Docter: Inside Out (2015)

How does the world feel to a child raised on digital media, a child who’s compiled and stored more data than they’ll ever be able to retain by the time they’re a teenager? That’s the question that Pixar has seemed to be asking over its latest generation of films – how to nail that demographic – culminating with Inside Out, the first film in the Pixar universe to feature an everyday, realistic character – a twelve-year old girl named Riley – as protagonist. There’s a catch though – most of the action takes place inside Riley’s mind, where the emotions of Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Anger (Lewis Black) and Fear (Bill Hader) collaborate and compete to regulate her moods and memories. Digital minds are often figured, onscreen, as fluid, provisional and improvisational, and while there are certainly traces of that here, the film’s power lies more in the way in which it captures the mechanised, externalised consciousness of the social media addict – the sense that all your feelings, memories and experiences are somehow out there, more organised but also more free-floating than ever before. As a result, Joy, Sadness, Digust, Anger and Fear don’t feel exactly inside Riley, but nor do they feel quite outside her either – they emerge from her in the same way that the cloud emerges from individual hard drives, or the mind was once thought to emerge from the brain. Not only does that disaggregate Riley much more than you might expect – the emotions are the real characters here - but it sets the film a peculiar challenge: how do you create a mindscape, or mindspace, that is at once mechanical and amorphous, internal and external, human and post-human? The answer looks a bit like Myst crossed with the perkier, brighter palette of the Pixar universe – a giant ball-bearing machine that unfolds before us as Joy and Sadness find themselves jettisoned from “Headquarters” and forced to traverse one part of the mind after another. Along the way, there are a few whimsical moments – the train of thought, the land of imagination – but for the most part this mindscape is too efficient, elegant and economical to admit of much whimsy. Instead, it tends towards a schematic sparseness and Cartesian minimalism that subsists on texture as never before in the Pixar universe, evincing an animation aesthete’s delight in surfaces, and the sounds of surfaces, that gives it a highly cerebral edge, culminating with production designer Ralph Eggleston’s “electrochemical” philosophy for visualising the emotions themselves. As might be expected, that’s quite an austere aesthetic, and for those raised on earlier Disney fairy tales, or even earlier Pixar fairy tales, the move from self-realisation to self-regulation might seem somewhat somewhat disarming – it feels right that the majority of emotions are voiced by actors from The Office and Parks and Recreation – as well as somewhat vertiginous, as Riley’s peaks and troughs sync up with the lovingly painted San Francisco backdrop in quite sudden and unexpected ways. But there’s also a message about resilience here, a guide to managing your digital consciousness without succumbing to depression – or datageddon – that not only flies in the face of conventional wellness wisdom, but does so quite unsentimentally, if only because the whole mechanics of the film unpack and undo the Pixar production of sentimentality, growing out of it before your very eyes.

Wain: Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

Released in 2001 and steadily increasing in cult acclaim ever since, this delirious delight takes place on the last day of a holiday camp in Maine in 1981, as the intrigues, romances and animosities between the various camp counselors are brought to a head. As the day proceeds, and we move from counselor to counselor, and incident to incident, we’re exposed to an incredible range of comic talents – including Janeane Garofolo, David Hyde Pearce, Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Molly Shannon, Christopher Meloni, Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black – to the point where it doesn’t really feel like a regular ensemble cast so much as a looser, more flexible comic collective, poised somewhere between a comic summary of the 90s and a comic prehistory of the 00s. As might be expected, that works perfectly against the film’s own coming-of-age backdrop, since it’s a bit like watching a new generation of comedians cutting their teeth with a few mentors along to show them the ropes, blending two generations in the same way that writer-director David Wain tends to confound all distinction or hierarchy between the counselors and campers. Since this is something of a rite of passage, then, some of the jokes don’t land – in fact, many don’t land – but the joy of the film is more in its messiness, as Wain’s catch-all approach leaves space for an enormous number of comic styles, registers and experiments, even or especially when they’re a bit daggy, or demand a little too much joyful credulity from the audience. In that sense, it feels like a tribute to the films that these actors grew up with – and, in particular, to that moment in the early 80s when sex comedies started to impart something of their anarchic energy to serial comedies, with nods in the direction of National Lampoon, The Gods Must Be Crazy and the Zucker comedies, as well as more familiar flagposts like Caddyshack and Porky’s. For all their differences, those films impressed you with how fun they must have been to actually make – and, moreover, invited you to vicariously experience that fun, creating a kind of amateur involvement that was perhaps only really possible before VHS, and not unlike the involvement of watching a live sketch variety show, or even a stand-up set. In that sense, Wet Hot American Summer feels like an elegy for pre-VHS cinema as a live medium, or at least as a more enlivened medium than 90s cinema, whose ironic literacy is dismantled at every opportunity. Among other things, that creates an amazingly and distinctively 80s sense of immersion, despite the fact that what we’re watching is effectively a string of tangentially-related sketches, since it never really feels as if the stories stop when we cut to the next nook or niche within the camp – you can’t help but feel that the actors you’ve just cut away from are still there having fun, or goofing around, even if they don’t happen to be on camera at this exact moment. In other words, it never feels like a sequence of sketches because it feels like all the sketches are continuing all the time – they’re really just the dynamic that keeps this collective together – just as the various stories don’t converge so much as overlap, with dialogue from one increasingly dubbed over the next, all layered into the final camp talent show which more or less absorbs the film. In retrospect, it can’t help but anticipate the draining 80s nostalgia that followed in its wake, but, in its serial, chilled-out invitation to watch and participate at your own pace, it also feels like a forerunner of recent television, especially Netflix, who have picked it up for the miniseries Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, a prequel-sequel that feels wonderfully true to the film’s own coming-of-age contortions, its frenzied nostalgia fo the future.

