Szifron: Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales) (2014)

If Damon Szifron's Wild Tales and Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights trilogy are anything to go by, directors are responding to the current economic unrest across the Hispanic world with a greater will to storytelling than ever, prompting a return to anthology film-making as an anti-austerity measure. However, whereas Gomes’ trilogy is deliberately loose, inefficient and uneconomical, Wild Tales offers something much tauter – a series of six sequential revenge stories that each feels like a brilliant thriller boiled down to its most suspenseful moments. Given that suspense itself is something of an austere pursuit – a deliberate paring back of sensory resources – Wild Tales also feels less overtly fantastic than Arabian Nights, and more about tapping into the quickened pulse of contemporary Argentina, a pulse that would presumably be unavailable or less perceptible in the full-length version of any of these perfectly truncated films. As a result, most of the stories here revolve around disenfranchised members of the Argentinian working class brought up against the bastions of aristocratic-corporate wealth. Yet for all the power of these allegorical fragments, it feels as if suspense itself is very much the subject matter of the film, as Szifron spends more and more time on each segment – the first is only ten minutes – while simultaneously amping up the tension, taking us from veritable Hitchcockian abstractions – diagrams more than films – to more fully-fleshed out characters and scenarios. Given that suspense tends to warp and intensify time, that has the effect of making the films feel shorter and shorter even as they increase in length - the temporal equivalent of a dolly zoom – resulting in an absurd, hallucinatory sense of time, a series of ever more intensive crises, climaxes and catastrophes that nevertheless fall short of catharsis until the final stunning segment, and even then don’t quite provide you with the reprieve you’re anticipating. In fact, so absurd is this sense of quotidian crisis that it segues almost imperceptibly into black comedy as the film proceeds, until every suspenseful moment is comic and every comic moment is somewhat suspenseful. Not only does that create an amazing, seamless synergy between the stories – if it doesn’t quite feel like one story, it certainly syncs into a day-in-the-life vision in the vein of The Naked City – but it imbues the film with an incredible, improvisational resilience, a grim determination to wrest pleasure, moment to moment, from even the most unbearably hostile experiences. More than a will to storytelling, then, there is a will to fun here, albeit a delirious, deranged, manic sense of fun, as Szifron invites you to party like there's nothing left to lose, taking revenge on austerity by getting off on austerity.

Netzer: Pozitia Copilului (Child's Pose) (2013)

Insofar as the Romanian New Wave can be said to gravitate towards a particular genre, it’s been towards administrative or bureaucratic dramas, stories of characters trying to navigate a single process or procedure in the midst or wake of the Ceaușescu era. As the Romanian scene has built momentum, however, the procedural austerity and sublimity of such groundbreaking efforts as 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days has started to expand into other genres and registers – often comic – creating something of a secondary, subsidiary, even revisionist wave of films in the process. In some ways, Child’s Pose culminates both those moments, fusing the procedural severity of earlier efforts with a maternal melodrama in the vein of Mildred Pearce, but in such a way as to reiterate and intensify that earlier bureaucratic impulse. Set against the backdrop of Bucharest high society, it’s essentially a one-woman show, in which Luminita Gheorgiu puts in a virtuoso performance as Cornelia Keneres, a wealthy architect who sees an opportunity to reconcile herself with her estranged son, Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache), when he hits and kills a young boy on a motorway outside the city limits. Having come of age in one of the most repressively bureaucratic regimes in twentieth-century history, Cornelia knows how to draw upon her extensive legal, political and medical connections – including those of her husband (Florin Zamfirescu) and sister (Illinca Goia) – to embark upon any and every process necessary to ensure that Barbu gets off, sinking us into the murky zone between bureaucracy and all the exemptions to bureaucracy she can find in twenty-four hours. At the same time, it becomes increasingly clear – as in so many of these films – that bureaucracy is constituted by its exceptions, with the result that Cornelia starts to feel more and more indistinguishable from the bureaucratic apparatus she’s trying to thwart, more and more at home in the murky, fluorescent-lit adminscapes that elasticise around every rule she challenges or traverses. The more she struggles for Barbu, the more she implicates him, and the more she tries to save him, the more she destroys him, leaving him utterly incapable of any action or even affect – except wishing the older generation would disappear – in an environment where action is everything, at least in terms of playing the bureaucratic game. As strange as it may sound, the result is something of a procedural melodrama, as Netzer suffuses every scene with a cloying, overbearing, overprotective insistence that every rule – and exception – is in place for everyone’s benefit, as if to replace the unadulterated hatred of earlier Romanian films for the Ceaușescu era with a sickly love-hatred, a learned dependence that’s even more disturbing and perhaps only visible with hindsight, or in a next-generation narrative of this kind. Shooting nearly every scene in frenzied, fractured close-up, Netzer anchors your ambit of thought so squarely in Cornelia than you’re never able to think more than a room ahead or recall much beyond a room ago, which makes you feel like a needy child and an ideal bureaucratic subject at the same time, enslaved to an era that may have ended politically but lives on affectively, perpetuating itself by way of the nuclear family fantasia - and melodrama - that was supposed to have destroyed it. 

