The Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time (2022)
The Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time has been conducted every 10 years since 1952. The 2022 polling consists of two lists, a ‘Critics’ list’ (250 films) and a ‘Directors’ list’ (100 films), with significant overlap. For simplicity’s sake, I am going to be working from both lists and combining the reviews into a single article.
Voters for this 2022 poll included Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Ari Aster, Richard Ayoade, Kenneth Branagh, John Carpenter, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Jonathan Coe, Sofia Coppola, Roger Corman, Joe Dante, Terence Davies, Julie Delpy, Pete Docter, Clea DuVall, Robert Eggers, Atom Egoyan, Asghar Farhadi, Abel Ferrara, Miguel Gomes, James Gray, Peter Greenaway, Andrew Haigh, Mia Hansen-Løve, Walter Hill, Mike Hodges, Joanna Hogg, Armando Iannucci, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Barry Jenkins, Bong Joon-ho, Neil Jordan, Richard Kelly, John Landis, Mike Leigh, Richard Linklater, Michael Mann, Neil Marshall, John Michael McDonagh, Martin McDonagh, Christopher McQuarrie, Steve McQueen, Michael Moore, Phyllis Nagy, László Nemes, Kim Newman, Gaspar Noé, Frances O’Connor, Gary Oldman, Frank Oz, Camille Paglia, Paweł Pawlikowski, Alexander Payne, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Lynne Ramsey, Bernard Rose, Jonathan Ross, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Penelope Spheeris, Oliver Stone, Tilda Swinton, Béla Tarr, Guillermo del Toro, Joachim Trier, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wim Wenders, Ti West, Armond White, Nicolas Winding Refn and Edgar Wright.
Following are the films that feature on this list but have already been reviewed as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century and can be found there:
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006) (#=243 Critics’ List)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzgy, 2000) (#=243 Critics’ List)
Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011) (#=211 Critics’ List)
Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) (#=196 Critics' List)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011) (#=196 Critics' List)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) (#=196 Critics’ List)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008) (#=196 Critics' List)
Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) (#=169 Critics' List)
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007) (#=122 Critics' List)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) (#=93 Directors’ List)
Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005) (#=93 Directors' List)
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004) (#=95 Critics' List, #=62 Directors’ List)
Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000) (#=90 Critics’ List, #=93 Directors’ List)
A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2009) (#=72 Directors’ List)
The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000) (#=67 Critics’ List)
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2000) (#=8 Critics’ List, #=22 Directors’ List)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000) (#=5 Critics’ List, #=9 Directors’ List)
So without further ado…
Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) (#=108 Critics’ List, #=72 Directors’ List)
When writing my first collection of reviews, and covering Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I stated that that film ‘openly laments the passage of time and engages directly with the fragility of memory’. Well, this movie, Wild Strawberries, is, amongst other things, about when your memories aren’t fragile, and do, in fact, make up a stronger and more pertinent part of your psyche than your current, ‘real’, tangible life.
The memories belong to Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström), a 78-year-old who is road-tripping across his native Sweden to receive an award for 50 years in medicine. Like everything else in his present-day life, the prize doesn’t seem to matter much to him. In a sense, one could even posit that Isak is somewhat already dead, a notion expressed directly through the dreams he has where he is being pulled into a coffin, and more indirectly by the semi-present haze through which he seems to drift in these degraded, half-speed, colourless final years.
Within Wild Strawberries I feel a strong sense of balance, as ostensibly incompatible elements not only co-exist, but do so smoothly. For example, it’s a slow film with next-to-no plot, yet it’s also brisk, a sensation most likely aided by the physical movement of the journey at the centre of the movie. It’s fanciful, yet also short and to-the-point. It’s episodic, yet unified. It’s a film that is both deeply melancholic but also suffused with a sprightly, good-natured air.
To this end, Isak Borg is an old grouch who behaves selfishly, but is also someone for whom the film affords large amounts of sympathy; its central themes wouldn’t be upstanding if it didn’t. Bergman was not yet 40 when he made this piece, yet was already exploring elegiac themes (to put it extremely mildly- it came out the same year as The Seventh Seal) and in writing the screenplay, must have had to project himself into the mindset of someone who was double his age.
