Amini: The Two Faces of January (2013)

Based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, The Two Faces Of January is about an American con artist and his wife, played by Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst, who are travelling in Greece when a crime unexpectedly casts them into the company of a young American working abroad, played by Oscar Isaac. As in so many of Highsmith’s novels, there’s a fascination with what happens when men get too close to each other, or when the person who buffers their closeness – usually a woman – is suddenly or dramatically taken out of the picture. However, the film is curiously tactful and circumspect about that fascination, more circumspect than Highsmith herself really, as if Amini were trying to envisage how a contemporary adaptation of the novel might have played. That works particularly well with Isaac – like any number of pretty-faced actors of the 50s and 60s (Montgomery Clift and Farley Granger come to mind), his gaze has a peculiarly bisexual pregnancy, a kind of blanket receptiveness and openness that doesn’t really distinguish between women, men or the camera. At times, his gaze also includes Matt Damon in that category, since this is as much an adaptation of Minghella’s Ripley as anything else, right down to the very shots and sequences that Amini uses to anchor his adaptation, which also culminates with a loose, unsettling homosocial exchange over water. If there is any difference from Minghella, it’s that Amini’s vision is slightly flatter and more stylised – this is Ripley after Mad Men, January after January Jones. Where Minghella revelled in the labyrinthine complications of Ripley, Amini hollows out Highsmith’s novel until it feels more like a parable, if Highsmith could be said to write parables. At the very least, it has the elegance and economy of a short story – it proceeds by evacuation, as the trio's proximity takes them across a series of increasingly desolate Grecian and Cretan landscapes that denude them even as they throw them into greater relief. And while Amini has been heavily billed as the screenwriter of Drive, it’s his adaptation of The Wings of the Dove that underpins the film's paradoxes. Like Henry James, Highsmith is perfect at crafting characters who seem both indisputably homosexual and beyond all suspicion, and Amini’s pregnant voids strive to envisage those two faces at once, while remaining true to both. 

Kopple: Harlan County, USA (1976)

When Barbara Kopple started filming what would eventually become Harlan County, USA, the 1972 Brookside Miners’ Strike hadn’t even begun. Instead, she was intending to make a documentary about Tony Boyle, the corrupt leader of the United Mine Workers of America Union. Once the strike started, however, she shifted her focus, and lived among the strikers and their families for several years, painting their grievances with the Duke Power-owned Brookside Mine with an extraordinary, breathless sense of urgency and immediacy. Of course, it was artfully edited after the fact, structured for maximum impact and interpolated with interviews and found footage, but the main thrust is still that of someone participating in history as it happened. And as artful as Kopple’s organisation of her material might be, she is first and foremost a participant – like most strikers, her most radical gesture was simply remaining where she was, staying put, as the strike evolved into something more like a frontal class war. As a result, Kopple doesn’t insists on her presence – we only hear her voice a couple of times and hardly see her – but not does she deny it either. Instead, she uses her camera in the same way the other strikers use the tools and devices they have to hand – as a way of keeping the strike alive, and a way of anchoring herself to it. Not only were unused segments of the film distributed to educate and mobilise local workers, but it’s clear that the presence of Kopple’s camera was often the only thing preventing Duke Power and their hired mercenaries from devolving into full-scale military assault. Perhaps that’s why it often feels as if the strikers are addressing each other and the crowd through Kopple’s camera – they tend to look at it obliquely, as if it were a reflective surface, a convex mirror capable of shaping them into a single unity. At those moments, it feels every bit as momentous as Eisenstein’s Strike – there’s the same liquid sense of unified purpose, the same, sudden awareness of speaking in a common language, as Kopple overlays everything with a rich Appalachian strain of protest song. And, like the best protest songs, it’s too aware of history to feel historical, as Kopple works to keep history open, puts history back in the hands of the audience, electrifying and agitating at every turn. 

Kent: The Babadook (2014)

The Babadook is an Australian twist on the supernatural home invasion dramas that have become so popular in the wake of the Paranormal Activity franchise – or, rather, a South Australian twist, since it’s rare among recent Australian films in being set in Adelaide, which director Jennifer Kent paints in a peculiarly sparse, denuded light. Apart from a few fleeting side cameos, there are really only two characters – Amelia (Essie Davis) and her six-year old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) – or three characters, if you count the “Babadook,” a monster that Samuel and Amelia first encounter in a pop-up book that somehow turns up in his bedroom. In some ways, that book is the most terrifying part of the film – it’s suffused with that sadistic pleasure in frightening and traumatising children that you sometimes find in an older generation of picture books, stories destined to be relegated to the tops of bookcases. And while it’s quite predictable that the Babadook starts to migrate from the bookcase back into Amelia’s under-furnished terrace, the film is also quite original in that most of that migration happens during the daytime. Supernatural invasion dramas often revolve around the rhythm of waiting for nightfall, but Kent paints this sprawling terrace house with so many shades of grey that it’s often quite unclear whether it’s night or day – or day simply feels like incipient night, which works quite well with the insomniac angle that gradually takes hold. And, like the strongest insomniac horror, it’s something of an anechoic chamber drama – everything is suffused with that particular quietness that settles when you haven’t had enough sleep, or when your brain is starting to make up for missed dream-work while you’re still awake. From that perspective, the editing is perhaps the most crucial part of the film – it’s full of mismatches and odd cuts that suggest some maleficent microsleep has occurred between one image and the next, producing an eerie sense of something barely missed that’s never really assuaged or resolved. Perhaps that’s why the house sometimes feels like a regional broadband blackspot that’s somehow migrated into the inner city – there’s an omniscience that the camera can never quite access, a presence that’s never quite present, no matter how ingeniously or emphatically Amelia and Samuel try to domesticate it.

