On a Saturday afternoon, oddly enough, watching a film is by far the strangest thing that can happen to me—dreaming of it, the most exotic and naughty fantasy. But in the apocalyptic post-holiday lethargy everybody around me seems to be in, in a weekend of January where outside is cold but not quite, and it rains but isn’t really, nor is sunny indeed, À bout de souffle comes to comfort me once again. Idiot… Lâche… These two words are repeatedly heard throughout the film, almost as a warning, a memento mori. Don’t be an idiot… You are a coward… The fear of time slipping away don’t just translate in the philosophical imperative, literally shouted, don’t hide, live, at any cost, but in the terrifying awareness that days are actually going by and being lost already. Michel’s first line in the film famously goes, ‘Après tout, je suis con. Après tout, si. Il faut. Il faut!’ I must. Later on, at a cinema, he is arrested by a lobby card of Humphrey Bogart, Bogie, for The Harder They Fall. There is a lot more in his stare than admiration, a lot more in that iconic gesture of stroking his lips with his thumb than the desire to emulate a hero. There is ambition, urgency, desperation. It never occurred to me how much of that is in À bout de souffle—how much greed and rage. As Truffaut recalled in a note I have recently come across, while Godard was making it, he ‘didn’t have enough money in his pocket to buy a metro ticket, he was as destitute as the character he was filming,’1 and he was one of the last of the Chahiers du cinéma critics to direct a feature. A few years older than Orson Wells at the time of Citizen Kane, who had since become the parameter by which all young directors measure their own success, he felt the pressure to make something soon and remarkable. The weight of that burden is palpable. The autobiographical connection makes À bout de souffle even deeper and darker. Furthermore, it is Godard himself as a passerby to report his fictional counterpart to the police. Whether any meaning was intended or was it just a nod at Hitchcock’s facetious habit of cameoing in his own films, I am not sure. Yet this does resonate with me profoundly. Yes, I am an idiot, and a coward—and the very one who’s staking my own freedom.
The long scene in the hotel room is more of a marvel every time I see it. There’s a moment in Miloš Forman’s Amadeus where Mozart pitches the idea for an opera that the Emperor wants to be dropped. After describing a scene he is particularly excited about, he says, ‘Guess, Majesty. Imagine the longest time such a thing could last, then double it.’ I always loved that line. À bout the souffle has the same spirit, which is not just arrogance, boldness, insolence. It is true cinematic bravura. All the more so, because it doesn’t come entirely from the page, but from a certain degree of improvisation, from the chemistry between two brilliant actors, from a clever work of montage. And naturally, from the breathtaking exhilaration of capturing what is not repeatable—the moment.
1.‘It Really Makes You Sick!’ Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, Michel Marie (New York Routledge, 2000).
Nada. Pinocchio lives on the page and in the memory of countless children, but on the screen his incarnations has hardly ever been more than the clumsy impression of an idea, however rooted. Guillermo del Toro’s age-old passion project is in some ways no exception, I hate to say, but with more than a few saving graces.
While giving up the layered narrative of Collodi’s Pinocchio and with that any trace of its freemasonic significance, del Toro drastically readapts the material to his own idiosyncrasies and disparately influenced sense of mythology making it more personal, contemporary, cinematic. Like he said, his Pinocchio is not much about a child learning to be a real boy, as it is about a father learning to be a real one. After all, children don’t need to learn how to be children, but grownups might have to learn how to be parents—when not adults too.
Guillermo de Toro’s Pinocchio is also the celebration of disobedience for the sake of affirming one’s identity, and therefore of unruliness as an act of innate bravery as opposed to one of immaturity. ‘If he’s a puppet, where are his strings?’ candidly asks Candelwick in church. ‘That’s true. Who controls you, wooden boy?’ chimes in his father, the city black-shirted podestà. ‘Who controls you?’ counters Pinocchio, to Geppetto’s embarrassment and the congregation’s muttered dismay.
