Ray: Charulata (1964)

In many ways, Satyajit Ray was the most European of Bengali directors, in the same way that his champion, Kurosawa, was the most European of Japanese directors. There’s something appropriate, then, in seeing him adapt a novella by Rabindranath Tagore, whose writings culminated the Bengali Renaissance, the gradual importation and internalisation of European and British culture over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Working from Tagore’s The Broken Nest, Ray paints a portrait of Charulata (Madhabhi Mukherjee), a lonely housewife living in Victorian Calcultta, caught between her dedication to her husband, Bhupati (Shalen Mukherjee), a printer, and her husband’s cousin, Amal (Soumittra Chatterjee), a calligrapher. Ray himself was both a notable typographer and a notable calligrapher, and in fact pioneered a variety of styles that drew from both Western fonts and Bengali flourishes, perhaps explaining why Charulata feels so collapsed into the writing she starts to embark upon under both Bhupati and Amal’s guidance. Specifically, Ray’s lettering styles drew on both Western and Bengali musical notation, meaning that his trademark scenes of music performed and appreciated feel more collapsed into the screenplay than ever before, just as his dialogue and even his cinematography feels peculiarly musical, continuous with his score; it is as if his camera managed to distill indolence into a melody, swooping and panning around Charulata as she wanders and ponders, elegant even in her restlessness and frustration. That makes for a powerful, understated character study, but it  also allows Ray to synaesthetically evoke the entire culture-world that surrounds her, especially the way it recapitulates and condenses the progression of European and English letters over the last two centuries – Bhupati yearns to be an orator, essayist or parliamentarian in the tradition of Addison, Steele, Burke and Macaulay, Amal composes Romantic poetry, and Charulata is somehow in between, embodying the rise of female literacy that made it all possible, the only true novelist and novel reader in the film. In that sense, it’s a tribute to Tagore as a realist novelist, and to the realist Indian novel generally - realism reimagined through neorealism, best watched through binoculars, too intimate and immediate to be experienced up close.

Chbosky: The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

It’s rare that a novelist directs the film version of their own work, and even rarer that it works as well as it does here, as Stephen Chbosky brings his iconic coming-of-age story to the big screen. Set in suburban Pittsburgh in the early 90s, and cut from the same cloth as My So-Called Life, it follows freshman Charlie (Logan Lerman), and his blossoming friendship with two seniors, Sam (Emma Watson) and Patrick (Ezra Miller). As might be expected from a novelist-turned-director, especially one adapting his own work, it’s very wordy, written as much as directed, but that’s probably necessary to capture the hushed, cloistered tone of the novel, as Chbosky translates Charlie’s cryptic, confessional epistolary style into the haunting, charming voiceover that drives the film. As with the novel, too, most of Charlie’s communications to the audience and to himself are about the books he’s read, the films he’s seen and, above all, the music he loves – and while bands such as Galaxie 500, the Cocteau Twins and the Smiths are quite familiar from the indie dramas of taste formation of recent years, this story charts the discovery of an earlier generation, the generation that emerged just after most of these artists’ heyday. Among other things, that means that there’s a breathless, thrilling sense of discovery that’s perhaps been a bit denuded in the age of the internet – not merely discovering a new artist, but discovering someone else who likes the same artist , a community of like-minded aesthetes. Perhaps that’s why it never really feels absurd that Charlie’s discoveries are so staid – his favourite books are Hamlet, The Catcher In The Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby – since it takes place in a time when taste wasn’t merely a click away, when you couldn’t curate your own radio station, when you might go for days, even weeks, trying to figure out the name and performer of a particular song. And that’s just what happens, as the trio spend most of the film trying to proto-shazam a song that turns out to be David Bowie’s “Heroes,” which they hear in bits and pieces on the radios, CD players and televisions that dot this superb reinvention of science fiction for an age where the immediate techno-past feels more remote than even the most speculative, visionary techno-future.

Losey: Eva (1962)