He does so admirably. We’ve all met Isak Borgs- they exist in all countries, and some of us will be Isak Borgs when we’re old. Some of us are already exhibiting some of his qualities now. One wonders if the film were intended primarily as a paean to ‘looking back’ in an open, general sense, or as a more pointed tribute to specific people- those of us who are psychologically predisposed to nostalgia, and wallow in it seemingly as second nature; ‘the dreamers of the world’, to put it another way. It’s the kind of disposition that engenders crabbiness, as the inconsequential small talk of others seems to bear no relation to and brook no recognition for the yesteryear letdowns and regrets that are just as relevant today as they were when they happened. It’s the kind of disposition that compels one to see the face of a lost love on another much younger and far different woman. It’s the kind of disposition that sees one spend 50 indecisive, noncommittal years practising medicine without seeming to have any natural ardour for it.
Wild Strawberries feels like a major work- highly cerebral, deeply pensive, thoroughly engaging despite its lack of formal narrative, and strung together with the sort of effortlessness that suggests a commensurate, rarefied calibre of artistry.
Superb.
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959) (#=136 Critics’ List, #=93 Directors’ List)
In my previous collection of reviews, I had this to say about Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu: ‘[It] has a simple tale to tell, tells it simply in a shade under 90 minutes with the minimum of fuss, and when it is ready, fades out and ends without any great amount of fanfare.’
I felt that Robert Bresson’s elliptical Pickpocket took these sorts of principles to an obdurate extreme, shaving a further 15 minutes from Timbuktu’s trim runtime and proceeding to present me with a work that features…a man who picks pockets.
He picks pockets.
He lightly engages with the moral and sociocultural consequences of his actions.
He picks more pockets.
His criminality is his overriding personality trait, though his demeanour, that of a thoughtful, quiet gentleman, contradicts his criminal behaviour.
He is a man without a personality.
Sigh.
The movie was understatement, understatement and more understatement, made up of scenes that were concise to the point of surgical. What are the laymans, the simpletons like myself, to make of this? It reminds me of comments made by music reviewer Garry Mulholland, who writes of Angels With Dirty Faces, the 1998 album from rapper and Massive Attack alumnus Tricky: ‘Changes of chord or key or melody line bring surprise, delight and relief to a music listener. Angels With Dirty Faces has none. It’s so horizontal it’s drowning in a puddle.’
Mulholland really likes this record, though describes it as ‘a very personal pleasure, and [one] which I wouldn’t make a try-it-you’ll-love-it argument for.’ In any case, I feel he’s engaging, at least to some degree, with the kind of dynamic that every reviewer eventually encounters- that of trying to adequately evaluate a piece of work which just rides one single note, incessantly, throughout, and then ends. No grand denouement. No ‘best scene’ or standout sequence, and in this case, no clear indication as to why the film was made or how you as a viewer are intended to receive it.
Conversely, I quite liked Martin LaSalle’s smooth, subtly assured, inherently dignified central performance as Michel, a position which stands at direct odds with my overall view of his character and the picture in general. He plays a man who makes almost no impression on the viewer. Is he an ‘everyman’? Is he a ‘no-man’- a far more innocuous version of Patrick Bateman, who exerts during his misadventures that he is ‘simply not there’? Why is Marika Green’s teenage character preoccupied with him, and why does she keep returning to the narrative, and back into Michel’s life, when Bresson has not seen fit to develop the relationship between the two of them at all?
Nonetheless, one concedes that there is a palpable amount of supple, fluid filmmaking grace in Pickpocket. It also comes with that curious sense of unsullied ‘perfection’ accompanying works which seem to aim for the stillness of a placid sea- no wind, no waves, and no sharks. Barely even any ripples.
Tokyo Story (Yasujirō Ozu, 1953) (#4 Critics’ List, #=4 Directors’ List)
‘Any serious journey into the cinema sooner or later arrives at his work,’ writes Roger Ebert of Yasujirō Ozu in 2005, while in a later article, centred around his voting choices for the 2012 Sight & Sound list of greatest movies, he asserts ‘There has to be an Ozu’ (emphasis mine). Other critics generally agree, and quotes like this are abundant. Rarely has a director been afforded such hushed, reverent tones across the board.
These are the waters that one wades into when they tackle an Ozu film for the first time, and especially Tokyo Story, widely regarded to be his masterpiece. Its number 4 placing here is down from a number 3 ranking on the 2012 S&S list- second only to Citizen Kane and Vertigo- and slightly up on its number 5 showing in 2002.
So what happens if you watch Tokyo Story and just think it was OK, as I did?
Are you a philistine?
In terms of theme, I thought Tokyo Story was very similar to Edward Yang’s Yi Yi: a One and a Two, though Tokyo Story is quieter and much less ‘busy’ than that movie. When discussing Yi Yi along with Syndromes and a Century and In the Mood for Love, I commented that these films seemed to be ‘trying to wring poetry from commonplace situations and the kind of conversational exchange that you hear all the time in your own house but very rarely in movies, especially ones that aim squarely for conventional notions of entertainment and solid plotting’.
