Lespert: Yves Saint Laurent (2014)

Yves Saint Laurent was the first of two biopics released about the fashion icon in 2014, and in some ways it’s closer to a traditional biopic than the more critically acclaimed Saint Laurent. Following Laurent (played by uncanny double Pierre Niney) from his earliest days working for Christian Dior through to the dominance of his own fashion house in the late 1970s, it’s narrated by his lifelong partner, Pierre Berge (Guillaime Gallienne), whose melancholy, bittersweet reflections set the tone for most of what transpires. On the one hand, it’s clear that Berge was devoted to Laurent, as well as being one of the first people to really recognise his genius, but, as the film tells it, Laurent wasn’t especially gracious or generous with returning his love, tending to wander away from Berge’s affection when he wasn’t utterly burned out from being in the spotlight for too long. As a result, one of the great strengths of the film is the way it dissociates Laurent from his fame, refraining from the kind of hedonistic expose you might expect from a high-profile fashion biopic to paint a version of Laurent as neurotic and nerdy in the extreme, albeit too awkward and ungainly to be a mere blushing beauty just waiting for a makeover either, as director Jalili Lespert positively buries Niney behind thicker and thicker glasses, trapping him in a manic depressive body that’s especially ill-equipped for the kind of decadence it was exposed to as Laurent’s star rose. For all that he longs for total, erotic intoxication, this version of Laurent simply doesn’t have the stamina for it, stumbling around like a dazed stick insect, and misplacing or displacing his sexual longings so laboriously that the film actually manages to generate a deep, smouldering and slow-burning eroticism – the kind of eroticism that can only start to emerge once sex scenes so consistently miss their mark. That’s not to say, of course, that it’s a clumsy film, since part of its power is how utterly Laurent transforms once he’s in his element, transfixing his models with such an exquisite sense of poise that it feels as if it’s directed by a fashion photographer. Although a great deal of it is set in the mid to late 70s, it never really feels as if it escapes the 60s – or at least the 60s popularised by Mad Men, a vision of the decade as a gradual congealment and distention of poise, pose and posture. Combined with the fact that Berge lent a staggering 77 vintage Laurent items to the film-makers, that often makes it feel as if the actors are merely mannequins in a mobile Laurent retrospective, which is perhaps how a period fashion piece should finally play, and perhaps why the film only really seems to come into its own during the catwalk segments, or when the mise-en-scene starts to resemble a fashion spread. In fact, as Laurent’s pret-a-porter style shifts into gear, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between what’s a catwalk and what’s not, just as every space feels as if has to be ready to grace a fashion magazine at a moment’s notice, all of which tends to offset the staginess with a more provisional, improvisational atmosphere, turning what could have been a fairly functional, standardised biopic into something considerably looser, airier, ready-to-wear. 

Vallée: Wild (2014)

In 1994, Cheryl Strayed – then Cheryl Nyland – walked the entire Pacific Crest Trail in an effort to come to terms with the death of her mother, her subsequent addiction to heroin and the breakdown of her first marriage. Some twenty years later, she shared her journey of self-discovery in Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which forms the basis for Wild, a travelogue-biopic that stars Reese Witherspoon as Strayed, Laura Dern as her mother and Thomas Sadoski as her ex-husband. Taking its cues from the memoir, the entire film is shot within the confines of the Pacific Crest Trail – it opens at the Mexican border and closes at the Bridge of the Gods, on the Oregon-Washington border, where Strayed would end up settling for the next twenty years – and that’s a bold move, since it means that Strayed’s story and character has to emerge through flashbacks and interior monologues, an impressionistic sense of her consciousness more than a fully developed or elaborated narrative. To that end, Jean-Marc Vallee situates the film at the hinge between past and present, and between landscape and memory, by way of a series of synaesthetic montage sequences, bursts of sound, image and texture, that make the past feel too present for flashbacks to really operate in a conventional way. Sound, in particular, plays a pivotal role, as Strayed’s thoughts and epiphanies often convey themselves in a kind of musical mentalese, a gorgeous taste for the way songs pare themselves back, over time, to so many inchoate mnemonic cues, as the soundscape cycles through bridges, hooks and fragments that seem urgently familiar, even if you can’t always place where they come from, or even what decade they were first released. In the process, you come to feel acquainted with with Strayed’s consciousness in the same way that you might have once felt acquainted with classical singer-songwriters – there’s a bedsitter ambience, a chamber hush that often feels peculiarly and poetically attuned to the purity and austerity of second-wave feminism, women who left their lives behind to set themselves against the wilderness. The same sublime sense of scale too, as the second-wave feminist project, as Strayed fuses feminist and frontier consciousness, taking deeper and deeper draughts of the vast lonelinesses that mobilised her ancestors – Joni Mitchell, Erica Jong, Adrienne Rich and Emily Dickinson are all touchstones – in a film that eludes both present and past for a future that feels tremulously, almost traumatically open.

