ‘The wrong people go hungry,’ he tells them. ‘The wrong people get loved. The world lives by trickery. If you want to succeed, you can’t be too good.’

The sons are smiling and playing with a dog at the time, and one of them tries to adjust the radio, so we can reasonably surmise that they’re not really paying much attention. But if you say something enough times, then it will inevitably start to have some sort of effect on your audience, especially when, as in this case, they don’t really have any other choice but to listen to your theories. Underpinning the questionable issue of filling young boys’ heads with this sort of thinking, and expecting them to be interested in it, is the implication of the speaker’s high level of virtue. Some of his statements, almost by law of averages, are true- the wrong people do often get loved, and though The Wolf of Wall Street was by no means a documentary, it purports to be based on real events, and can still serve as sound indication that the world, to a significant extent, does live by trickery. But the central theme of his utterances, disguised as sage, dutiful advice, is that he himself is too good for this world- too decent, too honest, too upstanding. If he was more of a crook, he would have ‘made it’. As touched on in my first review for the movie, this apparent no-nonsense, unvarnished wisdom is in fact serving selfish needs.

I could see now that O’Brien is a profoundly unhappy man, and through this sort of rumination he is able to recontextualise his own failures, presumably making himself feel temporarily better in the process. It’s sometimes difficult to see exactly what his specific problem is, especially through modern eyes and through the context of economic hardship. He appears to be unsatisfied with his job, but it provides enough for him to live in a perfectly presentable house on what looks like an extremely pleasant, quiet, crime-free street. His sons are all healthy, none of them are tearaways, and his wife is beautiful, respectable and dedicated to him and the boys.

For a while, I felt that he had emerged as the key character in this version of the film. Of course, I remembered his behaviour from the first time around, but I had some sympathy for him in the beginning stages of this re-tread; it’s clear that he wants his sons to both like and respect him, as he wrestles with them in the front yard and sometimes grabs them at the dinner table in clumsy but understandable gestures of jocular affection. The sympathy, however, started to dissipate around the point where he made this small speech in the car. As the film goes on, there doesn’t seem to be any plateau to his disciplinarian tactics- he seems to feel the need to keep pushing them further and further, behaviour which smacks of immaturity and resounding deficiencies in judgement and self-control. The grandmother character played by Fiona Shaw calls him a ‘weak spirit’ and even proposes that he is jealous of his own children. His wife confides to her brother that ‘he works the men under him too hard. Nobody likes him. It’s not that he’s a cold or selfish man, but he turns people against him. He offends them almost on purpose’ (incidentally, I believe she is wrong where the selfishness is concerned). Immediately following these comments, O’Brien becomes belligerent at the sight of his sons having fun with their uncle, exactly like an overgrown child who is not getting enough attention, and essentially orders the man out of the house.

Some of this conduct might be a little more excusable if he was still in his twenties, but he isn’t, he’s in his forties, and it’s pathetic. Why did Jessica Chastain’s mother character marry him? It is solely because it was ‘the done thing’ in the 1950s to find a husband without delay and marry young, come hell or high water? The couple simply don’t seem suited to each other, even when you consider that the majority of women would likely have struggled with him; there is absolutely no reason why this sweet, kind, warm-hearted woman of strong spirit and good sense would want to be with him at all.

As I similarly experienced when re-appraising Margaret, I found that the extended version of this movie was a deeper, more legible experience than its condensed counterpart, and even with my limited first-hand knowledge of his filmography, I strongly suspect that this is Malick’s filmmaking at its fullest and richest expression. The movie has the scope and the intention of an epic, and at this length, it feels as if these epic qualities are more effectively brought forth. I found that one of the most prevalent aspects of the film was its portrait of childhood- both childhood in general, and a childhood lived a certain way in a certain specific era. I can see now why Sean Penn’s Jack looks back constantly on his formative years- they were the only time he got to spend with his brothers. I can see now how weird it must have been- how wrenching- to grow up with two siblings yet live your entire adult life as an only child. Your adolescence would inevitably take on enormous personal significance- mythical, mystical, and almost close enough to touch, yet gone forever.

One could argue that Mr O’Brien has somewhat ruined a childhood that would have otherwise been positively idyllic, especially when you consider how precious these years would later go on to be in memory. The movie doesn’t make such an accusation outright, as such, but perhaps what I find most frustrating is how unnecessary his conduct is. There’s absolutely no need for it. The boys are fine- they’re not even particularly rambunctious. If you’re extremely disappointed with your lot, as he is, and you feel the world is against you, as he does, then why transpose these problems onto your kids? Why not keep it to yourself and maybe talk these feelings through with your wife, in private, after they have gone to bed? Why not discuss it with your friends over beers?

O’Brien doesn’t seem to have that second option. His friends are conspicuous by their absence, and in this we can perhaps detect that Malick is offering a gesture of understanding toward those sorts of people that- quote unquote- ‘nobody likes’. Of the traits that can lead to such a thing, O’Brien displays many- profound lack of consideration for other peoples’ thoughts and feelings is probably the main one, followed swiftly by a common sense bypass and an apparent belief that if he stubbornly carries on behaving in this way, with no compromise, then one day he will wake up to find that, at long last, the rest of the world has done the decent thing and fallen into his insistent rhythms.

This gesture of understanding does not take the contrived form of attempting to show the behaviour in a palatable light. Instead, it gives us a textured, contemplative glimpse into the more human sides of contentious, grating, obnoxious, arrogant people- one senses that O’Brien wants to be a good father, a good husband, and probably a good boss too, but lacks the tools, and in all likelihood this quality stems from his own childhood and his relationship with his own father.