By giving it a more specific historical placement than to my knowledge Pinocchio ever had, del Toro not only adds an unexpected sense of crude realism to a story broadly perceived as a timeless fantastic metaphor—he creates an exciting resonance between the stubborn, candid, rebellious attitude of our skinny little one and values that are close to intellectual resistance. Very soon we realise that Pinocchio’s magical characters have to deal with war, death, discrimination, Fascists—and the fairytale’s dramatic side suddenly gains a different gravity.
As stop-frame couldn’t have been a better choice to tell about a talking burattino and a cricket fond of Schopenhauer, the animations are mostly excellent with just a few jarring notes. The scenes where Geppetto is drunk and desperate, or when he puts Carlo and Pinocchio to bed are superb, tasteful, moving. Others moments lack the same charm. Count Volpe’s animation in particular, however deliberately theatrical and sophisticatedly mannered, feels conceived around slightly amateurish acting clichés.
Very interestingly, the comparison between this Pinocchio and Disney’s is not just an easy bait film critics picked up. Guillermo del Toro himself often raised the comparison, praising the beloved animated classic and declaring himself a proper Disney freak. The two films somehow speak to each other for how they read Collodi’s faceted novel from different yet complementary angles. Disney doesn’t get enough credit for being dark, says del Toro. As his films don’t get enough for being bright and positive.
But the most precious gift I get from him, is even prior to the film itself. As a very Mexican inspiration to Pinocchio’s central idea, he quoted a stanza from a poem by Jaime Sabines that is going to stay with me forever.
Alguien me habló todos los días de mi vida
al oído, despacio, lentamente.
Me dijo: ¡vive, vive, vive!
Era la Muerte.
Nightmare Alley was released in an age where such glossy films full of stars, commercial ambitions, and no cosplays, have probably gone, however temporary, who knows, out of fashion. Shame, because catching up with it only now, I realise that it deserved a lot more attention—mine, to start with—and that despite drawing from classic noir material, it is a lot closer to our days than its stylish appearance might lead to think. Better phrased by Martin Scorsese, who even wrote a heartfelt article1 to persuade people to put the bloody remote down and go see it in a cinema, ‘Guillermo is certainly speaking from and to his own time, but he’s doing so in the idiom of a time gone by, and the urgency and despair of then overlaps with the urgency and despair of now in a way that’s quite disturbing. It’s like a warning bell.’
To an equally relatable contrast, Nightmare Alley’s haunted souls roam in a surreal land of wonders. The aesthetics of the film are so meticulously designed to let their perfection give way to an almost alienating feeling. Richly packed with gorgeous antiques, every set looks like a recreated environment in a history museum or a model inside a snowglobe. Of course they are great, and yet indulgently artificial in their vintage warmth, especially for the gritty notes of the subject.
The story unfolds at a slow pace through a lengthy first act, though before I know, the film has switched to a completely different tempo. The tension grows from lazy golden-lit cinema déjà-vus, including what seemed to me a slightly forced homage to one of the most memorable moments from Goodfellas—‘Go on, go on, around the corner,’ says the fishy Clem to Stan, indicating a mattress where he could crunch for the night—to near hart-attack intensity as our hero’s foolhardiness paves him the way to self-destruction. On the one hand, Nightmare Alley seems to try and give more answers than it should, or if anything than I wanted. I didn’t need to know about Stan’s past to connect with the character. Nor I needed the hilarity of the epilogue—more apt to a short film anyway—to close the circle. But on the other, I was fine not to know the details of what the spine-chilling Ezra Grindle really did to his lovers, or the meaning of the fantastic creature in the jar. My imagination works well enough, and it feels great when a director is aware and knows how to feed it.