So it goes here. This is extremely calm, polite, prosaic filmmaking, ultimately quite sad, and very respectable, but I am unable to grasp exactly why Tokyo Story enjoys the reputation it’s afforded. This may be partly due to my ignorance of Ozu’s other films, as well as Japanese cinema in general, and the subsequent context that Tokyo Story occupies within them. But I am reminded of pianist Bill Evans’s liner notes for the 1959 Miles Davis masterpiece Kind of Blue, on which he performs:
‘There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.’
‘The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see will find something captured that escapes explanation. This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflection, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician.’
Now, I am fully aware that Ozu was not improvising, so only some, if any, of these principles can be potentially applied to his approach and style. But it seems to me that he may have achieved his stature because he never ‘breaks the parchment’, so to speak. A rigid self-control seems to run through Tokyo Story that remains steadfastly in place throughout and is never threatened by incongruity, such as, for example, the awkward inclusion of comic elements within an otherwise serious picture, or an unorthodox narrative decision, or maybe the employment of ostentatious camera angles that seek to remind us we are watching an ‘artist’ at work.
Tokyo Story comes with the notion that behind its apparent placidity and scenes of domesticity is a vast ocean of meaning and impact. The British journalist Richard Williams, writing- somewhat coincidentally- about Kind of Blue, describes ‘a melody so pure and simple that it gave the impression of having been distilled from some far more complex subject. The most obvious hallmark of all this was restraint, but behind the economy of gesture and effort appeared to lie enormous reserves of intensity…’
Then, of the piece as a whole (All Blues), he continues: ‘Its glow was quiet, even subdued. The individual sounds were delicate and nuanced. There was no showing off. No one was muscling in to have their say. Yet the impression was of great firmness and resilience and resolution, and a sense of perfection within the moment…’
Kind of Blue is an album unlikely to grab you on first listen, so with sentiments like Williams’s in mind as well as Ebert’s many effusive overtures to Ozu, I will most likely watch Tokyo Story again at a later date. But for now, it remains to me a movie which, quite obviously, has some weight to it, touching as it does on death, aging and loneliness, but generally drifted in and out of my life like a soft breeze- certainly not unpleasant, but hard to really say anything about, let alone enthuse over. I also, on occasion, found its dialogue leaden and repetitious.
Daisies (Věra Chytilová, 1966) (#28 Critics’ List)
At the beginning of Daisies, where Ivana Karbanová’s character appears to have hijacked a date, she shoves an entire cream-cake into her mouth in one go, and it ends up smeared all over her lips. She then proceeds to speak with her mouth full. The man across the table, who seems to have organised and be paying for the whole affair, wipes from his face the cream that she has inadvertently spat at him.
It’s disgusting.
Her cohort, played by Jitka Cerhová, remains relatively dainty through this particular episode, but the film will then go on to showcase both of our young anti-heroines engaging in one similarly indulgent and repellent act after another, culminating in something of a ‘grand finale’ where their destructive behaviour, often centred around gluttony, reaches its logical extreme.
One of Kurt Vonnegut’s rules for writing was to ‘always give the reader somebody to root for’ and Daisies is one of a relatively rare but still sizable number of works that does nothing of the sort; in this case, it hands us two ‘characters’, practically interchangeable, who we are not supposed to like and has us spend 72 minutes with them (the cynical among us might posit that if it were any longer, it would be unbearable).
You may not be shocked by Daisies, since it is a 60s film with no sex, violence or bad language and in the intervening decades we have of course been party to some far more straightforwardly shocking material. But if you are shocked, as I was a little, it seems prudent to ask if these activities are shocking because they are being committed by nubile young women and we are not accustomed to this sort of dynamic. It also seems prudent to consider that while it would be unusual to see a man commit the precise act I described at the beginning of the review, whether in or outside of a movie, it is not so unusual that a man acts like a pig in public, whether through swearing, unjustified aggression, or general crass and boorish behaviour. It’s not even so unusual to see this sort of thing around children.
