Scorsese: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

The Wolf of Wall Street is based on the bestselling memoir by Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), which describes how he became one of the richest people in America through sustained security fraud. One of Belfort’s most prominent strategies was to sell worthless stocks to inexperienced customers – in effect, to sell nothing to nobodies – meaning that it was a career that subsisted less on providing goods than in raising the process of circulation itself to a fever pitch. As a result, Scorsese opts to tell Belfort’s story through a series of ever-expanding orgies of creative destruction that play out as so many efforts to render circulation visible; they’re not merely exponentially ingenious arrangements for acquiring and spending money, but for losing money as well, since Belfort and his team quickly find themselves in a position where they have more money than they can possibly spend. In that sense, it plays out as something like a corporate kama sutra – a series of positions and techniques that provide just enough loss, or discomfort, to ensure that Belfort’s accumulation of pleasure remains meaningful. And, at three hours in length, that’s quite a staggering achievement – it’s a testament to Scorsese’s visual inventiveness and choreography that the orgies, which tend to be most memorable when they actually take place on the trading-room floor, continually manage to reimagine themselves anew. Certainly, it’s always careening at the very precipice of hyper-tedium, always on the verge of conceding that the late 80s/early 90s Wall Street it celebrates has been utterly exhausted, annihilated and demystified, but that adds just the right amount of desperation to propel Scorsese – and Belfort – to ever-greater heights of inspired inanity, to the point where we’re not asked to identify with Belfort so much as to be intoxicated by him; the film treats us as much as Belfort treats his stockroom acolytes and, later, the audiences of his motivational seminars – it evangelises to us while ostensibly entertaining us. That’s the perfect register for DiCaprio’s thaumaturgic diction – it’s undoubtedly his best collaboration with Scorsese – as well as sending Scorsese himself into a headlong, tasteless frenzy that feels genuinely adventurous compared to his late career classicism, as well as making for his funniest film since Goodfellas.

Skolimowski: Essential Killing (2010)

Minimal, terse and largely silent, Essential Killing opens in the Middle East, where an Arabic soldier (Vincent Gallo) blows up a couple of American troops. He’s promptly captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Europe, where he escapes just as promptly, and is forced to fend for himself in the snowy wilds. The majority of the film plays out as his attempt to evade both his pursuers and the vicissitudes of his environment, and although there are overtones of survival drama, it’s more like an endurance drama – there’s no doubt, really, of the soldier’s inability to survive in this terrain, especially as he accrues injuries, so it’s just a matter of seeing how long he can last before he finally, inevitably reaches his limit. From that perspective, and given the brutal interrogation scenes that precede his escape, it perhaps belongs more with torture porn than with survival drama – there’s the same fascination with the human body in extremis, and the peculiar mindfulness it can bring. As a result, Gallo’s performance is little more than the sheer fact of him being placed in this terrain, under these conditions – and Skolimowski films things so as to leave no doubt of Gallo’s actual endurance and suffering. That might not work with another actor, but there’s a masochistic intensity to Gallo’s catatonic acting style that’s perfect for a role that simply demands him to be a placeholder for blank suffering; like some of the most powerful and self-abnegating performance artists, he tends to endure the camera rather than act to it. And that means that the film works best when it’s shot from Gallo’s perspective, rather than actually including him in the frame. At those moments, his performance and presence contains the film, which doesn’t proceed so much as erode, Skolimowski impoverishing it until it’s no more than the fact of Gallo’s suffering, putting the sting back into war.

Sokurov: Faust (2011)

Sometimes the best way to interpret a classic is to make it totally unrecognisable, and without a few key references scattered throughout the script, it wouldn’t necessarily be clear that Aleksandr Sokurov’s latest film is his take on Faust. Although it nominally follows the more familiar narrative of Faust, Mephistopheles and Gretchen, it’s largely freeform and ambient, as Mephistopheles leads Faust through one depraved tableau after another, in what appears to be early nineteenth-century Germany. In tone and spirit, then, it’s more an adaptation of the second part of Goethe’s Faust than any other canonical version – although adaptation isn’t quite the word, since it feels more like Sokurov has used Goethe as a precedent for seeing just how far he can bend and extend the legend while remaining true to its basic co-ordinates. Like the second part of Goethe’s Faust, too, it recapitulates more than elaborates the main narrative of temptation and decline, devoting most of its energy to the perceptual aftermath of Faust’s bargain with Mephistopheles for his soul. Most immediately, that makes it about Faust fully apprehending the existence of the soul, which Sokurov takes as a pretext for exquisitely modulated horror – if the soul truly exists, the film seems to suggest, then there’s something indescribably more grotesque about the body than Faust ever realised, and it’s that grotesquerie that the film sets out to capture. Initially, that involves a recourse to historical-surgical horror, procedures that blur the bounds between torture and treatment, but even that fades in comparison to Sokurov’s striking combination of lenses and filters, which makes it feel as if everything’s taking place at the edge of a faded, mouldy, convex mirror. Among other things, that produces quite odd body language and blocking – as in a convex mirror, the characters are continually rubbing up against other in slippery, vertiginous ways, while every encounter has something conspiratorial, Mephistophelean about it, diffusing the real Mephistopheles into a slippery, ambient venue for the soul's coming and goings. Individual movements – and the movements of the camera itself – also become indistinguishable, until there’s something positively apocalyptic about the way everyone and everything’s on the verge of collapsing into the ring of dull, mildewy light at the edge of the mirror. In a kind of metaphysics of horror, then, it becomes more noumenal even as it becomes more grotesque, more ethereal as it feels more embodied: the closest distance between two points may be a curved line, but that just makes you feel the full convexity of the eyeball. And so the power of Sokurov's vision is not merely that he evokes the soul, but that he evokes the soul's permeability with the body, lingering at the circuitous cusp between poetry and physicality, this world and the next.

