Melville: Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea) (1949)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s debut film was an adaptation of Vencors’ novel The Silence of the Sea, a key text of the French Resistance. Both an allegory and a blueprint for action, it revolves around an elderly man and his daughter in a small rural town who are forced to billet a German soldier. In protest, they refuse to speak to him, meaning that most of Melville’s adaptation is free of dialogue, instead relying on inner monologues drawn from Vencors’ text.  On top of that, the film was actually shot in Vencors’ house, among the rooms where he wrote the novel – and as a film that was written and directed in the same space, it very much plays out as a reflection on auteurism, as Melville takes stock of his own personal involvement in the Resistance, as well as his subsequent excommunication, to start to build his own distinctive protest voice. And as in so many of his later masterpieces, we’re presented with something like parlour cinema, film that yearns to be produced and distributed in total secrecy, watched furtively at hearths before being burned forever, always attuned to forces that might occupy it if the proper precautions aren’t taken. For that reason, it’s perhaps strongest when the monologues don’t dwell on the war at any specific length, since that’s when Melville can really indulge his fatalistic paranoia, which in this case also means coming to terms with the lurking spectre of the Holocaust - among other things, Vencors was one of very few novelists to grapple with the Final Solution as it was actually occurring. At the same time, Melville’s taste for poetic, pregnant images and objects emerges fully-formed – the second act, which moves away from the house, could play as a visual essay in the vein of Resnais – until it feels as if the most precious relics in the country, the very soul of France, have been gathered in this small, rustic living room. By the end, it’s less an adaptation than an attempt to exhume the novel, to return to a moment of Resistance that left Melville behind – in a kind of reverse exorcism, it attempts to restore unquiet spirits, setting silence atremble with all the protest it's subsumed.

Swanberg: Drinking Buddies (2013)

With Drinking Buddies, Swanberg moves from mumblecore towards what’s starting to be described as post-mumblecore – films with a mumblecore sensibility, cast and crew, but that exhibit much higher production values, and are aimed at a much wider audience, than seemed conceivable within this loosest of loose movements in its heyday. It’s a transition that’s particularly dramatic for Swanberg, whose career only seems to have become more staunchly mumblecore, more self-consciously minor, over the last few years. Not only did he release some four or five films in  nearly as many months over 2011-2012, but he’s made several of them available for free download, as well as returning to short film for the V/H/S anthology, all of which suggested that a new level of micro-cinema, or online auteurism, might be the next logical step. Within that context, Drinking Buddies feels like almost as drastic an artistic manifesto as Hannah Takes the Stairs – if you don’t count Frances Ha or Tiny Furniture, it’s the slickest, most stylised film in the whole movement, even if it has a typically mumblecore plot, centred on thirtysomethings Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson), who can’t quite figure out how to negotiate their workplace friendship with their significant others, Jill (Anna Kendrick) and Chris (Ron Livingston). The cast alone should signal how far we’ve come, in some ways, from the early Swanberg/ Gerwig collaborations – although Swanberg does make a brief, memorable appearance – and  the film very much plays out as a kind of generational reckoning, an effort to come to terms with the mumblecore movement as a movement. In fact, Swanberg’s post-mumblecore often just feels like mumblecore identifying itself as such, as a movement that seemed to subsist precisely on not being named, noticed or even watched suddenly finds itself classicised, canonised, venerated as part of the cinematic pantheon. So there’s something brave about Swanberg’s recourse to more conventional, classical cinema – it admits that his trademark expendability has somehow become inexpendable, the invisibility he strove for has become impossible – just as there’s something traumatically visible about these characters, especially Olivia Wilde, who’s thrown into unbearably crisp relief. The more professional it looks, the rawer it feels, as every carefully composed shot really just yearns to slump down in corners, corridors and couches that no longer exist, aching for all the murky, stagnant digital backwaters that have been blocked up or channelled away, apotheosising mumblecore only to eviscerate it.

Ozon: Swimming Pool (2003)

Some of the most memorable thrillers have emerged as allegories of writer’s block, and Swimming Pool is no exception. On the face of it, the story’s familiar enough: Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling), an English mystery novelist, needs a change of scene to break through her creative deadlock, so she retreats to her publisher’s house in rural France. Upon arriving, she finds his estranged daughter (Ludivine Sagnier) living there, and the tension between them drives the film towards its final twist. In some ways, that twist isn’t so hard to see coming, but it’s also not really where the film’s eeriness lies, as Ozon more or less subsumes suspense into Sarah’s tentative, burgeoning relationship with her new environment. From the very beginning, there’s such an exquisite attention to Sarah’s body language that the French house only emerges as a series of minute changes in her distinctive tics, postures and gestures; for the most part, it feels as if the house has travelled to her body, rather than vice versa, continually recalibrating itself against across the surface of her skin. In thrillers of this kind, inanimate spaces often become psychologised, repositories of unspoken or unorthodox thoughts and desires, but here Ozon goes a step further – this house is physiologised, kinaesthethically attuned to sensations and palpitations that not even Sarah can fully articulate, even or especially in her writing. And just as her body language is continually on the cusp of coalescing into writerly postures, so Ozon’s spaces feel like they’re about to be articulated, about to be visualised – they have all the deep richness of a creative vision just before it’s captured. So the house disappears as Sarah’s novel proceeds – it’s an act of erasure as much as creation – which means that something about her disappears as well, if only because the house knew her better than she knows herself. Like watching someone write themselves out of existence, then, it’s often hard to know whether Sarah’s the disappearer or the disappeared, or both at once, making for a quite natural companion piece to Under the Sand, as Ozon diffuses Rampling to a slinky Anglo-French liquidity, a point of transition, translation and departure.