Daisies is a film that asks questions, then, lots of them, and it is quite prepared to make itself ugly in the process. It is staged as something of a ‘comedy’, yet there was not one single sequence or moment that I found funny, and this does not feel like a failure on the film’s part. Sharp camera tricks and snappy editing give off the (resolutely ironic) impression that the movie is a riot of wacky energy- meanwhile, all of this is juxtaposed with images of bomber planes, war zones and industrial machinery which recall the fascist, chauvinist Futurist art movement first put forth by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. As viewers, we are experiencing a yawning gulf in the movie’s presentation and its intent- the resulting effects are clearly not supposed to be congruous with each other, despite the technical excellence on display (especially during the film’s many montage sequences). One then wonders how bleak the movie might have come across if its overtones of convivial iridescence were stripped away, and the extent to which, socio-cultural commentary aside, it might have resembled a stark and uncomfortable study of mental illness.
On at least one level, there is an attraction to morphing yourself into an ‘unthinking’ state, assuming that’s what these girls are doing, and potential rewards should you manage to achieve it. Dogs, for example, don’t think, and look how happy they are. This last observation draws questions as to whether Daisies’ two characters are unleashing their ‘inner animal’, and whether a person ultimately has any right to do this, especially when the action is not merely a temporary method of assuaging some pent-up frustration, such as a potentially embarrassing drunken episode, but apparently a way of life. Dogs, for example, delightful as they may be, sometimes shit on the floor, or bark their heads off at 4 a.m. when everyone’s asleep, ignoring any entreaties to be quiet. Humans can’t get away with this sort of behaviour, and nor should they. That’s the correct way of things. If we didn’t hold ourselves to altogether higher standards, then we wouldn’t be the feeling, thinking beings that we are, capable of impeccable creativity and great art.
Their actions, of course, are bizarre. Daisies is a deliberately bizarre film, but it doesn’t seem to run on ‘dream logic’ and with the exception of one scene, all of its events are quite possible- I would, therefore, hesitate to call it a surrealist piece. One might feel that the words bizarre and surreal are fairly interchangeable, but I beg to differ- one is merely a synonym for ‘strange’ or ‘odd’, whereas the other, I would say, refers to a puncture in the tangible boundaries of the world we live in. Real life can be ‘bizarre’, quite often in fact. However, I would argue that real life, almost by definition, cannot enter the realms of the ‘surreal’ without the effects of some external force- a virtual reality helmet, for example, or more commonly the involvement of memory, medication, insanity and/or sleep.
The single scene that conjures unreality is where the two of them become ‘paper dolls’ and cut each other’s heads off in what is presented as a playful sequence. This could be a comment on the way in which women are obligated to constantly deconstruct and reconstruct themselves- a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen, a whore in the bedroom, and stepping seamlessly into a motherly or matronly role whenever necessary.
Considerations like this sometimes make one feel that Daisies is akin to an essay that happens to have been delivered in filmic form- nothing necessarily wrong with that, as such, so long as the viewer is happy to receive the work in that spirit, and appreciates that its arguments, some of which are adamantly subversive, form the principal reason for the film’s existence. To this end, one could argue that the movie- especially with its focus on gluttony and consumption- is a precursor to Marco Ferreri’s 1973 La Grande Bouffe (banned here in the UK for over twenty years until 1994) and Dušan Makavejev’s 1974 Sweet Movie (still technically banned in Britain to this day). While Daisies is nowhere near as explicit as either of those pieces, especially the latter, and while Chytilová’s dynamics are so sly and so sardonic that one seems at constant risk of misunderstanding or misrepresenting her vision, the specific melding of heavy political allegory, outlandish imagery and broad anti-establishment tone foregrounded both here and in the other two films nevertheless prompts the comparison.
It is worth noting that Daisies also fell afoul of contemporary Czechoslovakian censors, for vague reasons, and that 57 years after its original release it is still rated ‘15’ by the British Board of Film Classification despite featuring no onscreen content that would even qualify it for a ‘12’. At one point one of the girls is ‘nude’ while she holds objects that obscure her private areas, thereby exhibiting no more nudity than would a bikini. I suspect the ‘15’ rating instead reflects the discordant effect of, for example, seeing sausages being cut through the middle with scissors, apparently for recreational reasons; one feels a discordant tension not merely through the obvious phallic symbolism but also through the fact that it is such a perturbing thing to see on film and it would be such a perturbing thing to do in real life.
