Madden: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015)

Doubtless, there’s something tasteless about the Marigold franchise. The outsourcing of retirement to India, the over-the-top Indian accents and gestures, and the barely concealed colonial nostalgia are all pretty hard to take at times. For all that, though, there’s something powerful about the way in which this second film, in particular, modulates old age, drawing you into a sense of collective fantasy that’s peculiarly cinematic, and perhaps only really possible anymore when addressing the generation that the film depicts – the last remaining generation to continue to opt for the movie theatre over any other medium or platform. For perhaps that reason, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel doesn’t feel like a sequel to the first film so much as an intensification of its fantasy atmosphere to ever lusher and more opulent depths, an even richer communion with what it might mean to be old and still hopeful. Sitting somewhere between the Golden Age of classical Hollywood and the Golden Age of classical Bollywood - think The Thief of Baghdad meets Awara - it’s an extravaganza that aims to make digital cinematography feel as much like Technicolour as possible, decked out in an Orientalist palette that sets out to capture old age as something equally exotic and remote, a frontier as breathless and bracing as any other. Of course, it’s all grounded in a cosy story – or a cosy cast, adding Richard Gere to the team of Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton and Celia Imrie, along with Dev Patel as the hotel manager Sonny Kapoor, who’s faced with a bind when he decides to expand into new premises. At the same time, though, the fantasy atmosphere is almost too thick and lush for these characters to connect for any great length of time - and, even when they do, their backstories feel too full and private for them to really break out of their own mysterious reveries. That might sound tragic, or melancholy, but the result is something more like an emergent mood, or an emergent sense of connection, as everyone seem to be gradually reincarnated or reborn, dissolved more and more in the film’s Lethean atmospherics as they go, but not quite settled into a new or discernible shape by the time it finishes either. All of their traits and quirks feels provisional, temporary, destined to diminish - but in an upbeat, hopeful way, amidst an immersive flux that’s quite unsentimental about life and death, if only because it doesn’t draw much distinction between them. If it’s soporific and even anaesthetic at times, then, it’s only to draw you into a twilight state that’s surprisingly comforting – or at least takes comfort cinema more seriously than might appear at first glance.

Hansen-Løve: Eden (2014)

An elegy for the last days of neo-disco, Mia Hansen-Love’s latest film was based largely on the life and career of her brother, Sven Hansen-Love, a prominent DJ in the 90s and early 00s. Detailing the rise and fall of the French ‘Touch’ music scene, it spans some twenty years, opening in 1992, and moving forwards until we finally arrive at 2013. Although there’s a nominal main character, in the form of Paul (Felix de Givry), a cipher for Sven, there’s not really much narrative or characterisation to speak of – just a loose collective of DJs, dancers and hangers-on who spend all of their life preparing for the dancefloor, dithering, doodling and wiling the time away from one nightclub to the next. As a result, although a great deal of it is shot during the day, it never really feels as if it leaves the dancefloor, as least not during the 90s, as waking life is absorbed into those few mystical notes that can set a crowd alive, perpetually drifting into the atmospheric, yearning chord progressions that, for Paul at least, defines Touch’s indebtedness to 70s disco and soul, its ability to tread the finest of lines between melancholia and euphoria. With dance music playing somewhere in the background – or foreground – of every scene, then, the film instead taps into the archetypal, utopian stories that the most beautiful dance tracks always seem to tell: stories of unexpected love and new mornings, unexpected connections and collective revelations, and, of course, stories bearing witness to electronic dance music as a medium in itself, songs of rapturous electro-collectivity. For all that these daytime reveries are evocative, though, the most atmospheric scenes take place on the dancefloor, as Hansen-Love went to some pains to gain rights to a soundtrack that would allow her to set whole scenes to some of the most iconic and beautiful extended mixes of the era – there is a sublime encounter set against the entirety of Frankie Knuckle’s “Whistle Song” – perpetually poising her long tracking shots and momentary communions on the fringes of the dancefloor, the zone where you feel most torn between acting and letting the music act upon you. Among other things, that’s the perfect zone to evoke music that only felt timely because of how beautifully it captured the passing of time, music that offered a respite from time only to plunge you back into a world in which time appeared to have moved even faster in your absence. In that sense, as the film tells it, Touch itself already contained its own decline, the decline that takes up the second part of the film, which drifts from the early 00s to the early 10s, and is even more poignant for the fact that it is set against the rise of Daft Punk, who form a kind of counterpoint to Paul as figures who started off in Touch but only endured by moving beyond it, albeit in the same elegiac direction as the film, if the curation of excerpts from Random Access Memories is anything to go by. Like Boyhood, then, but in a totally different way, it’s a film that manages to sidestep something a lot of films struggle with – how to frame the 00s as the past, or as continuous with a more remote past - if only by tapping into how one of the greatest 90s public spheres contained and predicted its own dissolution. Watching it is like feeling the 90s wash up on the shores of the mid to late 00s, as Paul’s dancefloors decay into so many lawn parties and cruise gigs, light years away from the mysterious, foggy, breathless rave field that opens the film, the second summer of love that sets everything in motion. If Touch music was already an elegy for itself, for its own fragile communities, then the film’s hindsight allows it to occupy the Touch dancefloor more fully, completely and permanently than anyone could have at the time, to turn it into a home – but of course that’s also what destroys it, the paradox at the heart of his heart-wrenching film.