Upon its original release I was told it was the best film Guillermo del Toro had ever made. Having only seen Hellboy at that point and still aching from the disappointment, I didn’t doubt for a second the truthfulness of the tip so I went and watch it—but once again, not quite meeting any of the exhilaration anticipated. Coming back to it sixteen years later, after having distractedly let those negative impressions sediment for so long, the first thing I notice is how little I actually remembered of the story and, conversely, how vividly its imagery has been preserved in my mind. This observation alone is rather revealing as to the main graces of Pan’s Labyrinth, and as to what makes Guillermo del Toro such a unique storyteller. However mixed my feelings might be about his work, he remains one the very few—especially in an age that despite the amazing means offered by technology has only made mainstream films lighter and emptier—who’s still capable of creating characters and worlds that stay. An enchanter, and above all a daydreamer.
Giving shape to his own nightmares, del Toro conceives the film as a narrative maze in which reality gets lost and blurs into fantasy—where history meets mythology, human meets monster, darkness meets light. Pan is a reversed fairytale of lies, where solace can’t be found in this land but within its mysteries. Ofelia carries the complexity of a heroine who’s almost oblivious to what the real threats and stakes are, not just behind the walls or underneath the floors, but out there in the woods and even beyond, in the rest of the country. Less convincingly, her stepfather, brutal Francoist captain Vidal, slips into a stylisation often resorted to in cinema. By making a myth out of the sadistic autocrat, the disturbed man, the single-minded political and social climber, Pan reduces the troubled psychology under a sick regime to trivial terms, therefore missing at least one terrifying notion. People like Vidal don’t necessarily sport the mannerisms of a lunatic, a torturer, a monster. They are just like anyone else, men with families, men with friends, men and all.
It also took me an effort to buy the kitchy golden glow of the epilogue, but the profundity of its essence didn’t fail to touch me. From that depth, an unsound hollow, the echo of a cry deafened me—that of all the children who suffered from the inherent inhumanities of our recursive history. In that respect, Guillermo del Toro’s take is as down to earth as horns and hooves and fairies can be in the most beautiful stories.
I wouldn’t say that I was intentionally avoiding it. I simply didn’t think I needed to see it, or see it again. But Sunday afternoon was dark and cold before the snow made the city glow so I thought, perhaps, Die Hard. Two hours later—as I was raising from the sofa still bundled up in the arctic runner full dress uniform I had previously gone to the park with—it was still unclear if I had actually ever watched it or not. Which, really, says much about the impact certain titles from that generation had on our popular culture.
Halfway through the film, I decided that nostalgia must be largely responsible for the high regard Die Hard is broadly granted. If Alan Rickman’s remarkable performance is somehow timeless in its hypnotic Shakespearean tones, Bruce Willis’s fetishistic singlet or Bonnie Borelia’s thin curls are as iconic of the Eighties as Hulk Hogan’s moustaches. Likewise, their characters. John, a dedicated average cop, an impossible husband but a righteous man, and a sweaty Rambo type if need be. Holly Gennaro, of Italian ancestry, a brave working woman almost indifferent to men’s pathetic material games, and a single mother de facto.
During the second half though, a more discernible clue as to why this film is so special started to take shape. Only then, I found myself acknowledging how nicely the dialogues are written, how so very rarely they slip into the phoney machismo ever idiosyncratic of such action-driven shows, and how brilliantly, lead to character, the actors play against the stereotyped nature of their roles.
In narrative terms too—within the sense of structure and drama that Hollywood has defined in the last, say, four decades—Die Hard is pretty impeccable. The tension tightens steadily its grip from the very first scene all the way to the climactic confrontation and the imperative feel-good resolution through a comforting cascade of expected surprises. In a nutshell, however seemingly generated by an artificial intelligence system, Die Hard does work, or rather functions, but only up to a point. For me at least.
What prevents me from fully appreciating it, is how everything in the film revolves around violence. I remember Quentin Tarantino shouting back at an interviewer who was insistently arguing about violence in his oeuvre, ‘Because it’s so much fun!’ Well, yes and no. What is fun, ironic, clever, is never quite brutality per se, but the good writing around it. As it is, after all, in Tarantino’s gore brimful yet intelligent scripts. But in a film like Die Hard, violence appears to be used as the sole narrative lever to move from one story beat to the next, for the characters to achieve their objectives whether good or sick, interim or final, and ultimately—here comes a word so often abused to evoke an allure of nobility—to restore justice, in any of its forms.