Like other long films we’ve covered, particularly Yi Yi, the extended cut of Margaret, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, this version of The Tree of Life is something of a sprawl, with hints of directorial over-indulgence and potential lack of discipline. This is not necessarily a bad thing- Memento, for example, was extremely neat and tightly structured, yet left me cold. While I still have a certain amount of doubt concerning The Tree of Life’s ‘masterpiece’ status, and I’m still not sure if the content really follows through on the meaning it’s afforded, these sorts of concerns are pretty insignificant in the overall scheme of things. What I saw this time around was a work of substantial thematic weight and some genuinely compelling character-based discourse. Like Far From Heaven, it was also a sad and longing look into the past, into a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Like Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, it asks how we deal with bereavement, and the answer is that we don’t really, we simply learn to sort of co-exist with it and carry it with us forever, in some faded, pale, meagre version of acceptance.

2000- Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier)

After Melancholia, Dogville and Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark is my fourth von Trier movie in a row which presents me with a portrait of a woman in struggle. Often, the woman in question is being undercut or misunderstood or trampled on in some way by society or by people close to her, and this movie fits entirely within that mould.

When I covered Mulholland Drive, I commented that ‘There are two ways to look at [recurring], derivative elements. One is that through re-iterating and re-constituting themes from his other works, David Lynch is accentuating the auteur nature of his oeuvre. The other is that these qualities are now feeling like re-heated food and starting to go a bit stale’. This movie too, I feel, raises these sorts of questions.

It is understandable that an artist who is not chasing trends or any specific calculated commercial breakthrough, and for whom creative expression is always the primary motivating factor, may choose to regularly revisit the same refrains in their work. JMW Turner, for example, was compelled to paint maritime storms and shipwrecks, time after time after time, year after year after year. One can only really speculate why- was it because he felt somewhat dissatisfied with his previous shipwrecks, and was trying, quasi-obsessively, to ‘get it right’?

I don’t think that’s the case with von Trier. I don’t think he’s trying to perfect a formula, I think he simply makes the film he wants to make, and if you don’t like it, so be it, which is, in my opinion, an inherently good attitude for an artist to have. All filmmakers should have it really, and so should everyone else in the creative sphere- at least those who are not making works for children.

So why did I find Dancer in the Dark so limp? Maybe ‘limp’ is too strong a word, and maybe the movie’s perceived ineffectiveness is solely a byproduct of ‘diminishing returns’ when placed against the three previous movies mentioned, two of which post-date this one (trying to get a handle on a director’s creative vision, across multiple movies, can sometimes get a bit knotty when you are not viewing them in exact chronological order.) Because I actually thought the movie was OK, and more artistically stimulating than most. If it had been a first feature, it would have been exceptionally promising, and would likely have heralded the arrival of a major new talent.

So yeah, maybe ‘limp’ is not the correct word. But if I found the film a little flatter than the other three, perhaps is it because there were elements of tension present in Melancholia, Dogville and Breaking the Waves that are not present here- dangerous psychosexual explorations underpinned Dogville and Breaking the Waves, and though that was less prevalent in Melancholia, its central character was a misanthropic manic depressive who took perverse pleasure in the imminent demise of the entire world and everything in it, and was quite willing to say so. By contrast, Dancer in the Dark’s Selma- played surprisingly well by Björk in a beguiling performance that rides the line between assured and naïve- is simply a quiet, sweet woman who is polite to everyone and appears to have no sexual impulses at all. Roger Ebert uses the words ‘simpleminded’ and- with a qualifier- ‘retarded’ to describe her, and I don’t agree- though we are shown that she is a dreamer, a trait that renders her practically unable to perform her factory job, she also seems to be quite collected, certainly in comparison to Bess from Breaking the Waves, and although also possessed of a passivity that sometimes comes across childlike, I would posit that there is nothing overly wrong with this woman and, though undeniably eccentric, she is relatively normal.

Selma’s daydreams take the form of song-and-dance musical set-pieces featuring original songs. The songs were poor, in my opinion- simplistic, leaden and repetitive- and this may be due to an innate predisposition on my part against the musical genre in general; I made very similar comments when I was covering Leos Carax’s Annette, where the songs were provided by Sparks, a band who, like Björk, have had a stellar career and are highly beloved both critically and commercially. Maybe, for some reason, their music does not translate particularly well across this specific medium, and the skills one needs to write music for film are not the same skills one needs for the rock and pop charts, even for the kinds of restlessly creative, fiercely idiosyncratic acts like those that Sparks and Björk both are. The set-pieces also represent massive tonal shifts- not a huge problem, as you will get this sort of dynamic in daring cinematic works, and it is almost to be expected with von Trier, whose career sometimes seems as if it was built almost entirely on risk.

Either way, I thought it was all a bit of a mishmash, and ultimately I found it to be comfortably the least effective of the four von Trier movies I have discussed so far. The 1960s setting was pointless and added nothing. The tragic, melodramatic elements were handled with deliberate lack of moderation or nuance and it was pretty clear from an early stage that the film was going to be played out to its most upsetting, worst-case-scenario conclusion. Did the film have some interesting moments and ideas? Absolutely. Was it thought-provoking? Yes, of course, up to a point- I expect that every single one of von Trier’s movies, good, bad or indifferent, will meet this particular criterion. But overall, I wasn’t convinced by this one.