What Richard Did

2012, Ireland, directed by Lenny Abrahamson

In terms of current Irish directors, at least on the feature front, Lenny Abrahamson is in a class of one in turning out consistently insightful work. While What Richard Did is very different from his two previous films, Adam and Paul and Garage, in tone and milieu it shares with its predecessors a desire to explore some of the darker side of the Celtic Tiger. The storyline is loosely lifted from Kevin Power's novel Bad Day in Blackrock, in turn based on the death of Brian Murphy outside Annabel's nightclub in the summer of 2000, though Abrahamson replaces the novel's often artless, ripped-from-the-headlines qualities with a much quieter, more deliberate pace and abandons the narrative trickery that upends the conclusion.

Occasionally, Abrahamson's style is a little too on-the-nose -- the grey, metallic colour schemes and constantly blowing wind foreshadow the titular act, and are a touch obvious in their suggestion that all is not well in this world of privilege. The film's elliptical style works well, though, in economically sketching in patches of narrative -- a burgeoning relationship, the events of an extended party, the aftermath of a tragedy -- while also preserving a strong sense of naturalism. Where the oddball humour of Abrahamson's previous films is almost completely absent, his eye for the minutiae of Irish life continues to be very much in evidence. Indeed, having come of age on the fringes of this private school world, it was occasionally uncomfortable to watch: the film captures the rhythms of speech, the customs, the confidence of its particular world with anthropological accuracy, presumably a partial result of the extensive rehearsal process in which Abrahamson drew on the language and behaviour of the fine young cast.

Falsche Bewegung

1975, West Germany, directed by Wim Wenders (aka The Wrong Move)

Sandwiched between Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road, this feels only nominally part of the same road trilogy. It abandons the surprisingly warm black and white of the other films for a damp and chilly colour, and despite the unifying presence of Rüdiger Vogler in all three films, it comes across as an entry from an entirely different filmography -- a Godard film shot across the border with Germany, with an array of literary allusions, strange narrative turns, and that flat affect that's so disconcerting across Godard's films, from Week End to Nouvelle vague. It's a considerably more difficult film as a consequence -- the characters are consciously opaque, struggling with profound questions about their own ennui as well as Germany's history, but with little of the humour that makes the companion films so instantly engaging.

Make Way For Tomorrow

1937, US, directed by Leo McCarey

Though very different in tone -- elegiac, if not tragic at times, rather than comic -- Make Way for Tomorrow has the same remarkable facility with tone, McCarey making the smoothest of transitions between emotional registers such that he gives the sense of packing a much longer film into a brief running time. It's not as though the pacing is breakneck, either: McCarey is perfectly happy to linger over a scene, allowing it to reach the proper emotional climax, before moving on. Thus we get wonderful sequences like that between Victor Moore and Maurice Moscovitch, two old guys reflecting on their lives, or the scene in which a group of bridge players reacts to Beulah Bondi's phone conversation. And, most of all, the long farewell that concludes the film, and moves nimbly from sentimental to amusing to desperately sad. Bondi was just 48 when the film was made, but she plays older so effectively that I found it hard to believe her character was only supposed to be 70... In her rather quieter way, she's like a female Michel Simon, entirely convincing in roles decades her chronological senior.

Le Ballon rouge

1956, France, directed by Albert Lamorisse

My two-year-old son regularly asks us to switch on the TV in the evenings. Occasionally, we oblige and he sits still for all of three or four minutes in front of some children's programming and we switch the box off again. He's perfectly capable of devoting a significant amount of time to a single activity, but thus far TV is low on his priority list, and that's fine with me. Imagine my surprise, then, when he sat on my lap through the 35 minutes of Albert Lamorisse's beguiling film, entranced by balloons, dogs, buses, children, bakeries, staircases and all the rest. Perhaps without quite intending to do so, Lamorisse created one of those wonderful films that can be enjoyed equally by adults and children. On first viewing, the adventures of the little boy with the red balloon command the attention, but the film's documentary qualities, capturing so much of what has disappeared from Paris's streets, are ultimately just as captivating. Those adventures were surely among the inspirations for the Goscinny/Sempé Petit Nicolas tales, which began to appear a few years later.

