Refn: Bronson (2008)

Nicholas Winding Refn’s crossover hit and first English language film is based on the life of notorious English prisoner Charles Bronson, although it’s not a biopic in any conventional sense. Instead, Refn presents Bronson’s movement from petty theft, to imprisonment, to twenty years in solitary confinement, as a pastiche of ultra-masculine genres – prison films, boxing films, kitchen sink films, crime films, action films, vigilante films – to the point where the film plays as a catalogue of poses, or postures, or at least a series of mise-en-scenes and set pieces designed to showcase the muscular male body in the most fetishistic, flattering light. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that the effect of piling all those genres on top of each other is that none of them feels adequate – or all of them feel impotent, as if Refn were trying to recoup the intense hit of masculinity that genre films once afforded, and to lure back the male demographic that might once have sought genre films as a way of vicariously flexing their muscles. And, in many ways, it’s a genre film made for an age in which cinema has lost a great deal of that vicarious power, superseded by all the avatars lurking around the synthetic fringes of Refn’s vision, as if to remind you how much more effective this might feel as a first-person gamer, a tendency embraced further in Only God Forgives. In this case, though, Refn takes that lurking digital impotence as a challenge to re-embody the male genre film – a challenge that he addresses most powerfully when he draws on Bronson’s fitness books and programs, rather than his insistence on being a vaudevillain, which gets monotonous pretty quickly. Great swathes of the film play as a workout guide, or a demonstration of what a good workout guide can get you, as if prescient that a certain male demographic now works out for the same reasons they might have seen a genre film back in the day, just as the gym has come to eclipse the cinema as a site of male hysteria and anxiety. In fact, it often literally feels designed to attract audiences who might otherwise be at the gym – or to be played at gyms – as Refn concedes that genre films can no longer be satisfied to supply masculinity vicariously; this is a film that actually wants to provide you with a workout, or at least make you feel as insidiously inadequate as the most effective personal trainer, while Hardy’s Bronson is little more than a bodybuilding catalogue made over as an arthouse film, suffused with the high-end brute chic of a boutique fashion spread. Fists perpetually clenched, ready to punch his way out of every situation, there’s no thought or perception that doesn’t have to traverse a thick seam of muscle before it eventuates, which is pretty much the position Refn puts us in as viewers, in one of the most exhausting, exhausted genre films in recent years.

Akerman: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Made when Chantal Akerman was a mere twenty-five, this staggering film depicts three days in the life of a single Belgian mother, played by Delphine Seyrig, as she attends to her apartment, runs errands and looks after her son. Devoting roughly an hour to each day, Akerman doesn’t reject so much as eviscerate and exhaust the conventional Hollywood three-act structure, in one of the most perfectly modulated descents into madness ever committed to film. Over the first day, and hour, Jeanne Dielman is presented as a paragon of orderliness and routine – a mistress of domestic economy, with the focus on the economy – and Akerman’s camera follows suit, observing her with a detached, procedural blankness that never strays from static mid-shots. Nothing seems amiss about Jeanne’s routine, apart from the fact that she services male clients every afternoon to help pay her bills – the only part of her life we don’t see in painstaking detail – and that’s perhaps what starts to precipitate her breakdown on the second and third days. It doesn’t seem quite right to ascribe any overarching cause, though, since this a breakdown that comes so gradually that you only start to feel that it’s started in retrospect, so subliminally and hypnotically does Akerman ingratiate you into Jeanne's daily patterns. What is clear is that, by the third day, Jeanne has started to become well and truly dissociated from her routine, which means being dissociated from her apartment. Strangely, that opens up the possibility of boredom for the first time, but also the possibility of curiosity, as she – and the audience – see all her furniture and fixtures with a new kind of clarity, and the film becomes less about watching an apartment operating itself than something closer to a conventional, realist character study. It's also at this point that Akerman also starts to deviate from a relatively narrow pool of compositions, while Seyrig’s body language almost imperceptibly slackens, loses something of its conviction and coherence, like a mechanical doll that’s gradually winding down, fighting with all its power not to become part of the furniture, tripped up by household objects that have suddenly turned hostile. Less a breakdown in slow motion than a breakdown in real motion, seen moment by moment, in all its metrically gradated minutiae, it’s one of the most visceral, unbearable films ever made, if only because Akerman films Jeanne losing control as calmly and completely as she films her eating a bowl of soup, or reading a newspaper article, with all the shock of recognition that comes from seeing actions completed and contemplated in real time.