Taylor-Johnson: Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)

Now that it’s become possible to witness virtually any sex act at the click of a button, there’s something improbable about the blank narrative time that once preoccupied so much pornography. In fact, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that porn, as an old-fashioned narrative genre, has been more or less relegated to a boutique, arthouse niche – and even then a niche that’s filmed with the full assumption that you can still transition to the money shot at a moment’s notice. In the process, the ingredient that arguably accounted for porn’s eroticism – waiting, endlessly waiting – has been progressively whittled away, leaving scenarios that are ever more explicit, yet ever more mind-numbingly functional at the same time. In some ways,Fifty Shades of Grey speaks to that moment as eloquently as art porn spoke to the rise of digital streaming in the late 90s and early 00s, offering up a series of utterly unimaginative softcore scenarios that play out against an utterly lifeless neoliberal lifeworld, a world in which there is no real taboo left to surmount, least of all the sadomasochistic configurations that have been marketed as its most titillating and transgressive moments. That might sound fairly unpromising, but the peculiar genius of the film is that it makes you feel as if you can only really commune with Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) and Grey’s (Jamie Dornan) constrictive, suffocating rapport by watching it in real time. Rediscovering a certain masochism in simply watching pornography as film, the narrative revels in a sustained sense of the preposterous that only emerges when you watch it in its totality, and which seems neither unintentional nor knowing so much as wholeheartedly committed to the combination of the erotic and the idiotic – the erotidiotic – that once characterised porn as a genre, back when its artier and more masturbatory functions weren’t quite as separated and streamlined as they are today. Perhaps that’s why it often recalls Paul Verhoeven, since, like his greatest films, it forces you to be a hardcore voyeur for every minute of its two hour plus running time – a slightly ludicrous project, given that most of it looks like a tie commercial, a car commercial, or an Apple commercial, one of many ways in which Sam Taylor-Johnson’s mock-boutique style syncs perfectly with E.L. James’ corporate chic. Just as Grey brands everything in his life, so every single utterance exudes the mock-gravitas of his sex chamber, in something like an erotic thriller in which there is no actual thriller, which is perhaps what porn was all along. That said, from the film’s perspective porn is so historic that it’s already started to collapse into traditional romantic drama anyway, as Anastasia and Grey only seem to be able to finalise their masochistic contract by drawing upon one literary classic after another for inspiration - in a stroke of genius, Jennifer Ehle plays Anastasia's mother and muse -  which is where the film’s supreme sense of camp really comes into its own, its determination to pleasure as many viewers as humanly possible, even or especially if it risks ending up relegated to cult and covert midnight screenings in the process. 