Pollack: Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005)

Frank Gehry and Sydney Pollack were old friends by the time this documentary about Gehry’s life and architecture was made. As a result, it’s quite informal and relaxed – most of it is shot on low-budget digital cameras, while Pollack himself is often present within the frame with his portable camera in hand. On the one hand, that really draws out the friendship between the two men – their conversations have the organic ease and assurance of people who’ve known each other for close to half a century, which also allows us as viewers to cut through some of the awe that can sometimes shroud Gehry and his projects. At the same time, the low-budget look allows for quite an embodied, visceral sense of what it is like to move through Gehry’s spaces - from the very beginning, Pollack makes it clear that he doesn’t simply want to reduce these buildings to a series of photographs, or montage sequences. Instead, he aims to celebrate everything three-dimensional about Gehry’s work, which increasingly means focusing on him as a sculptor as much as an architect. At one level, that’s quite a commonplace when it comes to Gehry – as he himself points out, he’s always been “aligned” with artists more than architects, perhaps explaining why so many of his projects have centred on exhibition venues. At the same time, though, Pollack’s proximity to Gehry allows him to capture just how obsessively he moulds, shapes and structures every object he encounters – he is always fiddling with something, crafting several makeshift cities a day out of all the flotsam and jetsam that comes in his way. Up close, you can tell that he’s yearning to simply sculpt buldings by hand, yearning for a handheld architecture that sits quite naturally with Pollack’s own handheld approach. More than that, you can tell that he thinks and speaks in shapes – by the end, he’s less an architect than a purveyor of “caverns, spaces and textures,” moulding each comment before he makes it, only to discard it almost immediately in search of fresh textures and thoughts to shape and caress. Of course, for someone whose very thoughts are architectural structures, it’s inevitable that the vast majority of Gehry's vision is going to be left behind, remain sketches. But the peculiar beauty of the film is that it embraces that, pays tribute to all those inchoate, ephemeral “caverns, spaces and textures” that will never be realised - it's a projective retrospective that's all the more poignant in that this would turn out to be one of the last and most personal films in Pollack’s own career.

Bong: Snowpiercer (2013)

Train travel is such a reliable cipher for cinema that it’s quite disorienting to see a film like Snowpiercer that uses it as a cipher for digital gaming instead. Based on Jacques Lob’s graphic novel, it’s set in a post-apocalyptic future that’s been decimated by a second Ice Age after taking extreme measures to prevent global warming. The only survivors are the inhabitants of the Snowpiercer, a train powered by a perpetual-motion engine and segregated according to strict class principles. That’s something you piece together gradually, though, since the film doesn’t establish so much as assume a state of class warfare, immediately gathering us up into the propulsive, forward momentum of the latest revolutionary movement, headed by Curtis Everett (Chris Evans), who sets out with an army of workers for the front of the train. It’s an extraordinary journey, not least because the closer the workers get to the front of the train, the more oblivious and indifferent the spaces they’re passing through become – it’s clear that the most privileged occupants have absolutely no idea that class warfare is being brutally waged on their behalf, or at best only regard it as a distant, mildly distracting spectacle being staged for their amuseument. That produces an incredible impotence, and makes Evans feel quite incongruous – he is like a cinematic character trying to fight his way out of a gaming universe, mistaking the limited autonomy of a sandbox world for real autonomy, perpetually unable to accept or comprehend his inability to control actions or even garner responses beyond a fixed radius.  In that sense, it’s a bit like how it would feel to play a sandbox game if the limits to your movements and actions were periodically visualised on the screen – for all the variety and expansiveness of the train, it’s really just a series of levels, or strata, just as Bong continually reins character and even charisma back into wherever it happens to emerge from in the train’s tightly controlled hierarchy. And that’s perfect for a film that bristles for some space beyond class, a dystopia that’s desperate for some way out of the mantra of sustainability that sustains the train and everything it stands for. Like the best dystopias, too, it doesn’t answer questions so much as keep them open, as Bong piles every class system known to history into an incredulous, comic pastiche that forces you to ask, time and again, just why this world is so unremittingly ridiculous, and how it might all be done differently.