Based on a 1945 hard-boiled novel by James Hadley Chase, Eva is about the agonising, self-destructive affair between Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker), a sham novelist, and Eva (Jeanne Moreau), a scheming, gambling femme fatale. Although Chase’s novel was set in Hollywood, Losey moves the action to Venice, where the romance plays out among a loose English and American expatriate community. At one level, that feels like an autobiographical decision, a pretext for Losey to contemplate his excommunication from the United States and uneasy adjustment to the English film industry. But it also offers a striking opportunity for him to exercise and extend his signature tracking-shots, since, from the opening vaporetti sequence, it’s clear that his camera intends to glide as effortlessly through Venice’s streets and rooms as it does across its waters. Combined with a sinuous, jazzy score, the city feels so fluid that Losey can almost improvise it into a new configuration each time he shoots it, meaning that it’s often quite unrecognisable as Venice, as if the true nature of this city were to defamiliarise every new space as soon as we encounter it. As if that weren’t exquisitely disorienting enough, Losey tends to elide human faces and bodies from his tracking-shots, instead lingering over all the objects that Tyvian buys, sells and barters to keep Eva in his pocket – it’s as if each mise-en-scene is trying to recreate the experience of sitting down at a gambling table, all eyes on the objects laid out before us, fondling each one to calculate its exact risk and worth. As might be expected, that severely objectifies and debilitates Tyvian, making for one of the most harrowing, masochistic performances of Baker’s career – it continually feels like he’s fighting to get back into the frame, while getting off on how scrupulously Losey, and Eva, keep him in his place. Not that far removed from some of von Stroheim’s romances of degradation – Queen Kelly in particular comes to mind – it’s clear that the lapse of time between 1945 and 1962, and the imminent sexual revolution, hasn’t done anything to diminish Chase’s original vision. If anything, it’s allowed Losey to refine it, stripping Eva of the grace, art or nuance that might have cloaked her in classical noir, divesting her cruelty of beauty, in one of his most startling, uncompromising literary adaptations. 

Tarantino: Django Unchained (2013)

Django Unchained has been acclaimed for paying homage to spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation, but it’s not a nostalgia exercise so much as an archaeology, or an ancient history, of the gangsta culture that’s become omniscient in recent years – especially the gangsta distinction between niggers and niggas, old slaves and new slaves. Set in the antebellum South, it’s about Django, a freed slave, and Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter, who set out to save Django's wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from sadistic plantation owner Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), and his loyal house slave, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson). However, the standoff between Django and Candie is a bit of a smokescreen, as Tarantino seems more interested in the encounter between nigger and nigga, Django and Steven, inducing Jackson and Foxx to put in two of the most lurid perfomances of their careers. As Stephen, Jackson’s positively hallucinatory, bug-eyed with all the contradictions and self-loathing that come from internalising everyone and everything that’s ever convinced him he’s just a nigger. But it’s Foxx who steals the show, drawing more on his career as a rapper than an actor, as he steers his steed like an SUV, strutting through the film like it’s one of his music clips, with Rick Ross and RZA as guest vocalists. Brandings become battle scars, lashed backs segue into gangsta tattoos, in a tribute to the lurid spaghetti melodrama of the most memorable gangsta clips, their sense that anybody who’s not perpetually branding themselves as a nigga, a gangsta, a free citizen, is still just a nigger, a nonentity, a slave. Like the most propulsive, provocative gangsta beats, Django never stops inhabiting those few seconds after being delivered from slavery, riding a torrent of pent-up machismo so unbridled and uncontained it seems to warp the film out of its intended ending, producing a series of nested denouements and truncated subplots. And that’s exactly where Tarantino chooses to make his cameo, swept out of the story almost as soon as he appears, as if enjoining Django to speak despite his direction, despite everything he’s done to make gangsta culture palatable to a white audience.

Apatow: This Is 40 (2012)

This Is 40 was billed as a "sort-of sequel" to Knocked Up, but it's more of a revisionist Knocked Up, since it takes two of the side characters from that film and presents them with the same dilemma that the main characters had the first time around: an unexpected pregnancy. The difference, this time, is that the pregnancy happens at 40, rather than 30, meaning that Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) are faced with a different set of anxieties and insecurities. While it's no Rebel Without A Cause, there is something of the flavor of that film in the way that Apatow seems to be marking out and elaborating a new generational category - in this case, the second bloom of adolescence that comes in his characters' late 30s, making 40 something of a second adulthood. For that reason, the film's idea of 40 oscillates quite vertiginously: on the one hand, it's a second 20, but, on the other hand, it’s a second 40, only a "blink away from 90." Having a child at 40, then, is not that different from being a grandparent – and both Pete’s father (Albert Brooks) and Leslie's father (John Lithgow) have in fact had children younger than Leslie and Paul's children, collapsing parenting and grandparenting into a generational aimlessness that makes for a surprisingly ambient, freeform film, much like the devolution of narrative in Funny People. Except that it’s not really as funny or as compassionate as Funny People, which suggested that Apatow’s characters might have a use-by date, might stop being endearing really quickly, but didn’t quite push them to the point that’s reached here, as Mann and Rudd put in two of their shrillest, most grating performances to date. Pete, in particular, feels like an implosion of all Apatow’s bromantic instincts – he’s a record executive, and it’s hard to think of a worse portrait of an aging music lover – while a lot of other Apatow regulars hang around the fringes in denuded, washed-out, impoverished ways. For the first time, an Apatow film tends to be most compelling or cathartic when it’s most aggressive – it’s a protest film, really, driven by rage more than anything else, so it’s a relief when all the whining finally spews over into the rants and monologues that dot the third act. Those rants don’t make the characters any more likeable, but they at least make them feel as if they’ve resigned themselves to being unlikeable, which is perhaps the most that can be asked from their extraordinary solipsism, or from this melancholy footnote to the bromance experiment.