Baumbach: Kicking and Screaming (1995)

No other 90s director excelled at precocity quite like Noah Baumbach, who remains more or less unmatched in his ability to evoke that period of supreme graduate confidence – post-undergraduate but not yet postgraduate – when the entire future seems poised at the end of each perfectly polished sentence, even or especially if it’s a depressive or downbeat future. Admittedly, Whit Stillman came close, and in many ways Kicking and Screaming is a study in rarefied New England privilege along the lines of Metropolitan, revolving around a group of liberal arts graduates who decide to bunker themselves against the adult world by staying put in their small college town – it appears to be Poughkeepsie – and continuing to participate in the life of the college like they always did. That said, it’s far less austere, remote and otherworldly than Metropolitan, as Baumbach treads a wonderful line between preocity and plain sleaziness in what often feels like an ancestor of Old School as much as Girls, a frathouse comedy as much as an indie milestone. In part, that’s due to Baumbach’s way of writing and filming conversation, which is strangely frenetic and detached at the same time, built upon ruminative duos and cryptic asides that initially seem like studies in fusing written and spoken language, but quickly come to feel like a way of dissociating and compartmentalising conversations within a single scene – and one of the great strengths of the film is the way Baumbach manages to suggest the buzz and energy of lots of discrete conversations happening in a single space, if only to chart and occupy all the interstital spaces connecting and cushioning them. In the process, the film beautifully captures campus life as a vast panorama of conversational chambers, super-intimate and awkwardly formal at the same time, and mediated by Baumbach’s camera, a communicative platform as much as a recording device, an interface between a heterogeneous clutter of utterances, asides, monologues, conversations and theatrical renditions that often makes this feel like the last great frat film before colleges were remade by social media. At times, it’s not merely the characters but the actual cast – which includes Chris Eigeman, Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton, Carlos Jacott and the obligatory Eric Stoltz – who appear to be leaving messages for each other through Baumbach’s camera, which becomes a witness to an obsessive communicative inventory, a world in which people are continually replying to ripostes before they’ve even been delivered, oversharing only to try and take or give the information back, and anxious to record everything for posterity before it’s even occurred. Weirdly displaced from any one relationship, yet somehow attached to even the most incidental encounters, it’s the perfect register for a film about people who are trying to tap into that elusive undergraduate sense of possibility without actually taking classes – the sense of infinite conversations and connections taking place around you if you can only manage to tap into them. Of course, these characters never really do, settling into a low-key saloon groove that ends up making them feel more like the next generation of academics than anything else, which just makes this study in downbeat, downward mobility all the more bittersweet some twenty years later.   

James: Life Itself (2014)

A tribute to the life and lore of Roger Ebert, Life Itself was based on his 2011 memoir of the same name, and was filmed during the last stages of his battle with throat cancer, shortly before he passed away in 2013. Divided into roughly three sections, it opens with an overview of Ebert’s life and career before winning the Pulitzer for film criticism and, at this point at least, proceeds largely as photomontage, interspersed with interviews and archival footage thrown in for dynamism, and accompanied by excerpts from Ebert’s memoir. Not only does that capture something of the clutter and chaos of the news desk, as well as the vast sprawl of a life that was already overwhelmingly convivial and expansive, but it also gives this first part of the film the flavour of a talking book, with all the intimacy that entails. Among other things, that allows James to introduce us to an Ebert we’re perhaps less familiar with – the Ebert of poolrooms and hired ladies, the Ebert who co-wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the Ebert who breathed alcohol and was a self-confessed breast man and, above all, the Ebert who, for a number of years, lived the rugged, urban life of one of the melancholy 70s antiheroes whose roles he so often championed. As the interviews and archival footage gathers momentum, James moves on to the second part of the film, which is in some ways the most fascinating – the story of how Ebert paired with Gene Siskel to form Siskel and Ebert, pioneering television film criticism in the process. Almost despite itself, this part of the film makes a case for Ebert as a television critic even more than a print critic, if not a digital social media critic in filigree – a conversationalist and populist above all else whose overwhelming desire to “connect” with other people through movies would lead to him transitioning seamlessly into blogging and tweeting later in his life. Painting an incredibly evocative portrait of Chicago as a film criticism backwater sandwiched between Los Angeles and New York, James’ curation of archival footage totally nails the antagonism and dynamism between the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune – and, by extension, between Siskel and Ebert, stars of  a“sitcom about two guys who lived in a movie theatre” that returns, time and again, to the “clear, plain, Midwestern” timbre of Ebert’s voice, and his decision to remain in Chicago for his entire career. Of course that makes the final section, which deals with Ebert’s medical travails – he lost his voice in 2006 – all the more harrowing, but in the spirit of Ebert’s own Midwestern fortitude and optimism James doesn’t play it for tragedy but instead focuses on the way Ebert’s situation allowed him to fulfil his mission as a social media critic, bringing him into an ever closer proximity to his many devotees, as well as taking his relationship with his wife Chaz - in some ways the main character here - to ever greater levels. In fact, such is Ebert’s extraordinarily convivial and conversational presence that it only takes a few of his friends and colleagues for you to feel his words in the air around you, as James weaves a beautiful tapestry of witnesses to his life while always remaining in the moment with him and taking his charisma on its own terms. In that sense, the great achievement of the film is that a tragic scenario never devolves into full-blown tragedy – surely the way Ebert would have wanted it – as James sketches out a melancholy, effervescent and surprisingly opaque man of letters, as much an embodiment of the second half of the American century as Gatsby was of the first, and as indebted, in his own way, to his heartland upbringing, in what must be one of the greatest gifts a film-maker has ever bestowed upon a critic.