Aujourd'hui

2012, France/Senegal, directed by Alain Gomis (aka Tey)

Gorgeous to look at, Alain Gomis's film is an elliptical, occasionally confusing take on how one man spends one day of his life -- his last, as the opening sequences inform us, though there's no clear reason for this, simply an accepted-by-all interaction between the worlds of the spirit and physical reality.

The central character is played by the American actor Saul Williams, who barely speaks, presumably because he's not adept at the languages of Senegal, and yet his near-mute progress through the day is very effective, giving the sense of a man drinking in every sensation for the final time rather than getting in the way with his own commentary, while Williams finds other ways to communicate his emotions. His face in the early sequences, where his character is alternately celebrated and lambasted, is quite remarkable, morphing from a prideful glow to abject humiliation; later, he transmits a kind of exhausted, brittle happiness that's deeply affecting.

The film's most remarkable scene is a sequence where Williams's body is ceremonially "washed," a preview of what will happen following his death. His body is manipulated and arranged in practiced gestures by Thierno Ndiaye Doss (in his last role; one of his first screen appearances was as Guelwaar in Sembène's eponymous film). It's a hypnotic sequence, reminiscent of the scenes in Claude Sautet's Un Coeur en hiver that feature Daniel Auteuil repairing violins -- skilled craftsmen absolutely sure of each movement.

Psycho

1960, US, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Testament to the continued impact of Hitchcock's film, which is so strikingly modern in many respects: it silenced the hip/hipster audience at the Brattle. Sure, those assembled for the late screening guffawed knowingly in the early going, most especially during the blackly comic sequence in Marion Crane's office as Marion deals diplomatically with both Pat Hitchcock and the attentions of a lecherous customer, but they fell utterly silent as the film began to weave its peculiar spell. The shock moments clearly retain their power, if one can judge by exclamations alone, though what makes them work is the tension created in between, with every interaction fraught with worry. Even now, despite countless pale imitations, Norman Bates is one hell of a villain, played to innocent perfection by Anthony Perkins.

Alice in den Städten

1974, West Germany, directed by Wim Wenders (aka Alice in the Cities)

Thematic similarities abound, unsurprisingly, with the later entries in Wenders' road movie trilogy, but especially with Im Lauf der Zeit. It's not hard to imagine that Rüdiger Vogler is playing literally the same character, notwithstanding the change in name, as though this film's Philip ended a chapter of his meanderings in Bavaria before wandering on as Bruno a couple of years later. The same geniality and willingness to go, for the most part, with the hand dealt are essential to both characters; also present here is the striking warmth of Wenders' take on the world notwithstanding the ennui at the heart of both films.

Like so many films, one of the major themes here is the creation of one's own family -- often unlikely in composition, and yet somehow seen as more authentic than one's inherited family simply because there's a degree of intention rather than accident. Where the American scenes are about the obliteration of anything authentic under a blizzard of soul-destroying advertising and consumerism, the German sections are suffused with a sense of loss of the past, the paving over of places of youth in the interests of progress -- with perhaps small remaining window to change direction before the American way wins out, though by the time of Im Lauf der Zeit Wenders suggests that the American way may have had its subconscious victory already.

Christmas Holiday

1944, US, directed by Robert Siodmak

Watched as a small tribute to Deanna Durbin, who died last week, this is very much the atypical film in her roster. She made the picture specifically to give her a more adult image after the juvenile fare that made her name (and her studio's fortune) in the 1930s. Both Durbin and Gene Kelly are effective against type -- Kelly is even further away from his normal persona, and it's a clever casting choice, finding the dark side in the actor's charm. Still, the film is very much Robert Siodmak's: he's at play with atmospherics in locations as diverse as a brothel and a cathedral, and looks considerably more at home with the noirish inflections of this tale than with the Technicolor silliness of fare like Cobra Woman.