On a side note, I can’t even think a film like this could have a sequel. They made two. Now, if that isn’t a blind and greedy commercial attitude, I really don’t know what else it could be.
Time rewinds as nature, in the shape of a quince reversing from rot to ripe, is the only reliable witness. Diários de Otsoga—that I only realise on writing, and not without disappointment, be the word agosto spelled backward, not the name of an exotic Portuguese location—transcends both the concept of metacinema and lockdown project. The latter, incidentally, a cinematic aberration. The fictional forming and shifting relationships among the three young protagonists, the surreal limitations and uncertainties of the epidemic, and life on set with its petty crimes such as stealing a pair of socks or a bottle of milk from the fridge, organically blend into an all but surprising solid body. Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes challenge the fears of an unprecedented time, dextrously walking the line between sheer randomness and fine dramatic improvisation to convey a poetic mix of melancholy, innocence, and joy. Interviewed at the TIFF, Gomes is brutal but right in saying that most of the films that tried to be creative within the covid constraints are not, and are boring. Shot on film, shot by people, not solo with depressive means like a mobile or a webcam, Diários de Otsoga is quite the opposite. However they did it, the result is electrifying.
If he always keeps you dreamin’
You won’t have a lonely hour.
If a day could last forever,
You might like your ivory tower.
It is a dream not all directors can afford to make their own 8½. Even though I wouldn’t say that Iñárritu fully succeeded—nor that his has really much to do with Fellini apart from the common introspective intentions—Bardo is a rather admirable attempt at exploring one own roots and frailties using cinema in its purest form. ‘I put everything that I have into Bardo,’ he revealed at the London Film Festival. ‘I have nothing more to give at this moment. I gave everything, in terms of heart, in terms of soul, in terms of attention. I didn’t want to make Bardo, I needed to make it.’ And it definitely shows. Walking on a squiggly line between reality and metaphor, present and memories, personal and national nightmares—but also brilliance and self-indulgence—Iñárritu finds in the anguished Silverio Gama the fulcrum of a fascinating, if perhaps too ambitious, embroidery of themes. An intimate journey into paternity, grief, and fame, is intersected by a tormented reflection on Mexican history, spirituality, and identity. Either way, chasing truths that are nothing but emotional. It is hard not to picture the bearded Silverio pointing a finger at Iñárritu himself, and Bardo, his first Mexican film since Amores perros, as a way to reconnect to his home country, give it voice and justice, maybe ask forgiveness for having long neglected it.
Many scenes made my jaw drop, others touched me deeply, some didn’t quite convince me. One in particular—a preposterous conversation with Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés on a pile of slaughtered bodies and a gloomy artificial sky—felt overly mannered, both in narrative and symbolic intentions. The same comment I am tempted to extend to the categorical use of wide lenses. I actually wonder if the film was shot like Birdman on a single lens, and whether this extreme choice is maybe too apparent to serve the narrative without stealing, so to speak, the show.
Altogether, I have a feeling that Iñárritu’s cinema is starting to be too visually refined, contrived, post-produced—perhaps expensive—and that this overly manipulative work on the image is only coating the creative intuitions with unnecessary cosmetics. Insofar as I’d rather watch a film that takes the risk to be called pretentious than one that doesn’t even try to take me elsewhere, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy or appreciate it. Bardo does have a great soul and each of its photograms screams to let it through, but really, I am still in love with the brutal aesthetics of Amores perros and the nerve of the early Iñárritu.
On a due wiki note, bardo, in Buddhism, is the liminal state of existence between death and rebirth. Makes more sense than it seems.