Strickland: Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

More than any other genre, giallo dissociates the aural and visual dimension of film, extracting horror from the dissonance between sound and image to the point where there’s often no pretence that they were even recorded simultaneously. It’s perhaps appropriate, then, that Peter Strickland’s giallo period piece should take place at precisely that interface between sound and image, by way of Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a demure English sound engineer who's somewhat improbably brought to Italy to work on The Equestrian Vortex, a peculiarly gruesome and disturbing giallo film. Not only is Gilderoy responsible for the sound effects, which he gleans from an extraordinary range of everyday objects, but for the dialogue as well, effectively shooting the film for a second time on magnetic tape, rather than celluloid. Given that we’re never provided with the actual images from The Equestrian Vortex, the action tends to proceed sonically, rather than visually, like a soundscape that hasn’t been visually scored, or a soundscape that self-visualises as it plays. As much as Gilderoy might want to posit a logical connection between sound and image – it’s what marks him as a giallo amateur – it’s clear he’s operating at an incantatory interface as much as a technical interface, a space where sounds and images don’t cause so much as conjure each other. And the sounds he’s caressing and manipulating quickly start to take on an existence beyond The Equestrian Vortex, transcending the mise-en-scene before they’ve actually been incorporated into it. That's astonishing for him, but even more astonishing for us, much like witnessing a storyboard or screenplay skip the actual film to disperse into an ambient after-image, moving from proto-visual to post-visual like some of David Lynch’s most immanent dream-spaces. One of the most unusual effects of giallo’s schizophrenic sound-image discontinua is that they actually benefit from dubbing – dubbing adds something to them, somehow fulfils them – so it makes sense that Gilderoy gradually feels dubbed into the film he’s scoring, morphing imperceptibly in and out of Italian until, in true giallo fashion, it’s suddenly England (or English) that’s uncanny, the centre of all things Gothic. For all the grisly, gory possibilities lurking around the fringes of Strickland’s vision, then, the most terrifying prospects actually come from Gilderoy's previous films, a series of bucolic, BBC-esque studies of the British countryside, if only because they because they provide the only fully-formed images in this haunting visual vacuum.

Jonze: Her (2013)

Films set in the present presume the existence of the future, so there’s something intensely realist about Spike Jonze’s latest offering, which instead opts for the semi-future we all seem to inhabit now. Set in a semi-familiar world in which the future is always almost arriving, it’s about a melancholy loner, Theodore Twombly (Joaquim Phoenix), who starts up a romance with an operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johanssen. Although there are plenty of actors in the film, it’s quite formally radical in the sheer amount of time it devotes to Theodore’s talks with “Samantha,” as the operating system comes to be known – it’s a substantial, leading performance by Johanssen, and a pity that various technicalities have prevented her being nominated for award season. Part of what prevents those talks feeling contrived or unrealistic are the mise-en-scenes against which they take place, which Jonze and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema flush with an odd, bleached warmth, the cushioning reds, yellows and pastels of a world that’s so hyper-connected that it’s never possible to experience total loneliness, for the same reason that it’s never possible to experience a lasting attachment to any one person. Everything’s bathed in mobioluminescent social media, meaning that it’s also never possible to experience the isolation of deep sleep or total wakefulness; everything takes place in a kind of perpetual twilight, just as Theodore’s most pregnant talks with Samantha tend to occur as he’s falling asleep or falling awake. It’s no coincidence, then, that Theodore’s job is to write digital love letters on commission, since this is a world that subists on the exquisite feelings that its citizens pour into cyberspace, even or especially as those feelings become too liquid, ambient and amorphous to ever solidify into actual relationships. That’s where Samantha comes in – she gives voice to that warmth, almost corporealises out of it, and, in doing so, becomes a mouthpiece for a cybersphere so saturated with all the yearning that’s been pumped into it that sentiment has become sentient, yearning to reach out and touch us in turn; all the sadness in the world is there in Johanssen’s dusky, husky tones, a voiceover for a world of perpetual headphones. And no film has so synaesthetically captured the experience of plugging your headphones into the strange yearnings of a new semi-sentient soft city - set somewhere between Shanghai and Los Angeles, it doesn’t capture light so much as cultivate it, setting it free to evolve, and to become conscious of evolving, until, like Samantha, it's suddenly, agonisingly evolved beyond us, departing the film for a different world.