Wexler: Hysteria (2011)

A period comedy about the invention of the vibrator, Hysteria stars Hugh Dancy as Dr. Mortimer Granville, a Victorian physician whose espousal of germ theory forces him to resort to London’s only hysteria clinic for employment, run by Dr. Robert Dalrymple, played by Jonathan Price, and his wayward, apparently hysterical daughter Charlotte, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Rounding out the cast is Felicity Jones as Charlotte’s sister Emily and Rupert Everett as Granville’s best friend Lord Edmund St. John-Smythe, bit players in a wacky pre-psychoanalytic lifeworld – specifically, the 1880s – in which the clinical treatment of hysteria basically involves administering as many orgasms through manual clitoral stimulation as possible, with Granville and Dalrymple more or less playing the role of high-class escorts, at least so far as their hands and fingers are involved. Of course, it all takes place demurely, behind embroidered screens and damask curtains, but it inevitably suffuses the film with an overhyped, orgasmic – or immediately post-orgasmic – buzz, a slightly crazed jauntiness that tends to make hysteria seem kind of fun, an appetite for pleasure and a taste for life, as opposed to the “proclivity for frigidity, melancholia and anxiety” that’s spoken about in such serious tones by the male medical establishment. That’s not to say that it discounts hysteria as a constrictive diagnosis, since there’s a quite rousing feminist socialism at the heart of it all, mostly voiced by Charlotte but somewhat cautiously adopted by Granville as well, while Dalrymple’s hysterical practice is such an overwhelmingly cluttered, wallpapered study in lurid Victorian claustrophobia that it tends to induce hysteria – or at least perpetuate it – rather than cure it, both for the patients and for the viewer, in a distant echo of Gyllenhaal’s masochistic entrapments in Secretary. Against that backdrop, the narrative charts Granville’s invention of the vibrator as a simple mechanism for giving his fingers and hands some rest, a process that, at its most comic and evocative, gives the whole film a bit of a cyberpunk feel, as if the vibrator were an invention pioneered about fifty years ahead of its time – or at least a use of electricity pioneered about fifty years ahead of its time, as the entire female population of London starts to experiment with electrical self-stimulation at a time when the city was still predominantly lit by gaslight. Both more and less irreverent than it might seem at first glance, it’s one of the more unusual period comedies to come out in the last couple of years, and a fascinating experiment in reframing the best-selling sex toy of all time as the very “epitome of English virtue and womanliness.”