I'm fairly sure some enterprising blogger made the screen capture used above, but I can't figure out the original source as it has been used by numerous sites at this point. Apologies for perpetuating the theft... Durbin is in tears numerous times during the film -- carefully aestheticized tears at that, with one glorious shot in the cathedral where a single tear appears as a pinprick of light against Durbin's silhouetted form.

Im Lauf der Zeit

1976, West Germany, directed by Wim Wenders

For a film that is in many ways about alienation from modern life, especially modern German life, this is a strikingly warm and often humours piece, in which Wenders weaves big ideas about society and social relations into a portrait of two men on the road. The interaction between character and idea is far more natural here than in later work like Wings of Desire, which never quite worked for me -- it seemed to signal its own perceived importance, notwithstanding individually successful elements.

That's not to say that every scene here comes off: the sequence with the bereaved man and that in which Robert (Hanns Zischler) reunites with his father are both a little on the obvious side, though each has passages that are successful even if the overall execution lacks subtlety. But those scenes hardly set the overall tone, of constant, elegiac movement in which we're always aware of the end of the journey even as it might seem to unspool to infinity.

Wenders provides us with a very different look at Germany: there's little about postwar recovery and economic success, but instead small towns that have seen better days, and the abandoned countryside (in which both central characters are complicit). The film celebrates much that has been lost in Germany's recent history -- whether it's old vehicles or disappearing skills like cinema projection, printing, even rowing across the Rhine (Wenders and Robby Müller show that they've not forgotten much about how to create gorgeous black and white images, though).

The central characters might be expected to embrace the modern given their complicated relationships with their personal histories but they are instead driven to revisit the past in an attempt at understanding. That process of understanding also relates, of course, to understanding where they stand as Germans born after the war -- the the chill, never verbalized, that descends when the Third Reich is mentioned takes the smile off the face of even Bruno (Rüdiger Vogler), that most good-natured of characters.

Der Räuber

2009, Austria/Germany, directed by Benjamin Heisenberg (aka The Robber)

Even by the standards of the existential crime film, this is stripped down stuff, never touching on the central character's motivations except to suggest that his compulsions are somehow innate and not subject to any form of self-regulation. He does what he does because he has to, and he does what he does well, though without any obvious pleasure, whether the activity in question is marathon running or robbing banks. The apparent lack of depth, though, is deceptive: it's precisely by the absence of apparent motivations that the viewer is drawn to psychologize and provide explanations where none are offered. There's nuance, too, in the robber's halting relationship with an old friend, their awkward early interactions reinforced by Heisenberg's clever blocking -- much is transmitted just by the ways in which these two people negotiate the same space.

Quartet

2012, UK, directed by Dustin Hoffman

Julien Duvivier took a story about a retirement home for actors and produced La Fin du jour. Dustin Hoffman, armed with a tale about a retirement home for musicians, produces Quartet. Much as I'm loath to snidely dismiss any project that consumes months or even years of the participants' lives, there's no danger that La Fin du jour will be eclipsed as a work of art on the strength of this contribution. Quartet is thin gruel indeed -- you'd have imagined an actor of Hoffman's standing would wish to give his remarkable cast rather more to do.

Django Unchained

2012, US, directed by Quentin Tarantino

A disappointment, and in many ways a mess -- not only is Tarantino's thinking on matters racial entirely muddled, to be charitable, but his film has little of the structural finesse of his earlier work, whether it's the interlocking stories and alternate versions of a Jackie Brown or the careful block-building of Inglourious Basterds. As Jim Emerson observed in his comments on the film, Tarantino constructs a terrific early set piece in a bar and never comes close to that level of skill and suspense in the remainder of the film (I did like the opening, too). Indeed, in retrospect, the entire first half of the film comes to seem motivated almost entirely by the need to acquire a bankroll for the subsequent search for Django's wife, and yet that search is absurdly attenuated that it undercuts almost everything that came before.

