July: Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

Miranda July’s debut is a ensemble drama set in the L.A. suburbs, revolving around an aspiring performance artist (July) and a struggling shoe salesman (John Hawkes). However, where earlier L.A. ensemble dramas used apparently incidental or random encounters to gesture towards some emergent form of connectivity, for July that revelation is very much in the past. From the very beginning, it’s clear that her version of L.A. has been saturated, even oversaturated, with its connective potential, which isn’t to say that incidental encounters aren’t still important, but that they’re important in a different way – this isn’t a film that uses small moments to gesture towards the city in its totality, but rather a film that realises that the city in its totality has been entirely displaced by the small moments that it elaborates. That gives the film quite an unusual tone and pace – no moment is more important than any other, just as there’s no real difference in scale or scope from moment to moment. Instead, July strives to make each moment feel more momentary than the last, and to make each sequence feel more incidentally specific to where it’s taking place, to the point that it often plays more like a work of site-specific performance art than film proper, installing us in the city rather than allegorising our distance from it. That, in turn, creates an odd, distended warmth – every space feels oversaturated with late afternoon light, warm as a bedroom, shot through with the pink-orange hues that July has made her own – but it’s a sad kind of warmth, as July tries to get infinitesimally closer to closeness, the punctuation of everyday life. Perhaps that’s why writing feels so tactile in the film – prescient that most of the text we now see is backlit by the melancholy glow of social media, July’s characters are endlessly stroking typography, communing with language more than ever before, to the point where its texture and physicality overwhelms any message of intimacy it could possibly carry. And that tends to dissolve all the boundaries supposedly reinforced by digital media – between the very young and the very old, between normality and transgression – into a single, sombient enunciation, not unlike some of the more hypnotic performance pieces of Laurie Anderson. At one point, July comes across a frame that continually says ‘I love you’, and the film often feels framed in the same way, making for a suburban melodrama that’s definitively post-stranger danger, if only because no-one’s really a stranger anymore, or everyone’s a stranger, obscene and homely at the same time. 

Rivette: Le Pont du Nord (1982)

Set over a couple of days in Paris, this visionary film follows a pair of vagabonds, played by mother and daughter Bulle and Pascale Ogier, who stumble across, and try to decipher, what appears to be an occult, mystical map of the city. Shot entirely on location, the camera never ventures inside, making for an extraordinary evocation of early 80s Paris, which is very much the main character of the film. Among other things, this is a city where pedestrians have finally conceded that they’ve been outnumbered by vehicles, as all the sightlines, boulevards and promenades of late nineteenth-century Paris are gradually replaced with an entirely new, late-twentieth century configuration, vortically attuned to motorcyclists in a weird, distant echo of Cocteau’s Orpheus. At least, motorcyclists feel like the most discernible descendents of  pedestrians in this strange new metropolis, as Rivette centrifuges Paris around its monumental roundabouts as never before, until it feels as if the very sky is starting to slip down into the city. Helicopters quickly segue into the omniscient flux of traffic, which itself starts to collapse into the white noise of “absolute surveillance” – what one of the vagabonds describes as a “gaze that chases anything that moves,” dark forces descending from the air. On the one hand, that makes it feel like the action’s continually ascending, trying to get up into the sky, trying to reach the level where Paris becomes an aerial city, distributed across the strata that might be occupied by skyscrapers somewhere else. But that’s not really possible – even the top of the Arc de Triomphe feels like just another street – meaning that the vagabonds also seek out the all tiny pedestrian zones that have been left intact, spaces between the streets, nooks, crannies and wedges just big enough to accommodate a single person, as if these alternative vehicles for navigating the city were paradoxically the only residues of the “wide open spaces” of pedestrian life. It all makes for a film that hides in plain sight, suffused with late autumn light, and caressed by a camera that’s so soft and delicate that it seems to bring the texture of the city into existence, only to pull it away from us with every new shot – the kind of agonistic, spontaneous warmth that could perhaps only be fulfilled by a mother and daughter acting together. In the breadth of its urban ambition, it’s a natural companion piece and corrective to Paris Belongs To Us – a devastating vision of post-revolutionary Paris, set amidst a mass of rubble and reconstruction, where even “1980 is already a long time ago.”