Crowe: Aloha (2015)

By this point, the American Dream has all but become a dead metaphor, equally applicable or irrelevant to any number of American movies, depending on your perspective. Yet Cameron Crowe is one of the few directors who could be said to still truly have a living investment in the idea of the Dream – ever since Jerry Maguire, his films have focused in on characters who find their aspirational mobility thwarted, often in the workplace, and have to find some alternative pursuit of happiness, some other avenue for making themselves over in the nation’s image. As a result, his films often have a homecoming flavour even or especially when his characters have no real home to return to any more, since his vision is more about recovering and restoring the increasingly transient sense of homeland itself, if only for the couple of hours that you’re immersed in his films. In that sense, his films often feel like experiments in crafting a deeply, personally – and above all, liberally – patriotic affect in the face of a nation that has less and less time for precisely that brand of patriotism, which was so suited to the centrist, Clintonesque climate of mid-90s America but feels as remote as Frank Capra by now. On the one hand, that means Crowe’s various American Dreams have become ever more contorted and contrived since Jerry Maguire, but it’s also forced him to transform those contrivances into a veritable artistic signature – a will to imagine something more than the cynicism or pessimism of more realist visions. And in some ways, Aloha is the degree zero of that conscious contrivance, that will to generosity, which is perhaps why it also feels like Crowe’s definitive break with realism. Once again, we’re faced with a homecoming narrative, although it’s perhaps significant that this is the first of Crowe’s films to be set outside the mainland United States, with the action unfolding on Hawaii and, more generally, across the night sky, which is painted as a kind of deterretorialised, glorified firmament of what the United States might have been and still is in Crowe’s cinematic world. Into that landscape comes Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper), a military technician-turned-contractor who returns to Hawaii after a stint in Afghanistan. Among a ensemble cast that includes his ex-wife (Rachel McAdams), her husband (John Kraskinski), his ex-boss (Danny McBride), his new boss (Bill Murray) and his Air Force liaison (Emma Stone), Gilcrest has to reckon with his current mission: to help launch a private military satellite into orbit that may start another global arms race and dispense with the atmosphere’s exemption from property rights forever. As might be expected, that leads to lots of sky- and stargazing, but the film as a whole is centred around fleeting gazes as never before in Crowe’s oeuvre, glances that seem to say hello and goodbye at once, and intricate, delicate dances of bodies and faces that make Crowe feel more like a choreographer than a director, as if trying to evoke the ebullient spirit of patriotism gesturally, in the spontaneous communions that pass from American to American in the midst of collective celebrations or ceremonies. As a result, the most memorable scenes tend to be crowd scenes, while even the one-on-one encounters have the slightly incidental, irrelevant, atonal quality that works best when masked or cushioned by the presence of other bodies – every conversation feels a little too flat, or a little too audible - to the point where the dialogue detracts from virtually ever encounter, contriving a patriotism that now only really exists as a lingering, inchoate affect into pronouncements that feel utterly incommensurate to what’s taking place. It’s no coincidence, then, that Krasinski’s character never talks, or that his wordless encounter with Gilcrest prompts the most crucial in a long line of wordless revelations, since it’s clear that Crowe’s love for country has forced him into something like silent cinema, a disconnection between sound and image, speech and feeling, that might not particularly look like an elegy, but always feels like one, saying goodbye when it most appears to be greeting you and subsuming itself into Crowe's immaculately curated soundtrack as never before.