On the captain’s desk, a book that could lend its title to the film—Noam Chomsky’s How the World Works. From a near documentary first part to a clumsy Lord of the Flies, The Triangle of Sadness doesn’t add much to the trite derision of the obliviously rich, nor uses a desert island in any particularly original way. A setup, Ruben Östlund himself points out, that has been often used in literature and cinema for how it effectively reduces human interactions to a primal level, shifting the received weight of currencies, and annihilating hierarchies. But the premises are only as good as the first twenty minutes of the film. A silly interview at a casting session in a fashion photography studio, a gender squabble over a restaurant bill payment—Östlund immediately confirms to have a knack for contriving a narrative through a series of cringingly awkward moments. Like in Force Majeure and The Square, it isn’t much the social criticism that drives the story as the behaviour of people outside of their comfort zone. Except this time, his sadistic scalpel doesn’t dare as deep, or shine as much. Frustratingly, the promising vibe set by the first half soon fades away. Things start to wobble during the grotesque captain’s dinner scene and go souther once on the shore—the few brilliant passages being watered down by unremarkable jokes.
Of a similar fate seem to suffer the aesthetics. However reminiscent of The Square, there is something attractive to the stylised rarefaction of the opening. Cruise onwards, the image gets impersonally glossy and garish, the colours abusively graded. If this is supposed to be an allusion to the unreal world most of the characters are coming from or mockingly evoke cheap television shows of the likes of I’m a Celebrity, I guess I don’t find it rooted enough to buy it. Unless, I wonder retrospectively, the satire is meant to aim elsewhere, perhaps at those who are relentlessly being indoctrinated to see that world through such filters so we can desire it—us.
Although Des’ree Life brought me back to my university years giving me the exact same experience Anton Ego has when he tastes little Remy’s ratatouille, the soundtrack picks are terrible and occasionally misplaced—like the one that takes the beautiful ending scene into the credits as if to make sure, needlessly, it looks like one.
Bones and All—and grief and solitude. Behind a rugged surface and the metallic stench of blood, lies a complexity of themes so profound and layered as to give the film an almost metaphorical weight. After the screening I heard many sharing the unease of having found the story so vividly resonating despite its inhumanity. It is a very interesting point, although I am not quite sure I felt the same. I wouldn’t know how empathy could ever be disturbing. Its ravenous characters are forced into an even more excruciating kind of isolation by the unspeakable nature of their diversity but, in essence, they are just lonely souls desperate for someone to share the pain and help understand their mystery. Who, really, wouldn’t fit in this description, especially coming from a culture that is drenched with equally disquieting if less literal forms of cannibalism?
Responsible for portraying the American middle-earth in such a magnificent way is Arseni Khachaturan, a relatively emerging cinematographer that Luca Guadagnino had noticed at San Sebastian for his work on Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning. Some of the supporting performances are no less than exhilarating too. I am thinking of the lady at the bus station counter played by Marcia Dangerfield and the creepy-friendly-greasy eater that Maren and Lee camp out with for an awkward night—a hardly recognisable Michael Stuhlbarg.
Some fancy costume choices would have to be considered slightly self-indulgent but who cares, they are great—and for one thing, they heavily contribute rooting the stunning aesthetics of the film. André Holland’s stylish Barbour-like coat on a pair of large denim trousers and beautiful Timberland work boots are a good example. Timothée Chalamet’s country-psychedelic shirts collection, coming from nowhere to somehow over-characterise his brilliant Lee, is of course another. Mark Rylance’s spectacular attire feels ironically quite natural, given the eccentric personality of the character.
As a minor detail, all the same intriguing, to me at least, the film is populated by many books. I could glimpse Joyce’s Dubliners on Maren’s dad’s table, The Lord of the Rings in her hands once or twice. I got to ask Luca Guadagnino about the hidden language behind it. ‘She reads Tolkien. She is like a hobbit on a journey through a fantastic land.’ Fair enough.
So what to say—yes, some left during the screening, but many, like me, gave a heartfelt applause as the end credits started to roll and Luca Guadagnino, in an all-black outfit and Prada high-top sneakers, limping from a sprained ankle, cautiously climbed on the stage to take the deserved praises, and all.