Such content serves to highlight how Daisies is a piece of cinema that defies at almost every turn- it defies categorisation, it defies interpretation, it defies accepted levels of taste and decency. It defies criticism because it so clearly doesn’t give a shit whether you like it or not and isn’t asking for your ‘approval’ in any way. It’s a bold, brash, in-your-face piece of filmmaking which is also unquestionably cerebral. Among the many tributaries of apparent condemnation that run through the movie, what we might call ‘trash culture’ seems to be derided as one of our anti-heroines rips a curtain down, drapes it around herself and proclaims ‘A fashion show!’ while performing a stumbling parade down a ‘catwalk’ filled with cakes and treats and sandwiches and cooked chicken, all of which she gleefully steps into and ruins. The gaudy colour filters employed at various intervals seem to cast a decidedly derogatory side-eye at the ‘trash’ of Andy Warhol, whose work included Blow Job and Taylor Mead’s Ass and whose cohort Paul Morrissey actually made a film entitled Trash, one which Pauline Kael called ‘porno-absurd’.
You could proffer that Daisies is like a ‘Swinging Sixties’ movie gone wrong, a prescient missive that anticipates the Summer of Love’s terminal fate at a point in time when Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Sharon Tate were all still very much alive and active; it even pre-dates Love’s foreboding 1967 musical masterwork Forever Changes. One suspects that an artist such as Chytilová probably found the whole Summer of Love facile from its very inception, especially in a place like communist Czechoslovakia where its cultural impact must have been minimal and its aesthetics may have looked nigh-on ridiculous.
Is the movie actually any good? Yes, for what it is, it’s pretty good, and if on the one hand it’s perhaps a little too self-important and perhaps a little too willing to alienate the viewer, I found that its singularity of vision, its energetic execution and its admirable fearlessness were instead the overriding factors that defined my experience.
Groovy.
Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952) (#=157 Critics’ List, #=72 Directors’ List)
What would you do if you were told you had six months to live?
How would you react?
How should you react?
It’s a big question. You might even say it’s the biggest question, the ultimate what if? scenario.
Additionally, what do you do if you also have no friends, have devoted your whole adult life to bureaucracy and your only son is completely disinterested in you?
One option, I suppose, is to go to a bar and tell a stranger that you’re dying, which Kanji Watanabe, our tragic everyman, does. Under the circumstances, it’s as good a course of action as anything else. Other options are serenading a further group of strangers with a sad song from your youth, going AWOL from your job and openly craving attention from your attractive and much younger female co-worker (in this case named Toyo), all of which he also does.
Takashi Shimura’s quivery, wide-eyed, rabbit-in-headlights central performance is something of a mixed bag, though it serves to remind us that naked vulnerability does not always come across as appealing, thereby also giving Toyo’s unpleasant change in attitude towards him more believability and depth. In allowing his main character to be terrified, undignified and childlike, Akira Kurosawa subverts the arthouse tradition to examine death by utilising ‘stillness’, containment and easily-admired emotional composure to produce stately effects.
That’s not to say that Watanabe’s indignity comes about through a Daisies-esque unleashing of his ‘inner animal’. Instead, as he trawls bars and nightclubs, he appears to be merely looking for a new experience and do something he wouldn’t normally do, rather than actively trying to be debauched. The same seems true of his overtures toward the young work colleague- I don’t think he is trying to sleep with her, but rather, her youthful buoyancy and initial sweetness simply make him feel better, and that’s reason enough to allow himself to become an irritation.
Shimura was 47 when he made this picture- since Watanabe is said to be close to retirement, we can conclude that the character is supposed to be at least ten years older than that. We can then construe that he probably expected to live about another twenty years, and although in his original guise he is shown to be a profoundly dull and unimaginative man, we can nevertheless imagine that he had plans for those twenty years, even if such plans largely amounted to relaxing and not really doing much of anything. The movie addresses directly the innate cruelty and unfairness of a terminal diagnosis, and although the handling of this theme is genteel and full of sympathy, it also somewhat feels like watching a horror movie- a metafictional one where the invisible killer that creeps up on our hero will also, at some point in the future, get us too.
Kurosawa employs notions of great wistfulness and beauty in his vision, utilising images such as falling snow to further drive home the bittersweet vagaries of life, death and everything in between. Watanabe’s final ride on a swing, singing softly to himself, suggests a regression back to a childhood state, which in turn recalls Isak Borg’s figurative journeys into the past and his younger self in Wild Strawberries. If Ikiru employs significantly more melodrama than the Bergman picture, then such a thing can be easily forgiven when its effects are so touching, and evocative, and so wrenchingly sad.
The Colour of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1969) (#=122 Critics’ List, #=93 Directors’ List)
More than any other film in my current viewing history, Sergei Parajanov’s plush, brooding, ornate, thoroughly imperious Colour of Pomegranates is a visual poem. I have personally never seen anything quite like it- a movie that consists almost solely of imagery (though garnished with a little voiceover, some title cards and much incantatory musical accompaniment). Perhaps that exposes certain gaps in my movie knowledge- I haven’t seen, for example, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle, because it isn’t available commercially, but in any case, it certainly seems as if The Colour of Pomegranates’ emphasis on constructed set-piece is a direct antecedent for Barney’s sprawling arthouse behemoth.