Side Effects

2013, US, directed by Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh is surely one of the most intelligent of current mainstream directors, wrestling with interesting conceptual problems -- not least how to tell certain kinds of stories -- while delivering satisfying narrative entertainments. There's a satisfaction in the neat, finely-honed outcome here that's complemented by a fascination with the intricate putting-together of the overall puzzle; you want to re-watch the film immediately to figure out what you could have known when, and just how the director signals certain ideas (through colour scheme or shot selection, for instance) or conceals little pieces of information from the viewer. And yet it's not just an exercise in careful narration, or for that matter in trickery. Soderbergh makes especially adept use of the interiors in which these characters live, work, and play. The spaces in which their lives unspool -- spaces of privilege, for the most part -- come to function as important adjuncts to the characters, and there are a couple of exhilarating shots where he takes us around Rooney Mara's apartment in quite deliberate fashion to give us a sense of the proximity of a number of key events. He also has a knack for working with fine casting directors -- the smallest parts are always worth looking it in a Soderbergh picture, with cops, janitors, co-workers all neatly sketched.

Clueless

1995, US, directed by Amy Heckerling

One of the great teen films, along with Heckerling's own Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Heckerling manages to retain our sympathy for her characters despite their uniformly privileged status. It certainly didn't hurt that the 1995 audience was fresh from a decade of Beverly Hills, 90210 melodrama, and indeed several of the gags make reference to that show. The film feels considerably less episodic than Fast Times: there's never a free moment here to indulge in a scene for its own sake, partly because the focus never strays from Cher (Alicia Silverstone).

Indeed, I can't recall many Hollywood films that have no scenes whatsoever that don't involve the protagonist, even if on a few occasions her presence is over the telephone. Cher comes across as a very canny young woman, eagerly manipulating her ditzy image but absolutely in control of her actions: in her own way, she's a surprising avatar for girl power, with no one, save a street punk with a gun, likely to put one over on her.

Pitch Perfect

2012, US, directed by Jason Moore

Entertaining, but quite honestly ten days later I can't recall the details well enough to post anything insightful, except to note that the film tries to include a couple too many supporting characters and then can't manage the logistics of giving them each something unique to do -- a point made rather flagrantly when they are dismissed as individuals in a scene where they are supposing to be opening up about their unique traumas.

The Day of the Jackal

1973, UK/France, directed by Fred Zinnemann

The 1970s were very strong on the big screen police procedural, and this to my mind remains near the top of the heap, partly because it's really two procedurals in one -- the criminal at work and the police on his trail, with the structure lifted from Frederick Forsyth's detail-heavy/character-light novel. The central character, played by Edward Fox, is quite deliberately a cipher, a point underlined a touch obviously in the coda, but this does remove the need to give him much in the way of depth; by contrast, the very occasional suggestions of actual real lives for the other characters are quite welcome even if left mostly undeveloped.

As a piece of film construction, it's deeply impressive, bringing together multiple sources of information efficiently and clearly -- even when we're switching locales, we're always aware of where we are and why it matters, and Zinnemann establishes his locations with minimal fuss, with none of those ungainly and often-parodied datelines. More awkward are the many different accents -- both because of the actors themselves and individual performance decisions, some nominally French characters speak in flawless British accents whereas others add hints of local colour either because they are, say, French or because they somehow feel as though adding a Gallic burnish helps their credibility.

At times, it's what Zinnemann doesn't do that's at least as important: unlike in many of his earlier films, or in Hollywood filmmaking generally, he avoids musical emphasis designed to amp up the emotional impact, for instance -- a decision that seems to parallel the Jackal's completely emotionless killings. The silence, or the use of background noise alone, is especially effective in the film's final, extended set piece, which uses a real parade as a backdrop for the climax, Zinnemann's often mobile camera especially good at picking up little details of the Parisian streets to lend texture to the central narrative. Those sequences reminded me, of all things, of Maurice Pialat's L'Enfance nue, of all things -- that film also opens with a real parade, albeit on a different scale, but it, too, serves to anchor a carefully constructed narrative with an air of authenticity.