Ekvtimishvili: Grdzeli Nateli Dgheebi (In Bloom) (2013)

At first glance, In Bloom seems like a somewhat standard coming-of-age drama, centred on two fourteen-year-old girls – Eka (Lika Babulani) and Natia (Mariam Bokeria) - growing up in Tbilisi in the early 1990s, shortly after Georgia’s restoration of independence from the former Soviet Union. Shot in a loose, languid neorealist style, we follow the girls in their day-to-day life with the same calm, impassive, almost hypnotic presence that they bring to their performances – they have the authenticity and immediacy of the most compelling non-professional actors - as they navigate their relationships with classmates, family and each other. For the first third, at least, the stage seems set for a fairly modest, small-scale vision of adolescence, in which a series of gradual realisations or revelations propel the girls little by little into the adult world. However, while those realisations do occur, there's also a dawning realisation that the adult world doesn’t really exist in this society, which, as we’re continually reminded, is severely and traumatically depleted by the outflux of soldiers and support required for the civil war that was taking place in Georgia at this time. That’s not to say that there are no adults – of course, they’re everywhere – but that there is a steadily increasing refusal on the part of the adult world to take any responsibility or protective interest in the children around them, least of all Eka and Natia, which turns out to be uncannier and more dystopian than a world in which adults simply aren’t around, or don’t exist. As a result, the girls gradually come to realise that they are both already, at some level, adults – at least in the eyes of adults around them - ripe for sex, marriage and domestic life at the age of fourteen, as Natia is abducted and press-ganged into marriage by a local family in front of a crowd of locals who remain utterly impassive, indifferent and impotent in the face of her fate. From that moment on, the film doesn’t feel like a coming-of-age drama so much as a dissection of what made Georgia, at this point in time, so inimical to a coming-of-age drama, as Nina Ekvtimishvili paints an incredible picture of her home country as a limbic state, poised at the verge of an independence it still can’t quite handle, in which every adult is continually and compulsively falling back upon their most childish selves. Perhaps that’s why the film feels so oddly, crisply empty – every source of light feels somewhat spartan and hollow, as if it’s echoing off tiles or filtered through glass – or why Eka and Natia’s entry into adult society just makes them feel more and more sequestered in a childhood world of their own. And yet the great surprise of the film is that that childhood world still turns out to be nurturing – if there’s no difference between being adults and being children, then it’s also possible for Eka and Natia to retreat back to their fourteen-year old selves in a moment’s notice, which imbues them and the film with a real, hard-earned resilience, as if learning how to remain children were the best lesson to be learned in a world without adults. 

Pohlad: Love & Mercy (2015)