An overriding impression I had of this film was one of control. Parajanov appears to be in complete control of every frame- he appears to know exactly what he wants to say, and exactly how he wants to say it. One senses that this piece was already fully-formed before he started filming it- that he knew exactly which images he wanted to capture, and exactly the order in which he wanted them to be presented. It has an extremely consistent colour scheme, an aspect which feeds directly into the picture’s lustrous textures and latent eroticism. If other filmmakers created a film in this style, there are a great many who would produce striking works that were filled with arresting visuals, and perhaps thought-provoking ones, too. But these hypothetical pieces would likely lack the control of this movie, whether through some self-indulgence or deficiency in thematic substance.
I don’t know what the ‘point’ of The Colour of Pomegranates was supposed to be, but if one accepts that strikingly provocative visuals can be a ‘point’ in and of themselves, which I do, especially in an art context, then this perceived absence of ‘point’ doesn’t matter. After all, no-one questions why Constable painted The Hay Wain or why Claude Lorrain painted his majestic landscapes- they did it because they wanted to, they were extremely good at it, and the resulting work produces an effect on the viewer that is mostly characterised by basic principles of sheer, straightforward beauty.
You don’t have to know what a song is about to adore the melody line. I enjoyed The Colour of Pomegranates for what it was, and although further research into Armenian history may be illuminating, and make an already impressive film even better, it may also somehow sully the blissful ignorance and quasi-childlike wonder with which I experienced the film.
The brevity of this movie calls to mind Daisies. One feels that in both of these instances, the respective film centres around key notions and ideas that the writer-director wants to express, and if this can be achieved in under 80 minutes, then they will do so, seeing no need to garnish any superfluous flotsam over their work or artificially elongate the resulting piece in any way. In both instances, it is also up to the viewer to tease out what these expressions might be or to maybe find more subjective meaning in the material they are being presented with.
It didn’t touch me as deeply as many other, more traditionally narrative-led movies have- the montage-based, dialogue-free second half of Miguel Gomes’s superlative Tabu springs to mind- but this piece offers you something different. It offers you a succession of images that are abstract yet clearly underscored by a central unifying theme. My earlier suggestion that Daisies was essentially an essay delivered in filmic form is surely also applicable here, but while Daisies was largely a socio-political tract, any politics in the thematic content of The Colour of Pomegranates compete with a heady brew of ceremony and ritual, passion and lust, longing, desire, and dark sacrificial blood- maybe it is not so much an ‘essay’ then, but closer to the aforementioned ‘visual poem’ or some Joycean stream-of-consciousness odyssey.
Either way, a feast for both eyes and intellect. Recommended.
Céline and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974) (#=78 Critics’ List)
‘Today, I’m Angèle,’ says Céline, an hour and forty minutes into Jacques Rivette’s hulking three-and-a-quarter hour opus.
‘Yesterday it was me,’ giggles Julie.
The two women have found themselves able to travel back in time and enter the bodies of people from the past, involving themselves in a story which repeats on itself as they flit back and forth from there to their real lives in the present, returning day by day to see how different actions might affect how the course of events plays out.
Confused? Yeah, me too, at least a little. This movie may be many things, but straightforward and easy to review it is not. What, ultimately, is Céline and Julie Go Boating actually about? On one level, it really does appear to be, quite deliberately and very cheerfully, about nothing, a celebration of what Boris Vian might have called ‘the foam of the day’- the spaces in between thoughts, or the times when you are compelled to say to someone ‘sorry, I was miles away’, or when you get an unexpected flashback from the dream you had the night before that momentarily blurs the lines separating the corporeal world from your own personal abstractions.
The film also appears to be about the different guises that we all move through in the course of our lives, and what life might be like if this aspect of your reality was much more expansive and far more ‘real’ than it is- if you could actually inhabit different people, in another time, or leave your (presumably dull and pedestrian) librarian job to perform burlesque stage dance. A life where you meet a new person that you find fascinating and allow yourself to physically follow them while they go about their business, and instead of finding your behaviour perturbing, they like you back, quit their job too, and move in with you so that you can indulge this new friendship completely unrestricted.