Welcome

2009, France, directed by Philippe Lioret

Although it has its share of narrative contrivances, Welcome is, at its core, a carefully observed character study that brings together a teenage Kurdish refugee and a French swimming instructor (Vincent Lindon, as reliable as ever -- craggy, rumpled, gravel-voiced from too many cigarettes) when the young man comes up with a hare-brained scheme to swim the Channel. The opening is especially strong, giving us an unpleasant insight into the realities of clandestine migration and the ways in which the system treats migrants (the system, in this case, extending to the entire community of Calais, which has been transformed by a culture of fear). The missteps come later -- as with most films of this type, the focus is on the European/American who befriends the immigrant, likely partly a reflection of the realities of film financing, but it tends to push the film back on old clichés -- the bedraggled westerner given unexpected insight into his life through contact with the exotic.

The Dark Knight Rises

2012, US, directed by Christopher Nolan

Where I found the action sequences in the prior franchise entry pretty confusing, here it was the overall structure of the film that I found mystifying at times -- we kept looking at each other as though to ask, "have you any idea what's going on here?" I'm not sure if that's a reflection of the fact that this is the capstone film of the trilogy, and that we needed a little more recent familiarity with the preceding installments, or whether there are structural problems that create that sense of bewilderment. Even with the film's expansive running time, I had the sense that some sequences had been abruptly chopped to save a few seconds here or there -- or perhaps Nolan assumes, possibly correctly, that most viewers can in fact join the dotted lines themselves. That said, there are numerous individually memorable sequences and images -- the sections set in a hellish prison, Bane's masked appearance (Tom Hardy manages to make his character surprisingly nuanced despite having limited face to work with), the sense of a city in lockdown -- but it's almost a relief near the end when the conflict simplifies to the most basic of races against the clock and there's no longer any need to keep up with the multiple storylines.

The Hunt for Red October

1990, US, directed by John McTiernan

There's an awful lot going here -- tense developments aboard three different submarines and on board a handful of ships, as well as asides in the corridors of power in both Washington and Moscow -- but John McTiernan makes it work, carefully pacing his material and saving the biggest action thrills to near the end, while extracting remarkable tension from submarine manoeuvres that are mostly in the imagination.

Still, there are some awkward touches -- the filmmakers never quite resolve the issue of whether or not to have their Russian characters speak Russian, and while there's an elegant conceit early on to allow the Russians to begin speaking English onscreen, late on the trick comes back to cause confusion (Sean Connery sounds more Scottish than ever, though, especially when speaking Russian). And at times McTiernan appears not to trust his own instincts: Basil Poledouris's score is overblown, drowning out the dialogue at times, including in sequences where that dialogue would appear to be the main event.

Angel

1937, US, directed by Ernst Lubitsch

On this evidence, at least, the famed "Lubitsch touch" depended very much on the availability of comic material -- this more dramatic, even melodramatic, fare feels rather leaden at times, though it's not helped by the presence of Herbert Marshall, who seems constantly on the verge of a refreshing nap, such that it's hard to imagine he was ever catnip to a woman of Dietrich's self-possessed charms. Of course, that's part of the point in this tale of a wife tiring of the splendor in which she has been encased, but the demands of the Production Code entirely bowdlerize the central drama, and the dialogue, for the most part, lacks both the sparkle and the double meaning on offer in Lubitsch's finest films. Still, things do look up occasionally -- Dietrich's account of a dream in which her husband beats her is quite extraordinary, as is the later scene when Marshall and Melvyn Douglas reminisce about their shared wartime love (a Parisian prostitute).