Eastwood: Space Cowboys (2000)

If Unforgiven was Eastwood’s elegy for his Western heyday, then Space Cowboys is his elegy for his Cold War heyday – specifically, the vertical horizons of The Eiger Sanction and Firefox. It revolves around an air force unit – Team Daedelus – that found itself discharged when space exploration was handed over from the air force to NASA. Fast forward to the present day, when NASA is faced with a Russian satellite whose orbit is rapidly decaying, and whose technology is so antiquated that it can only be repaired by Team Daedelus. All four members of the team have been forced to deflect their galactic, heavenly ambitions into earthbound pursuits – engineer Jerry O’Neill (Donald Sutherland) test drives roller coasters, pilot “Hawk” Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) runs barely-legal thrill flights, navigator “Tank” Sullivan (James Garner) has become a priest, and commanding officer Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood) spends most of his time fixing up pieces of “obsolete technology.” Corvin’s profession might seem less expansive than those of his former colleagues, but what makes the film such a quintessential Eastwood joint is the way it fuses good old-fashioned craftsmanship with the American technological sublime. Made for an age in which space exploration no longer has the same spectacular currency that it once did, Eastwood eschews the nostalgia of, say, The Right Stuff, to insist that the technological craftsmanship that serviced space is still alive and kicking, if only in own his own mastery of B-pictures. Among other things, that makes for Eastwood’s wryest film about aging since Heartbreak Ridge – the agile ageing of Absolute Power has been given a gravity-free kick here, meaning that, at least in outer space, Eastwood moves as dextrously as he ever did. And while there’s no doubt that the outer space sequences have a stereoscopic expansiveness that’s all Eastwood’s own, it’s the earthbound sequences that actually feel the most sublime, if only because they're also the cosiest. All four men are still affectively poised at the moment between air force exploration and space exploration, still dreaming of the most distant reaches of the exosphere, and that makes for a stronger sense of the Earth’s curvature than in any of Eastwood’s other films – all his horizons meet in the middle, kiss the sky, while every lateral movement has a kind of buoyancy that seems destined to carry it above the clouds (at one point, Eastwood steers a car in a jet plane’s slipstream). It all makes for a Western that’s been turned on its side, rotated ninety degrees – and while visions of the space race often emphasise its remoteness, the way it stupifies action into a sublime stare, Eastwood’s galaxy starts right at the horizon, just as the Cold War of The Eiger Sanction started at Monument Valley.

Turteltaub: Last Vegas (2013)

Last Vegas follows a group of sixty-somethings, played by Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline and Robert de Niro, who reunite in Las Vegas for a bachelor party. For the most part, it’s charmingly creaky, poised at that cosy cusp where it could just as easily have a laugh track as not, as Jon Turteltaub’s direction feels just as quaint and old-fashioned as his characters. As the film proceeds, it splits into two different comic registers, each of which play on incongruity, but in different ways. Half the time, we’re presented with the more predictable incongruity of these old geezers stumbling through the heaving MTV crowds of The Hangover franchise, trying to talk over Autotune anthems, and hear past dubstep drops. But for as many LMFAO or Black-Eyed Peas film clips that they stumble into, there’s another side to the city, one where they’re entirely congruent. And that’s where the other side of the film comes into play, as Turteltaub sketches out a version of Vegas that’s comically incongruous with how we usually see it in film - a city that subsists on seniors, swathed in a retiree haze that often makes it feel more like an offshoot of Florida than an escape from it, driven by oaky lounges and dusky variety shows, places that haven’t seen the light of day for as long as any of these characters have been around. Those are often the most organic, soulful moments of the film, when the “Flatbush Four” really come alive instead of just watching someone else’s music video, but in the end it’s the alternation between the two incarnations of Vegas that drives the comedy, if only because the actors have different strengths in each world. And while Kevin Kline’s probably the best at making the switch, it’s fascinating to see how Douglas moves between his playboy of the 80s/90s and his post-Liberace persona, since there are still traces of Liberace everywhere in his voice, just as there are traces of Liberace’s Vegas everywhere in this muffled seniorscape. Certainly, it’s just as tasteless, lowbrow and exploitative as The Hangover franchise, but it’s also kind of nice to see such an upbeat, affirmative film about old people, since there are no token lessons about mortality here, no morbidity, no guilt, no shame, just a group of sixty-somethings who get everything that they want – more life, more love, more sex, more fun and, of course, more Vegas.