There appears to be a something of a sardonic streak to Céline and Julie Go Boating, juxtaposed with its playfulness and levity, exhibited by, for example, the fact that Céline and Julie do not actually go boating until 190 minutes into this 192 minute movie (and even then are disturbed by visions from another plane of reality). The very final sequence then sees the film loop back on itself to suggest that the entire thing could have been a protracted daydream.
To mark a cinema re-release of Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, a Guardian review by Peter Bradshaw describes it as ‘a kind of hoax or prank, a superbly engineered and detailed windup’, comments which I think could be far more accurately directed at this film, along with subsequent references to Von Trier’s ‘patent insincerity and facetiousness’. This is not to say that there is much about Rivette’s directorial approach or the performances of the two lead actresses that I might seek to criticise directly. But ultimately I didn’t really know what, or who, Céline and Julie Go Boating was supposed to be for, and I wasn’t left with any strong opinions one way or the other, mild irritation and a sense of disbelief at its sheer length being perhaps the most abiding sensations. It spent prolonged sections appearing to think it could get by on nothing but its peculiar brand of winking Gallic charm, and I couldn’t recommend it to anyone I know- I don’t think a single one of them would understand or like it.
C’est la vie.
North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) (#=45 Critics’ list)
I didn’t really get North by Northwest.
This is the first Hitchcock film I’ve ever seen in full. I can’t say exactly what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting to find the movie trifling, silly, kinda irritating, and thoroughly inconsequential.
I tried to put myself in the position of someone watching it in 1959, perhaps having never seen anything like it before, and enthralled by the kinds of thrills and spills involved in, for example, action sequences that feature our characters clinging onto the face of Mount Rushmore. Success in this capacity was limited. The film just wasn’t doing it for me.
Cary Grant is basically just a walking suit as he coasts through his empty leading role, sleepwalking into ‘crazy’, ‘wild’ situations while barely changing his expression. Meanwhile, passable support comes in the guise of OK performances from Eva Marie Saint, James Mason and Martin Landau, the former of whom is forced to put flesh on the bones of a paper-thin, incompatible, deeply unconvincing romance with Grant, and the latter of whom is rendered mute.
A complete waste of time? That’s maybe putting it a little too strongly, but I certainly didn’t see what the picture’s worth was meant to be. John Patterson of The Guardian notes that ‘North by Northwest has been called the first James Bond movie’, perhaps suggesting that the film’s ‘forerunner’ status in this regard is the reason why its standing in cinematic history might be so high.
If that’s its legacy, it’s welcome to it.
Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972) (#=211 Critics’ List)
Pink Flamingos is one of the most shocking films of all time. That’s not my view, per se- it’s merely an objective statement pertaining to the picture’s status and reputation, regardless of any individual personal reaction.
Should, then, one go into it with that in mind- pre-warned, so to speak- or try to take it as one would any other piece of art, and judge it solely and exclusively on merit?
Good luck with the latter. If the film is judged by the standards that commonly dictate such a judgment, then its level of artistic merit is, shall we say, negligable. Its shocking aspects have also been somewhat diluted in the fifty years since its release, with some of its content- an unsimulated blowjob, for example, or a close-up of an anal tract- rendered rather everyday by the advent of freely available internet pornography.
If I really wanted to be catty, I might say that the most shocking thing about Pink Flamingos is its acting, and the second-most shocking thing is its script, and the third-most shocking thing is its cinematography. But it would all be kinda missing the point. No-one involved in the making of the movie was aiming for Casablanca, and it isn’t supposed to be a ‘good’ film in the usual sense of the word. If one listens to the DVD commentary with John Waters, he sheds light on the movie’s intended audience and how it was supposed to be (ahem) digested by them; apparently referencing legal troubles, he comments that material viewed at a midnight movie screening when everyone’s been smoking marijuana appears very different when shown in a court on a Tuesday at 9 a.m.
One gleans from this that the movie’s primary function was to give certain people, of a certain mischievous disposition, naughty giggles, through doing things that other movies were both thoroughly unwilling to do and, by generally-accepted codes of conduct, considered ‘not allowed’ to do. If these giggles were attained, with or without accompanying gasps, then I guess the film had done its job. I can appreciate these sentiments, up to a point. However, I don’t really respect the film as a comedy. It doesn’t have any recognisable jokes in it, certainly not in the way of wordplay or sharp observation. A ‘running gag’ about an egg obsession was completely lost on me. Ditto a set-piece that sees a character tying a sausage to his cock before going flashing. 95% of this ‘shocking’ film does, in fact, merely consist of conversation- long-winded, unnatural, deeply expository conversation featuring speech patterns and inflections that nobody in real life ever uses. As stated earlier, the acting is poor, clearly performed by amateurs, from which pool Divine- somewhat carrying the film- probably emerges as the most assured.