Eastwood: American Sniper (2015)

Based on the bestselling autobiography of the same name, American Sniper describes how United States Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) went from being a struggling rodeo sideshow act to the most prolific and decorated sniper in American history. Aside from a short prologue depicting Kyle’s upbringing in Texas, it’s largely preoccupied with Kyle's four tours of duty in Iraq, during which he refined and honed his skills amidst some of the ugliest and cruellest moments in the war, many involving children. Each tour is shot as an extended set piece, and together they comprise the bulk of the film, giving Clint Eastwood a bit of room to get away from the script, which can be a little constrictive at moments, as well as providing him with an opportunity to demonstrate just how agile a director in his mid-80s can be when given the right opportunity. Yet that’s not exactly to say that he shoots in the mobile, frenzied, handheld way that we’ve come to associate with cinematic representations of the Iraq conflict, but more that sniping gradually comes to feel like a way of rearranging terrorist warfare as frontal warfare, reining the diffuse, amorphous threat of post-9/11 combat into something commensurate to the classical editing patterns Eastwood has made his own. That places an enormous ideological burden upon the sniper, and upon Kyle in particular, who finds himself compelled at every moment to reiterate and refashion the war as a defensive war, so proximate in its geographical and political signficance that it’s tantamount to an invasion, if not of American soil, then of American principles and values. Some critics have argued that he’s presented as too patriotic, or too unquestioning, but his position doesn’t leave room for anything else – at least as the film presents it – as he’s continually forced to seek out the sightline that will allow him and the army behind him to fold and contain the next terrorist attack into something resembling classical combat. Given how seamlessly Eastwood fuses his lens with Kyle’s lens, it also puts an enormous burden on his own camera, which feels as if it’s sending out a pre-emptive strike with each scene, scanning and sweeping every space, even when it seems to be enmeshed in the safety of America, or the historical past. In fact, as Eastwood’s transitions between Iraq and the United States become more abrupt and dissonant, you start to feel as if you’ve never really left the Middle East at all, just as Kyle insists that a true patriot is “never quite back,” never really home. And the film never quite arrives home either, or at least never makes the transition from home front to home, which is perhaps why it never quite arrives at a specifically conservative or liberal homeworld either, settling instead into a vague, postpartisan dread and disillusion, a self-consuming rage that’s not unlike the eerie, unearthly atmospheres of Eastwood’s earliest apocalypses. 

Watkins: The War Game (1965)

Poised somewhere between Mass Observation and the neorealist fringe of Ealing Studios, The War Game is one of the most unusual films to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The most immediate reason for that is that it’s not really a documentary at all, but instead a step-by-step recreation – or anticipation – of how a nuclear attack on Britain would look and feel, from the first blast of light through the ensuing shock waves and firestorms and out into the radiated landscape beyond. Turning his low-budget cinematography to his advantage in quite an extraordinary way, Peter Watkins crafts a found footage drama half a century before its time, commanding what often feels like the last surviving camera with a frenzied, frenetic, kinetic energy that’s so bewildering and disarming that it’s not hard to see why it was pulled from the BBC’S Wednesday Play anthology series for fear it might be mistaken for a news broadcast, or the remains of an aborted news broadcast. Although a loose, satirical, dystopian narrative gradually emerges, in which food becomes “bonus” for maintaining law and order, the focus is squarely cenetred on this sublime encounter between camera and nuclear apocalypse, which seems to radiate, warp and melt the film stock as it goes. Shrouding his non-professional actors in the peculiar hush of post-mortem footage, and shooting them mainly in close-up or extreme close-up, Watkins not only nails the surreal claustrophobia of knowing that nuclear warheads are aimed at you all the time, but also the strangeness of a war in which a war zone of utterly apocalyptic proportions might coalesce around you at a moment’s notice, which is pretty much what happens over the course of the film, rendering its brevity – only thirty-five minutes – utterly crucial to its lingering horror. A war film for a world in which Kent might become the next Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki any second, Watkins leaves utterly no space or time to distinguish anticipating the worst from assuming the worst, which may not quite segue his story back into traditional documentary, but certainly makes it feel as if the only way to truly document the worst fears of the Cold War was to document them as if they had already happened, or were happening at the very moment of filming.

Fitoussi: Folies Bergère (2014)

Folies Bergere isn’t, as the title might suggest, about the legendary nightclub, or the glamorous fin-de-siecle Parisian lifestyle that it suggests. Instead, it’s about a literal bergere – or shepherdess – whose follies puncture and play around with the haute aspirations of arthouse French cinema, to the point where it almost feels as if it’s been made just to punk a French Festival lineup. As Brigitte Lecanu, Isabelle Huppert is more or less in Bovary parody mode, dreaming of a life beyond her husband Xavier (Jean-Pierre Daroussin) and his swine farm that takes her up to Paris for the weekend, where she has a brief flirtation with one of their young rural neighbours, along with a businessman that she meets in her hotel. At one level, that makes it a bit of a vicarious Parisian holiday for her audience as well, but it’s a holiday that skewers Paris’ highbrow pretensions as it unfolds, taking us through a late New Wave city – Brigitte’s younger lover works at American Apparel – that doesn’t really feel that exotic, or even that cultured, and certainly doesn’t guarantee the kinds of endless erotic satisfaction and rumination that you find in so many films made about French people for foreigners. In some ways, that brings it closer to Godard and Truffaut’s cityscape than a more nostalgic tribute, tapping into their peculiarly free-floating, pulsating sense of exuberance, as director Marc Fitoussi sets Huppert’s body and face to the most retro moments of recent dance music – the original French title is La Ritournelle, after Sebastian Tellier’s nu-disco classic, although most of the music was released in the last year – until she feels quite ageless and free, finding her youth so unexpectedly and joyfully renewed that she doesn’t even really have to look back upon it. And joy is very much the register and point of the whole film, which is comic in a grand, quite old-fashioned way, beginning and ending happily, and giving Huppert license to put aside her masochistic austerity to just goof off and have a good time with one of the most contagiously silly characters of her career.