Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie is addictive for more than one reason, among which strikes me how subtly the entire cast embraces its peculiar sense of humour elevating the page towards unscriptable dramatic heights.
Often said throughout the film, ‘avec plaisir’ isn’t just a polite expression of delight but also an exquisite moment of unwitting irony—pleasure being, strive as it might, the one thing Buñuel’s jolly middle-class brigade constantly fails to achieve. Relentless dinner parties are interrupted by a cascade of increasingly preposterous impediments. A café in central Paris unlikely runs out of tea, coffee, and milk—but they do have water. An extramarital love affair is not consumed as the passion is chilled by the inconvenient arrival of a friend, and husband. And yet they go, tenaciously, whether running away from dubious ancestral fears or made invulnerable by their charming form or bravery. They move from house to house beautifully dressed in compact formation—unquiet, almost comical, the clicking of their heels. Lacking an author and a direction, they only know the few lines of a part they play indefinitely, which includes petty notions such as how to mix a martini, carve a turkey, or test the purity of cocaine. Like in the iconic recurring scene that sees them walk in the heat of a sunny day on a deserted countryside road, they come from nowhere, and to nowhere they march—alone.

“Cinema is an instrument of poetry, with all that that word can imply of the sense of liberation, of subversion of reality, of the threshold of the marvellous world of the subconscious, of nonconformity with the limited society that surrounds us.”
—Luis Buñuel

So for now you just call me something personal like, Jesus Christ.
I’m not Christian, I’m sorry your children died.

The screenplay for C’mon C’mon is a pretty exciting read—the draft I have, not quite the final, but close enough. The dialogues sport the witty sharpness that only comes from the pen of a writer. Some will be nuanced by a more real if less eloquent tension, once shot. The situations are perfectly relatable, often touching—the electric feel that art gives when it seems to have reached inner places we only thought we knew. Moving from the specific to the chorus and back is strangely visual on the page, where questions are posed to diverse children letting the word improv be a clue to the world their unscripted answers will unfold. One in particular scared me, took me by surprise, made me reflect on how the world will look like after I am gone—different.
Mike Mills explores hidden ties between listening, remembering, future, and control, giving us something sensory to cling to—a sound recording gear, mobile phones, classical music. Ten-year-old Woody Norman is brilliant, in fact, inspiring. His natural performance sets the bar and the style, the other actors seemingly trying to catch up and do their best to play along. The low-contrast, bright b/w feels like a great choice to bring different cities, people, and experiences under the same silvery sky. Some aerial views of LA and street photographs of NYC are particularly stunning. I would so love to visit New Orleans!
And yet I wonder if said all this is still OK to not have loved C’mon C’mon so madly—perhaps a film that relying too much on what really is a non-exceptional extraordinariness, shows how taking life to the screen straight, even with the support of unquestionable talent, is not enough to get an exceptional film.

‘They had to evacuate the grade school on Tuesday. Kids were getting headaches and eye irritations, tasting metal in their mouths. A teacher rolled on the floor and spoke foreign languages. No one knew what was wrong.’ ¹