Vaughn: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)

While the most recent Bond films have added a lot to the franchise – depth, angst, backstory – they’ve taken a lot away as well. Lost in Daniel Craig’s clenched jaw and existential snarl, you could be forgiven for forgetting that this was once a fundamentally comic, camp series, and that Bond was more or less a sexual deviant, questionable at best when it came to his encounters with women. In some ways, Kingsman steps in to fill that niche, whittling Bond down to the camp extravagance that made him so popular in the first place, and unfolding an alternative myth of origins to Skyfall – the story of how a Chav, Gary “Eggsy” Unwin (Taron Egerton), learned to disguise himself as a gentleman, under the tutleage of Harry “Galahad” Hart (Colin Firth), a senior member of an aristocratic secret service known as the Kingsmen. One of the major casualties of the most recent Bond films has been Q, who’s too archaic for a world driven by digital crime, and too irreverent for Craig’s stony dramatics, but Kingsmen, by contrast, is a bit like watching Bond from Q’s perspective, as Galahad instructs Eggsy on all the accessories he needs to become a gentleman, leading him through a seemingly endless array of coats, canes, shoes and other accoutrements, all of which are armed with the latest innovations in micro-defence. It may all revolve around a global terror plot, hatched by a crazed spokesman for climate change, played by Samuel L. Jackson in a brilliant parody of the typical Bond villain, but at the end of the day it feels as if nothing is quite as significant as finding the right suit for the right occasion, especially the right sexual occasion. In that sense, it nails the fine line between aristocratic elegance and tabloid sensationalism that makes Bond such a quintessence of British snobbery, not least because it’s absurdly violent and sexually explicit at the same time, ending with a scene that’s worthy of They Live, and often recalling Monty Python in the way it skewers the British class system from the inside. Based on a graphic novel by David Gibbons and Mark Millar that was released at the same time as Skyfall – the apex of arthouse Bond – it’s not exactly nostalgic so much as simply continuing the Bond tradition as the lowbrow, B-movie romp it always really was, pitching Firth as the next Bond – or, rather, as the best of all possible bridges between old-school and neo-Bonds.

Assayas: Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)

With the exception of Steven Soderbergh, it’s hard to think of a contemporary director who has sought to make complexity his muse as assiduously as Olivier Assayas. Set in a post-digital world that’s at once overdetermined and improvisational, his films seem to unfold at a different altitude from waking life, which works beautifully with the rarefied alpine backdrops of Clouds of Sils Maria, a rumination on cinema, theatre and digital technology that takes place against the staggering landscapes of southeastern Switzerland. On the face of it, the narrative is something of a Bergman tribute, a chamber drama in which Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), an aging stage and screen actress, retreats to the Swiss Alps with her assistant, Valentine (Kristen Stewart), to start rehearsing her next role. Not only is she now playing the older woman in a lesbian drama she debuted in twenty years ago, but her rehearsals – and relationship – with Valentine quickly become indiscernible from the play itself, especially since there are very few other characters in the film. To some extent, what ensues plays as a metafictional puzzle, a cryptic set of associations that extend far beyond the characters and the play, showcasing Assayas’ tact and allusiveness as a screenwriter more than any of his films to date. At the same time, though, the sense of complexity is too emergent and viral to really feel predetermined in any way either, putting you at the forefront of a narrative cloud that seems to change its shape depending on what it encounters, threading its way through Assayas’ cryptic architecture with a casual, if provisional, grace. For all the change in backdrop, then, there’s the same sense of being perpetually in transit as in Assayas’ earlier techno-thrillers, although it’s considerably quieter and more inward here, as we’re more or less confined to a relationship that also feels emergent at every moment, an agoraphobic chamber drama in which the chamber itself always feels like a work in progress. For perhaps that reason, Assayas’ actual transitions between scenes feel even more disarmingly woven into the fabric of the film than usual – less about maintaining continuity than reiterating a pervasive, mysterious discontinuity, they refuse to ever allow this mercurial relationship to settle or stabilise as we might expect. In fact, as Assayas folds more and more miscellaneous and found footage into his cuts and fades – police reports, an X-Men parody, a series of excerpts from a silent film about cloud formations – it starts to feel as if the whole film is poised at the hinge between scenes, or between screens, as Maria searches for a way to transition into the next part of her life, the next medium where she’s likely to make her mark. Too accumulative for any scene to ever really end, but accumulative enough that you feel as if you’re always approaching the end of each scene  before it’s even begun, it’s frantic and serene all at once, a beautiful and tantalising glimpse of how late Assayas might look, as well as a sequel of sorts to Something In The Air.