As the cycles of nostalgia and retromania get shorter and shorter, the idea of a singer being genuinely washed-up seems more and more foreign, let alone the idea of a singer being washed up for years and years, left to drift through a decade in which they have no part or place. Yet that’s exactly the starting point of this extraordinary biopic of Brian Wilson, which opens with Wilson, played by John Cusack, adrift in mid-80s Los Angeles, suffused with an aimless ambience that’s only exacerbated by his overmedication at the hands of court-appointed phyisician Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), as well as his burgeoning – his slowly burgeoning – relationship with Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), who steals the show with her mercurial, musical presence. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before we flashback to the 60s, where a younger Wilson, played this time by Paul Dano, is weathering the real or imagined criticisms of his father, friends and a delightfully unlikeable Mike Love, as he shuts himself up in the studio to record the soundscape that would form the backdrop to Pet Sounds and the aborted Smile sessions. At one level, that’s a great move for fans, since it offers the amazing – and uncanny – opportunity to witness these canonical accompaniments shorn of their vocals as they come together piece by piece. Yet despite a few nods in the direction of Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, director Brian Pohlad doesn’t ultimately seem interested in the stylised documentary approach that characterises so many biopics, nor in any kind of blow-by-blow fandom-fixation on how Pet Sounds came to be. Instead, this is very much a chamber pop drama, an attempt to capture how it felt to be Brian Wilson as he approached the outer limits of his studio self. As a result, Wilson really comes off as an antenna more than a character, gateway to an aural universe that we can still just hear in the 60s segments, but which has totally exceeded us in the 80s segments, shrouding him in the mystical silence of someone receiving transmissions from a distant star, too remote for mere human perception. In that sense, Pet Sounds starts to feel less and less like a piece of music than a voyage to the edge of the sonic universe, as Pohlad erects even the most cacaphonous moments in the recording sessions upon a quietness that just gets deeper and deeper as the album comes together, the kind of baroque stillness that arises at key points within the album itself, as if to suggest something lurking just beneath the threshold of audibility, a silky sombience that makes you feel as if you can hear the distant thud of surf in almost any space. At one level, then, there’s a sense of decline as we move from the 60s to the 80s, but there’s also a sense that Wilson is inhabiting Pet Sounds' silences as never before, paused in a state of perpetual rapture that Ledbetter doesn’t exactly puncture so much as learn to cohabitate and expand, with a breathless wonder that often makes this feel like a tribute to Say Anything as much as a tribute to Wilson. In that sense, it feels less like a paean to Pet Sounds than to Brian Wilson, Wilson’s first solo album, which was released a couple of years after he met Ledbetter, and boasts “Love and Mercy” as its opening track. Contra to conventional or canonical wisdom, that’s the real masterpiece here – the album Pet Sounds almost was and that Smile should have been – as Pohlad takes its signature synth substrate and spins it out across nearly every scene, as if the onset of Wilson's solo career required a better and stranger vibration than anything that had come before.

Vinterburg: Far From The Madding Crowd (2015)

Far From The Madding Crowd is an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel of the same name, and revolves around the plight of Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), a landowner of independent means who finds herself forced to choose between three very different suitors – Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenhaerts), a loyal and attentive neighbour who subsequently becomes her employee, William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), an older member of the landed gentry, and Frank Troy (Tom Sturridge), a Sergeant who commences his courtship while stationed in her corner of Wessex. Despite a fairly lavish promotional campaign and a few lush interludes, it’s a film that’s defined above all by its naturalism, or by its particular brand of naturalism, since Vinterburg is just as keen to avoid the stylised neonaturalism of, say, Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights as he is anxious to distance himself from costume drama sentimentality, falling back upon a more mundane vision, an eye for plainness, that adapts Hardy as a realist rather than the latter-day romanticist he so often seems to become when translated to the big screen. For all the romantic deliberation, prevarication and agitation, Vinterburg, like Hardy, never allows himself the luxury of staying away from everyday life for any great length of time, with virtually every scene taking place in the midst of labour or as a transaction of some kind, suffused with a pervasive pastoral rhythm that’s not about bucolically idealising the countrside – no small feat for a film that takes place almost entirely outdoors – so much as subsuming even the most dramatic human moments into the change of seasons and the demands of Bathsheba’s farm. As a result, the major events occur quite matter-of-factly - neither telegraphed not allowed to take you completely by surprise, they unfold with that quantum of happenstance, or circumstance, that’s so central to Hardy’s worldview. Yet it’s also central to the Dogme ’95 worldview as well, which is perhaps why this feels like the closest Vinterburg has come to the austerity and humanity of Festen, as well as a manifesto of sorts for how Dogme looks now, a vision of Dogme ‘15. In particular, Hardy’s taste for a certain kind of female sadness – the impasse of a woman trying “to define her feelings in a language chiefly made by men to express theirs” – syncs up perfectly with the classical Dogme heroine, whose inchoate yearnings typically transcend or elude conventional film language. On the one hand, that allows Vinterburg to capture something like the full radicality of Hardy’s vision, its yearning to transcend itself in the name of something totally outside the conventions of married life, with  radical possibilities of both singledom and polyamoury glimpsed at various points throughout the film. At the same time, it refashions – or refines – Dogme as a Hardyesque invitation to women to appear before the camera just as they are, before the demands of realism stylise all their deepest melancholias out of existence – an invitation that Carey Mulligan accepts as if she’s been waiting for it for years, in one of the the greatest and saddest performances of her career.