At the end of a screening at the Soho Hotel—the beautiful scarlet seats in a room designed, perhaps carved, as a contemporary Greek theatre in a London basement—two art deco armchairs are brought on stage, the narrow space between the screen and the front row that is. Moments later, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach are sitting there, wearing right the stylish clothes one would expect, promptly delving into an amicable conversation and an insightful reflection on the act of making.
What did you mean to say, is the daunting question any artist will eventually be asked. Very candidly, they seem to share the feeling to have never written a script knowing exactly what it was about. It’s normally something you discover after two or three Q&As, they convene. Mike Nichols—further elaborating, now seriously—always had that clarity in mind. But to them, shaping ideas through words on paper is a different kind of journey that, even when adapting from a book, is still driven by raw intuitions. While their tone is full of genuine admiration for the mastery of their late common friend, I cross my legs the other way and reflect on whether that lack of conscious intent is actually the only key to retelling DeLillo’s layered maximalist novel without being constrained by the search for its meaning or the lucidity to articulate it. In this respect, Baumbach succeeds in finding his way through an exhilarating maze of ideas that could have been translated in countless different films—or no one at all—and a place that is loose enough from its source material to make any attempt at comparing the two an utter nonsense.
The first part of White Noise—from the sheer writing bravura of its introductory dissertation on the value of car crashes in American films onwards—is perky and hypnotically strange. Its distinct Eighties–Spielberg flavour, along with the garish colour of the vegetables on the table at home, in the canteen of a college, on the shelves of a dehumanised—or dehumanising—supermarket, even allows a slightly perverse nostalgic feeling, If not for the time, for its cinema. From there, things dip into darker psychotic matters, only to let us realise how these have been looming all over since the very first frame. The finale gets suddenly a little wacky, in an unexpected vintage cult fashion. But maybe it’s good, I am still considering. Maybe my bewilderment should find peace in what Noah Baumbach said towards the end of the evening about the inexplicable joy of things that happen in a story ‘just like that,’ without trying to be univocally intelligible or display an obvious narrative logic.
One last note. I always thought that films that end in a big dance choreography should be made illegal. I haven’t changed my mind, and yet I’ll admit that focusing on one single character at a time during the tragic coda not only made me laugh, but also think—all those people, like tiny coloured plastic figures in some scale model—what a fitting image to represent our manic new world. And come full circle.

1. An excerpt from Don DeLillo’s White Noise that I find spookily meaningful—no one knew what was wrong.

It was never on my very biopic-unfriendly list, but after having surrendered to Spencer and Elvis, it only seemed fair that I watched this too. And that will be it for a while.
Blonde is so patchy to have left me unsure of what I’ve seen or, if anything, with a series of thoughts that are equally dichotomised. Alternating notable glimpses of creativity with jarring uninspired moments, its aesthetics are messy to say the least. The image gets often overly manipulated by pointless visual effects of all sorts. Too much trying, and perhaps too cinephile a director. The freaking talking photo à la Harry Potter of Norma’s dad put me off. I resisted the temptation to give up purely because it was too early in the film to be so resolute. The elaborate use of different aspect ratios combined with the random back and forth between colour and b/w also felt a bit crafty, overthought, only bearable because of the superbly photographed shots coming through at regular intervals to save the day.
Ana de Armas is a marvel as an actor even when the script, despite appreciable efforts, doesn’t allow her to dare beyond the received notion of the icon. The interesting thing about a film on such a mythical figure is that it inevitably has to deal with the consequences of that very idea, with the established gossip, with the popular knowledge whether false or true, and with whatever publicity fed us with over the years. Where Blonde fails is in finding a voice that doesn’t necessarily say anything more or different, but does it independently enough to really intrigue. Although with a certain style, Blonde essentially joins the chorus at the likely risk of being soon forgotten.
Adrien Brody and Bobby Cannavale brilliantly portray what I guess are to be considered particularly fictionalised versions of Joe di Maggio and Arthur Miller. Shame they didn’t get more screen time. But the silent heroes in the cast are Julianne Nicholson and David Warshovsky, who turn Norma Jeane’s mum and Marilyn’s trusted make-up man into unexpectedly seductive characters.
‘I just wanna begin again from zero,’ is a line that resonates with me, but what she says immediately after, is the piece of dialogue that I shall remember. ‘In the movies they chop you all to bits. Cut, cut, cut. It’s a jigsaw puzzle. But you are not the one to put the pieces together. Oh, but to live in a part. To just be in it till the closing curtain every night.’ Which is not just Dominik’s way to bluntly state what he doesn’t seem to like of cinema—Blonde being full of highly enjoyable long takes and monologues—but also one to note how brutal the world can be in dissecting people, and how endemic their desire to escape from their own lives has worryingly become. Echoing this, the uncomfortably long shot on Norma’s feet as she lies motionless on her bed is eerie and touching at once. It should have lasted even longer.