Nichols: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

The opening credits of Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Edward Albee’s Pulitzer-winning play are so stately and classical that they could easily be attributed to some great lost movie from the 40s, hovering at a polite distance behind a middle-aged couple, Martha and George, played by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as they wander home across the bucolic liberal arts campus where George is an Associate Professor of History. The moment they – and the camera – step inside, however, we’re launched into an argument about who's best versed in 30s and 40s cinema, paving the way for a film that, perhaps more than any other big-budget top-billed Hollywood outing of the 1960s, sets out to establish itself as definitively post-classical, in terms of ambit, atmosphere and acting style. In large part, that’s because Albee's iconic vision of a marriage in crisis is so incompatible with even the residual confines of the Hays Code era that it more or less plays as a dismantling of every classical scruple and sentiment, lurching us into a strange new world that starts at the end of a boozy, combative evening and simply escalates from there, as Martha and George invite a couple they’ve met over the course of the night – Nick (George Segal) and Honey (Sandy Dennis) – back to their house for a tortuous session of “get the guests." Arguments, especially drunken arguments, tend to date pretty quickly – let alone in a film in which the characters are drunk for the entire duration – so it’s extraordinary how harsh, biting and volatile this still feels, as the repartee flows quickly, pre-emptively and cacaphonously as in the most daring screwball comedies, and voices already worn out from drinking and arguing all night are taken to ever greater levels of agony and aggression. If anything, it makes latter-day descendents, such as Roman Polanski’s Carnage, seem somewhat tame by comparison, thanks in part to Haskall Wexler’s incredible camera, which always feels a little too close to the actors – and gets closer as the night wears on – but is too mobile and shifting to ever settle into anything like a regular close-up either. Inhabiting it is like being trapped in a car with a drunk driver, vertiginously claustrophobic without being in the least stagy – a considerable achievement for a theatrical adaptation – as Martha and George's spray of abuse reaches such plosive, rapid-fire intensities that it's pretty much impossible for Wexler to cross-edit each new invective, instead forcing him to duck and weave around them like he’s shooting a boxing film, marriage as a spectator sport. For that reason, his camera works most organically when it’s trained on Taylor, who puts in the performance of a lifetime, perpetually speaking through a mouthful of food, ice or gin, and coughing, spluttering and contorting her delivery as if she's determined to twist further out of her beauty with each passing moment. Cloaked in accumulating, aggressive feedback, her luminous rage strives for the apex that will finally allow it to mutate into despair, even as the dawn only seems to get further and further away, sinking the film into the weird ambience of the wee small hours that both Nichols and Wexler do so well, the ebb and flow of late-night drunkenness, sudden lurches between existential introspection and expansive aggression. After the first ten minutes, you feel that it must be ending, that it can’t possibly intensify for another two hours – and yet it does, somehow it does, taking us into the very bosom of a marriage that, by all sane accounts, should have ended some twenty years before.

Mackenzie: Starred Up (2013)

Referencing Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped has become something of a commonplace when it comes to prison films with any aspirations to profundity, but Starred Up is one of the few genre exercises that feels like a true descendent – a minute, painstaking and unbelievably visceral embodiment of the prison experience by way of a protagonist who, like Bresson’s Fontaine, is really more of an avatar than a character. From the moment Eric Love (Jack O’Connell) is “starred up” – moved from a juvenile facility to an adult facility, where he’s housed in the same wing as his father Neville (Ben Mendelsohn) – he seems convinced that the prison establishment isn’t merely looking to contain his body, but actually after his body itself, or at least his ability to control and co-ordinate his body. As a result, there’s not much in the way of introspection (or at least it's strongest when there's not), just the muscle memory and proprioceptive limits that Eric desperately tries to maintain by pre-emptively defending himself against convulsive onslaughts that nearly always have some element of rape or sexual abuse, and nearly always end with him being manhandled and bundled off to solitary confinement. Nor is there much in the way of narrative or dialogue - in some way, it resembles an episode from a gritty Granada or BBC One television series more than a fully-fledged film -  as Eric and his cellmates parry plosive chunks of sound that are so monosyllabic and thick with regional flourishes that they’re muscular rather than expository, bodily vibrations that feel more or less continuous with the punchups they inevitably precede. Too busy with staking claim to his own body to worry about escaping, Eric’s world contracts to anyone and everyone who comes too close to it, which creates a quite unique tone, meditative for long stretches but only ever the tiniest twitch away from ultra-violence as well, a process that his counsellor Oliver (Rupert Friend) tries to reverse by teaching him how to move from rage to a steady, calm contemplation of his rage. Still, by the end every encounter has become so traumatically embodied that it’s more like watching horror, or even torture porn – the end-point of an exponentially escalating aggression that’s so relentless that aggression itself starts to feel somewhat relative, forcing you to forget that any other way of interacting is really even possible. And perhaps that’s what finally allows Mackenzie to nail the weird ways aggression and abuse can domesticate intimacy among men in close confinement - in his vision, it’s only at the very threshold of the fight-or-flight response that the most tender and fragile homosocial communion can hide in plain sight, which is where his entire film feels poised as well, unspeakably vulnerable as it is unspeakably volatile.