Vallée: Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Dallas Buyers Club is a loose biopic of Ron Woodrof (Matthew McConaughey), a Dallas electrician who was diagnosed with AIDS in the mid-80s and established one of the first underground markets for unapproved drugs and supplements. In Jean-Marc Vallée’s version, Woodrof’s also homophobic, but, to its credit, the film doesn’t really play out as the story of a homophobe heroically conquering his fears. Certainly, Woodrof does become less homophobic as the film proceeds, partly due to his friendship with transgender patient Rayon (Jared Leto), but there’s no great moment of epiphany, nor does his change of heart affect his character in any fundamental way. Instead, it’s just a matter of exposure – all it really takes is for Woodrof to spend a significant amount of time around gay men for him to gradually, imperceptibly embrace them as one of his own. In any case, something Woodrof learns very early on is that, once he’s infected, he might as well as be anything along the LBGT spectrum, since the film opens in the earlier days of the epidemic, when being diagnosed was tantamount to being outed, even or especially when the diagnosis didn’t seem to correspond to any known sexual proclivity or profile. And so it makes sense that Woodrof quickly learns to disregard anything that’s supposedly essential or even characteristic about the disease – he focus on symptoms, not cures - turning the Buyers Club into a way of staying one step ahead of anyone trying to co-opt the disease for their own agenda, especially the big pharmaceutical companies, backed by the FDA, who quickly come to seem like an elongation of the virus, organisms at the edge of life. Not content to outwit his body, Woodrof enjoins the Club to outwit the operation of market forces on their bodies, creating a sense of precarity that feels entirely present, or at least makes the film feel like it’s set in the present, shot in real time, suffused with the unfussy immediacy of a docudrama or telemovie. Moving from one safe house to the next, jacking in to all the cruising highways and byways of 80s Dallas, Woodrof’s crusade perhaps captures the frenzied, speculative ingenuity of the early-mid AIDS crisis better than a regular, elegaic period piece – and at its most memorable moments it’s positively anti-elegaic, a steady-eyed celebration of everyone who refused to be victims of the disease, let alone the vast bureaucratic architecture that surrounded it. 

Kelly: Southland Tales (2006)

One of the most confounding, ambitious dystopias of the 00s, Southland Tales is set in an alternate present, in which the United States has been hit by a second wave of terrorist attacks, precipitating a third world war. Against that backdrop, Kelly traces out a series of characters trying to revise or renegotiate their identity in Los Angeles, including Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a film star trying to rebrand herself as a reality show host, Private Roland Taverner and Officer Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott), a pair of identical twins who gradually suspect they might be the same person, and Boxer Santoros (The Rock), an action star who’s been struck with amnesia, and searches the city for traces of his previous identity. Like so many films set in L.A.,  it’s an ensemble drama – but where L.A. ensemble dramas of the past used the city to gesture towards some imminent, unimaginable connectivity, Southland Tales makes it clear that that moment is well and truly behind us. In this world, connectivity has reached saturation point – for the most part, the film unfolds as a multimedia event, rather than a film per se, as Kelly floods his frames with a bewildering proliferation of screens and interfaces, just as his vast cast is, for the most part, only tangentially or obliquely related to what we’d think of as the traditional film industry, devoid of any privileged distance from the media-drenched citizens they play. Relayed and related from one media device to another, Kelly’s images don’t even feel second-hand – they’ve lost all connection to their original image, let alone their original subject, as every frame feels gripped by a kind of free-form, hysterical amnesia, perhaps explaining why most of the threads coalesce around Boxer’s search for his identity. As soon as we emerge from one screen, we discover we’re in another – the transition between scenes, the whole point of editing and montage, seems more to remind us that what we’re watching has already been processed by someone else, rather than for any narrative reason. Or if there is a narrative, it’s unfolding simultaneously, rather than sequentially, incorporating whatever screen you might happen to be watching it on, as well as any other screens that might be in the vicinity. A film like this can’t really end, if only because, by the end, it’s no longer really a film – it’s an event whose parameters change depending on its platform, creating a new space for itself each time it’s screened. 

Russell: Silver Linings Playbook (2013)

Based on Matthew Quick's bestselling novel, Silver Linings Playbook revolves around Pat (Bradley Cooper), an ex-teacher who returns to his home town after being discharged from a psychiatric institution. Released to the care of his parents Pat Sr. (Robert de Niro) and Dolores (Jacki Weaver), Pat sets out to reconnect with his ex-wife Nicki – it was her infidelity that prompted his nervous breakdown - but finds himself distracted by Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a distant acquaintance with a similarly troubled history. All the material is there for a feel-good film, but this is more of a feel-better film, partly because Pat's genuinely bipolar, rather than merely eccentric, or eccentrically troubled, as so often occurs in films of this kind. And David O. Russell very much reflects that in his direction, making for a film that’s quite true to the book’s slightly unbalanced, first-person voice – his trademark jerky, jagged editing makes it feel as if Pat’s continually running away from himself, while the circuitous, vertiginous pans make everything feel a little too close, on the verge of jump-cutting in, as if the camera were tracing out the ambit of Pat’s multiple restraining orders, an ambit he’s continually, manically trying to restrain himself from crossing one last time. Football plays a big part in the film – Pat Sr. is a manic Eagles fan – so it makes sense that Pat’s movements quickly come to feel like a football match gone awry; he moves as if he’s continually bracing himself for a tackle, while every confrontation, however minor, is poised at that tensile cusp just before a tackle becomes a fight, bodies clenched with the breathless anticipation of a fan so obsessive and devoted that he’s working even harder than the players he’s watching. And though Pat’s romance with Tiffany involves learning to discipline his body through a dance competition they decide to enter together – the film actually builds towards a football-dance parlay – the process is never complete, can never quite stave off the digital darkness that’s always lurking at the fringes of the action. Sometimes, certainly, it’s a warm darkness, the hushed hearth of an evening football game, but it’s also a perpetual reminder that these characters have only just started to take the first, tentative steps out of mental illness – and it’s the very modesty of their achievement that makes it feel so profound, preventing the film ever devolving into the series of self-help mantras it could so easily have been.