To say that a good part of it is made of Steadicam closeups on people walking—or rather marching, frowned, mostly on their own—might sound reductive, and yet is not, nor is a lie. Romain Gavras embraces the fashionable technique of long continuous shots to give his otherwise classically conceived tragedy a contemporary, relentless, human pulse. Arms throw Molotovs, but it’s when legs move that ideas are processed. Athena advances through reflective moments tightly framed, while fancily choreographed hectic sequences populated by hordes of extras serve as bridges and provide the spectacle—one of such furious energy to evoke the crazed spirits of Fury Road. To craft his complex camerawork, Gavras avoids resorting to CG, resulting in gravity and a more physical flow. Without indulging as many directors have done in recent years in ungrounded visual or technical itches, he knows when to cut and when the narrative requires a more conservative language. His background in music videos might be apparent, but however aesthetically stylised, his cinematic vision is convincing and efficient. I don’t mind how blurry is his political take, or shallow the social insights. Athena is about the inherent nonsense of any act of violence in a world where media and devices are catalysts of escalating apocalyptic traits. And she is the woman wearing no helmet that calls her sons in the most crucial moments reminding them, and us, what is at stake—what really is being destroyed.

Regarde là-bas, un bateau! A man and a woman promenade along the waterfront after dinner. ‘It travels to other countries, other worlds,’ she says. ‘I’m so jealous of people who travel.’ Reverse shot on the sea, a Western rock tune¹ kicks in. We stay for an awkward stretch of time on the almost mystical view, a few glowing dots neatly aligned in the pitch black that we only know from the lady’s remark being a ship. It is an unexpected meditative moment that takes us to the very core of Timité Bassori’s oddly psychedelic tale. Whether it is the afterlife, a distant place, or the future experienced through an ominously real hallucination, La femme au couteau is pervaded by a vivid sense of elsewhere that is in any case unknown, inescapable, and therefore source of dreams or nightmares. The conflicting awareness that what is perceived as a promised land is also sweeping away a cultural identity, intersects with personal human struggles, one becoming a metaphor for the other. As revealed by Bassori himself, the angry woman with a knife is the symbol of a traditional Africa fighting to reclaim her children. But however messy the structure he gave to the ambitious ideas of which the film is brimful, what her image evokes goes far beyond the intentions stated.

1. As the end credits make no mention of the soundtracks, I couldn’t help scooby-doo-ing around it, finding out that this particularly fine guitar solo is from an instrumental Southern soul interpretation of The Beatles’ Come Together by Booker T. & the M.G.’s (McLemore Avenue, 1970).

Crimes to the Future opens with a striking image that is likely to slip into the back of our mind as the story unfolds, only to gain meaning retrospectively, maybe strengthened by a second viewing. In the only shot filmed in the sunlight, the wreck of a liner lies on the shore obstructing the horizon. Huge, rusty, and abandoned. The camera lingers on the carcass, then tracks back to reveal a long-haired kid, squat in a vaguely simian pose, playing with a stick, the muddy sand, some pebbles. ‘I don’t want you eating anything you find in there, you understand me?’ A monument to the failure of evolution as we thought of it for centuries, next to that of a new generation that’s about to establish itself. And from there, we are thrown into the dark.
People craving for physical pain. Parents killing their own offspring. New vices and inner beauties. Prophecies such as ‘surgery is the new sex’ and ‘sexier means easier funding’ echoing like mantras. Performing, appearing, competing. And plastic eaters. ‘Because our bodies are telling us it is time to change, time for human evolution to sync up with human technology. We’ve got to start feeding on our own industrial waste, it’s our destiny.’ Is that what it is—destiny—our very crime of the future?
Cronenberg orchestrates a cerebral noir without fedoras, trench coats, or rain, where environmental questions intersect a provocative reflection on the meaning, purpose, and boundaries of art. His daring intuition appals from the very first sequence, his passionate lament is loud and timely, but alas the execution—somehow ordinary, at times naff, with dialogues that seem devised to encourage the actors to try and act as bad as they can, succeeding—is not quite up to the exciting ambitions of the concept.
And yet the experience his vision offers escapes the rational thinking it triggers while and after. Despite its flaws, there’s something utterly addictive about it that I can only surrender to. Out of many great films that leave me awed and get me to write down notes and scribbles, here is one that hardly fits in that category, but seduces me completely, making me want to endlessly lose myself in its gloomy meanders.