Coppola: Palo Alto (2013)

Palo Alto is an adaptation of James Franco’s short story collection of the same name, honing in on two stories in particular while retaining the woozy, romantic feeling of the overall collection. The first story is in some ways the main story, revolving around a disenchanted senior (Emma Roberts) who develops a crush on her soccer coach (Franco), while the second story forms more of an ambient backdrop, revolving around the relationship between two stoners (Jack Kilmer and Nat Wolff) who stumble from one self-destructive, apathetic communion to another. Even the first story, though, feels somewhat dispersed, as if Gia Coppola were more interested in adapting the general feel of Franco’s collection, the loose, spontaneous breathlessness peculiar to a semi-connected sequence of short stories, resulting in something like an ensemble drama without an ensemble cast, a vividly adolescent prescience that the centre of things is always somewhere just out of reach or just offscreen, along with all the inchoate yearning that entails. At its strongest, the film yearns to transcend itself, as Coppola returns time and again to the luminescent low-tide of the party, when people are starting to pair off and make their separate ways – moments when the future seems tantalisingly close, whether it’s in the arms or bed of someone you’ve just met, or the empty streets that stretch away outside. As might be expected, that’s quite a delicate register to maintain – even if you are a Coppola – and it does, at times, start to feel a bit more like a fan party curated by Franco for himself, not that dissimilar to the opening scenes of This Is The End. Yet that narcissism is also, in some ways, what makes the film feel so true to adolescence – and possibly the film in which Franco has manage to craft his narcissism into an aesthetic accomplishment in the fullest and most resonant way. Of course, there is something immediately and somewhat repulsively narcissistic about the fantasy on display here – the hot yet self-deprecating coach who can’t manage to land a date but is pored over by his students – that doesn’t feel all that surprising to anyone who’s read or seen Franco’s other auteurist efforts. But the film goes beyond that, moving from narcissism to something like solipsism, insofar as it feels like Franco is just as keen to present himself as Roberts’ character – the sensitive, tortured, misunderstood girl – as he is the coach, in the same way that the original short story collection was partly inspired by a vast number of actual testimonies from Palo Alto adolescents that Franco made over in his own image. The result is a profoundly autoerotic romance – which is to say a poignantly and painfully adolescent romance – that may make every character in the film feel like an emanation of Franco’s beauty, but also clouds that beauty with a loneliness that’s quite unselfconscious, and almost unconscious, a strange and lingering insight into one of the most self-conscious self-promoters in Hollywood today. 

Hughes: Forces of Nature (1999)

A sort of late 90s revision of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Forces of Nature feels in retrospect like the second part of a trilogy in which Sandra Bullock felt her way to the fringes of romantic comedy – or at least as far towards the fringes as blockbuster expectations would allow. Nestled between Hope Floatsand 28 Days, it’s a genuinely bizarre film that sees Bullock as Sarah Lewis, a manic pixie dream girl avant la lettre who teams up with Ben Holmes, played by Ben Affleck, when their plane from New York to Savannah is delayed due to a technical malfunction. Ben is heading to Savannah to marry his fiancee, played by Maura Tierney, and since there’s a very strict timeline for their nuptials, he finds himself banding together with Sarah to make his way down the Atlantic coast as rapidly and ingeniously as he can. Of course, everything that can go wrong does go wrong, from cyclones to wrong turns, while Ben and Sarah start to develop a rapport of their own which quickly – surprisingly quickly – leaves him questioning why he’s even getting married at all. On paper, that might make him sound a bit flighty, unsympathetic or downright unfaithful, but Hughes shoots the entire film like a wedding videographer, filling it with manic crash-zoom shots and curved, cantilevered compositions with lots of unexpected angles, taking her cues from the main departure terminal at Newark, where it all begins. Not only does that make Ben and Sarah’s romance feel like a bit of a fait accompli, but it’s such a catastrophic style that it tends to makes the various disasters that putatively punctuate the narrative feel incorporated into the style of the film before they even begin, which is kind of funny in the way that it makes every setback, no matter how large or small, feel equal – there’s just as much of a sense of crisis when Ben’s laptop runs out of battery as when he’s framed for a drug bust, just because everything seems to exist in a heightened state of crisis. Perhaps that’s why the journey feels more and more like a music video – while the small segments in Savannah, featuring Maura Tierney, become more and more staidly classical by comparison – as the sheer unrealism of romantic comedy, and its fixation with meet-cutes, actually starts to pull the film away from both romance and comedy towards something darker and more obsessive. Nowhere is that clearer than in the film’s pessimism about marriage, since, to avoid Affleck’s character coming off as a total bastard, the screenwriters have to ensure that pretty much everyone he meets has a cautionary tale to tell about marriage, even elderly couples who would seem to be perfectly content at a passing glance. And, in that end, that gives the lie to Ben’s connection with Sarah, or at least makes you realise how different this kind of promiscuous meet-cute really is from a permanent relationship, which is perhaps why watching it finally feels like witnessing the romantic comedy starting to shed its skin, the feel-good affect that dominated so much 90s blockbuster cinema restless and anxious to feel something else instead.