Allen: The Uninvited (1944)

The Uninvited is generally considered to be the first serious haunted house film, or at least the first high concept haunted house film, as well as the first to ascribe the haunting to a supernatural cause. Set on the Cornish coast, it’s about a brother and sister, Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey), who impulsively buy a remote, desolate clifftop house when holidaying from London. They quickly move in, and just as quickly realise that there’s something wrong about the house – a series of “disturbances” that take them back to the original owner, Commander Beech (Donald Crisp) and his granddaughter Stella Meredith (Gail Russell) for questions. For the most part Lewis Allen draws on the lush atmospherics of the Lewton horror cycle to heighten our sensitivity to the precise modulations of moving from one room to another - insofar as the “disturbances” tend to manifest themselves, it’s as fleeting, elusive changes in how a room feels, or sounds, or smells, as horror tends to hang around doors, porches, windows and other thresholds between one micro-atmosphere and the next. Among other things, that tends to collapse the difference between scenes shot on sound sages and scenes shot on location – if anything, the more furnished a room, the more distinctive an atmosphere it accrues, as Roderick and Pamela learn after attempting to make over the house in their own image, a ploy that just provides the “disturbances” with a greater canvas of materials and textures to make their presence felt. And, at its strongest, it feels as if Allen is offering the haunted house genre as just this collapse of real and staged scenes in the name of an affinity between the camera and the spaces it describes that doesn’t much care whether those spaces are regarded as being natural or artificial by human standards – a realism of space that bypasses human use and so ends up feeling too real for human perception, as if supernaturalism were simply the moment at which realism exceeds our sensory limitations. Not unlike the relationship between the camera and its spaces in the Paranormal Activity franchise – the film includes one of the earliest and eeriest séance sessions – it must have struck audiences with a similar terror and uncanniness, making for one of the most melancholy, memorable horror films of the 40s, and a morbid, moody precursor to The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

Eastwood: Unforgiven (1992)

It’s fitting that Clint Eastwood hasn’t returned to the western since Unforgiven, since it plays as a swansong and elegy for his great revisions of the genre in the 70s and 80s. Dedicated to Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, it’s a fairly stark revenge narrative revolving around a handful of figures on the verge of retirement, including Will Munny (Eastwood), a reformed bounty hunter, his ex-partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and “Little Bill” (Gene Hackman), a brutal sheriff. All three men are settling down after a tightly wound life, starting to become dissociated from the legends that have started to circulate about them, whether by endlessly retelling and embellishing them, or by refusing to countenance them. However, when they find themselves confronted by a conflict that’s as visceral and propulsive as anything in their heyday, they discover that all the old brutality is still there, still lingering, meaning the film very much plays as an effort to come to terms with their separate and shared legacies. Set in the 1890s, it’s considerably more modern than most westerns, and it’s not hard to see a parallel with Eastwood’s position in the 1990s – just as Will, Ned and Little Bill’s frontier has started to recede to a mythological distance, so the frontier of Eastwood’s westerns has also started to recede into the realms of the canon, creating an elegaic, autumnal tone that tends to contain the more brutal moments rather than being overtaken by them. Among other things, that means that, of all Eastwood’s westerns, it’s the least possessed by sublime vistas and visionary scales – although it’s driven by landscapes, all the landscapes feel remembered, filtered through nostalgia to a second remove, even if it’s a revisionist nostalgia, nostalgia that leaves some limited space for critical distance. Perhaps that’s why glasses and short-sightedness abound – in particular, Will and Ned’s poorly matched partner, “The Schofield Kid” (Jamiz Woolvett), has virtually no long-distance or depth perception, which comes to play a critical role in how they revise their expectations of their purpose and mission. Almost impossibly languorous, painterly and musical – Eastwood’s score and David Webb People’s script come to feel like much the same thing – it’s a high watermark in Eastwood’s career, a perfectly pitched venture into sombre sentimentality.

Leconte: La Fille Sur Le Pont (The Girl On The Bridge) (1999)

A glossy, haute couture pastiche of poetic realism and neorealism, The Girl On The Bridge revolves around the romance between Adele (Vanessa Paradis), a drifting, melancholy waif, and Gabor (Daniel Auteil), a knife-thrower who saves her from jumping off a bridge, and convinces her to become part of his act. Most of the film follows their personal and professional relationship – there aren’t really any other characters - but that doesn’t necessarily make it feel insular, it just means that Leconte has to work extra hard to make them feel like they’re carrying the whole world in their wake. Not unlike some of the greatest poetic realist films, there’s a sense that everything accelerates towards some unimaginable departure, a departure without a destination, as Leconte draws on Adele’s plunge to the depths and Gabor’s knife-lines to craft long, low corridors and tunnels of space, occasionally funnelling the action along the vortices of Jeneut, Besson and Carax’s futuristic Paris. As with the whole Cinema du Look movement, too, there’s a sense that the future itself is a new kind of sexual orientation, or sensual orientation, where knife-throwing isn’t just some cipher or placeholder for sex, but a new and fascinating development of sex. Specifically, it’s a form of sex that allows men to finally achieve multiple orgasms, as Gabor explains to Adele that the real challenge of knife-throwing is to transmit and receive thoughts faster than the knife, over and over and over again. Too bound up in the shared telepathy of orgasm to even need sex any more, Adele and Gabor come to have the same strange relation to each other that you sense between models in a fashion spread, especially a French fashion spread – flushed with cyborg warmth, they’ve become post-human, even if a critical part of being post-human involves mistaking themselves for human, believing more in their humanity than any of the actual humans filling out the background of this sly, surreal mood piece.