DOTRICE: Are you afraid of a little emotion?
TENSER: I’m afraid of everything.

I jump on a bus feeling like a fugitive who’s finally managed to give his followers the slip. I’m starving, like most escapees do. I grab a sandwich on the way. Egg and cress is my favourite, as I am sure all London knows. Outside of Holborn Station there’s a fruit and veg stand, and it drizzles. While I walk down the narrow Parker Street, I still wonder how come it took me so long to discover its existence. The programme of The Garden Cinema is as fascinating as its story, that of a man who had enough money to open a cinema, and passion to actually do it. I go to the bar while I wait for a couple of friends. I am early on purpose, so I can seat, let the day fade in a book and—as they don’t serve decaf, which was my first choice—a glass of vodka.
Moments later my company shows up. More drinks and nibbles for them. I am fine after my solo sip and read. As we leave our scarlet booth, go past the bar again, make a stop at the loo, and finally get into the screening room, I breathe in almost afresh the modernised art deco style of the spaces. And as the b/w opening cards appear on the screen on the dusty notes of a suave soundtrack, the transition to London’s Forties feels incredibly seamless.
It Always Rains on Sunday is a remarkably intricate and well structured tangle of subplots, where the main storyline—of a jailbreaker finding shelter at his once fiancée, who has meanwhile married someone else and got three times busy—only looms quite unnoticed over the lively swarming of an East End scarred by the Blitz. The contrast between the preoccupations of the many characters of the former—ultimately petty, by comparison—and the dramatic tone of the latter, is the driving force of the film. Many laughed at Hamer’s humorous intercalations and cringed at its brutal account of the postwar hardship. They giggled one last time at a rudimentary special effect involving a miniature train, and were certainly touched by its picaresque traits as they gently surfaced.

He can hardly walk, almost gasps for breath. A valet helps him to a grand piano, holds the microphone for him. ‘This is a song that I just recorded . . . it’s an old song . . . is it out?’ In two weeks, someone confirms. He makes a hazy joke. ‘I don’t know all the chords so . . . show me the right keys.’ People laugh, he does too, then fumbles. ‘It’s called Unchained Melody.’
If one credit must be given to Baz Luhrmann, is to have revived the memory of one of the most touching moments in the history of popular music by seamlessly cutting from Austin Butler to real Elvis in one of his latest public appearances—his second to last concert held in Rapid City on 21 June 1977, to be exact—less than two months before he died. He was sweating like I never could even if I went drunk into a sauna, but his singing was still jaw-dropping, pristine in fact, his coolness unscathed, his gaze killer as he briefly turned to the audience and smiled at the sight of their joy.
But apart from the fortunate intuition of discreetly intercutting the entire film with archive footage, Elvis looks very much like one of the stunning outfits he used to wear—sexy, elaborate, expensive—yet ultimately lacking the same seductive brazenness. A two hours and forty minutes hysterical montage of acrobatic digital camerawork, Elvis might have the merit of not attempting at revealing the mystery of genius nor displaying the arrogance that most biopics have of purporting to own the truth, but at the same time it doesn’t seem to even try and dare beyond the myth or challenge any of the ideas I had about Elvis Presley.
Narratively, its approach is disappointingly conservative—all the more so being the anticipated work of a director rightly praised for his unique style as he deals with a subject that, at least on paper, seemed to naturally fit his own idiosyncrasies. Despite the promising concept, Colonel Parker is a Salieri without the depth Shaffer put into his devilish fictional narrator or a hint of that provocative nature, because he—the villain, the miserable, the untalented, the envious—is the one among all the characters that most resonates with us. Scary. But who is Parker? How in the bleeding world are we supposed to relate to him if his dramatisation is so shallow and one-dimensional?
As a retrospective reflection—while on the go it felt a little frustrating—I think it is an interesting choice to never show Elvis performing Can’t Help Falling in Love, leaving it to other voices or as a distant echo in the background. ‘Take my hand. Take my whole life too.’ But then again, if the bare thought of these few words has just made goosebumps appear on my skin, I regret saying it is not quite this overly post-produced cinematic take on his short life that I have to thank.