Ultimately I had to ask myself whether I was watching a taboo-busting, groundbreaking piece of fearless and incisive iconoclasm, or whether I was just kinda spending my precious time watching someone eat dog shit, or raping a chicken or whatever, and acting badly. It really does look as if the eccentric on your street and their bizarro friends, who happen to have a video camera that they probably borrowed, could have made it. This sort of thing does, I suppose, carry a certain ‘punk’ and ‘DIY’ spirit that some people think is great. In music, it certainly can be, but on film, and particularly where this movie is concerned, I’m not so convinced. Still, for twenty years I’ve wondered what Pink Flamingos is actually like first-hand, and now I know.
Cheap thrills indeed.
Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970) (#=48 Critics’ List, #=93 Directors’ List)
Wanda is the story of a woman in her mid-to-late thirties, played by writer-director Barbara Loden. Its opening scenes see her sleeping on someone’s couch in a trailer. I’m not sure we’re ever told who she’s staying with, but I think it might be her sister and brother-in-law.
She’s due in court, and is significantly late. There, Wanda’s husband, claiming she is an unfit mother, divorces her. She is fired from her job. She falls asleep in a cinema and is robbed of what little money she has. This all sets the scene for what might be described as the main thrust of the film, which is that Wanda gets involved with a criminal, and the two of them go on a road trip of sorts.
Wanda hardly reacts to these events and doesn’t seem overly affected. She just plods on, and this attitude is something which might be said to almost dominate the piece, centred as it is around her unusual decisions and hyper-placidity. Is Barbara Loden deliberately underplaying the role? Almost certainly, and she has every right to do that. Has it resulted in great cinema? Debatable, and if you wanted to argue the case that it has, you would have to negotiate around the central character’s strange and often off-putting disposition. You would probably have to argue that this aspect has more substance and artistic validity than a movie with a clear message, trite as it may be, and a lead character with bags of pluck, grit, determination and general derring-do.
This line of thinking might be particularly hard to uphold when you are actually watching the film and trying to understand it. For one thing, what is its genre? Does it have one? You could probably call it a crime drama, sort of, but one feels that that would be misleading, since the tag doesn’t reflect the tone of the picture at all. It seems much more similar to the British kitchen-sink dramas of the early sixties- an attempt to delve into the lives of a social underclass who have been ‘left behind’ and live disreputably, numbing the pain at the centre of their empty lives by drinking, smoking, fighting, thieving, and having affairs. In the case of Wanda, they also try to commit a bank robbery- an act of apparent desperation which comes across as ludicrously conceived and laughably executed, with no chance whatsoever of success, adding a distinct layer of projected idiocy onto these disenfranchised masses.
The relationship at the centre of the movie is, in keeping with the movie in general, perplexing. It’s implied that Wanda and the criminal- ‘Mr. Dennis’- are sleeping together, but there’s no romance, and never realistically could be- they don’t like each other enough for that. What are they doing together then? What’s stopping her going back to her sister’s couch? At one point Mr. Dennis does try to get rid of her, stopping the car and telling her to get out, and in perhaps the only scene where she stands up for herself, she says she hasn’t done anything wrong and there’s no reason why she should have to. He accepts this, and the mismatched pair simply continue in their misadventures, roaming from one stark, grey town to another and taking up space in their fleabag motels.
I don’t know. As with many other movies that I’ve reviewed and struggled to fully get a handle on, maybe there’s something I’m missing. Rarely, for example, do you see this level of purposelessness, insignificance and futility expressed onscreen, and perhaps this is where the picture’s principal worth lies. Maybe it shares thematic ground with Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (a comfortably superior movie, in my opinion), in that Wanda may speak to a very specific aspect of the female experience, reflecting how little control some women feel that they have over their own lives. It’s commendable that a picture which is now over half a century old can carry a sociocultural point that was still relevant when The Headless Woman was made in 2008 and is presumably still relevant today; incidentally I also did not feel that Wanda was as dated as many other movies from the same era. Whatever the case, I didn’t think it was a bad film, as such, but I didn’t find it to be a particularly special one either. A little thought-provoking here and there, a little sad (it’s difficult not to feel at least some twisted sympathy for Loden’s baleful titular character), but I’m not really sure what it all adds up to. Then again, perhaps this feeling of slightly confused, disoriented dejection was exactly what Barbara Loden was aiming for, and if so, job done.