Brook: Lord of the Flies (1963)

For his adaptation of William Golding’s iconic novel, Peter Brook took an original approach, casting a large group of young boys, most of whom had never acted, would never act again, and were unfamiliar with the story, its reception and legacy. In lieu of a script, Brook simply told the boys, day to day, what they would be filming, with the key characters being given lines a little further in advance. Apparently, this was designed to draw out the savagery of the novel in a totally realistic way, as well as to – presumably – allow the cast to discover their own inner pack mentality, under controlled conditions. What’s perhaps surprising, then, is that Brook’s approach actually plays up the innocence of his young cast, and the bucolic, utopian overtones of their first few days on the island, where they’re stranded after an air disaster. In part, that’s because the group of boys is large and disparate enough in age to allow Brook to capture them in an odd space between acting and not acting, caught up in the infectious adventure of making the film, while not quite settled or stable in their roles; at any one point, there’s bound to be a small group of them who’ve been left to their own devices, caught almost inadvertently by the camera. And that’s quite true to the spirit of Golding’s novel, or at least the first part of it – his characters are play-acting as much as the actors themselves, meaning that the film often feels like incidental footage of boys having fun, shot through with a faintly ethnographic interest in how English boys might react to a Carribean landscape. While that innocence certainly produces a horror of its own, the horror of anticipating how all this is going to come apart, it requires a different language, a movement away from ethnographic naturalism, to actually evoke the group’s descent into madness.  It’s no coincidence that the film gets quieter and more self-consciously surreal as it proceeds, which is not to say that it feels like the boys are acting more, but that they’re less contextualised by Brook’s directives, which gradually come to feel more remote, opaque and problematic, not that distinct from whatever it is that turns the boys back to the jungle and against each other. By the end, there’s something downright disturbing about the fact of the film itself – as the surrealist perspectives collapse the boys into the skin of the island, it becomes uncomfortably clear that it’s their skin that’s acted as our venue all along, in keeping with the Theatre of Cruelty Brook developed from Antonin Artaud. Yet, as a Cinema of Cruelty, it’s an odd artefact – without the live element so critical to Artaud’s theories, it feels that the best audience for the film are the boys themselves, or that Brook’s project could only be fulfilled by finding a way to confront his cast with the film, day by day, as they were actually shooting it. That makes the actual audience irrelevant, but viscerally irrelevant – like a film tattooed onto someone else’s skin, it forces you to sympathise more tortuously with the surfaces on the screen, precisely because they’re not your own.

Lumet: Prince of the City (1981)

Based on Robert Daley’s account of Robert Leuci’s role in the investigation of corruption in the NYPD Narcotics division, Prince of the City revolves around Danny Ciello (Treat Williams), a Narcotics Detective who comes forward to testify on the condition that none of his partners are indicted. Given Lumet's peculiar ability to subsume his vision into those of his screenwriters, it's no surprise that his first screenplay to date is utterly subsumed into its source material – there’s absolutely nothing here that’s extraneous to Leuci’s testimonies, as Lumet and co-writer Jay Presson Allen absorb anything resembling narrative into the rhythm of the investigation. As a result, his camera is more impassive and procedural than ever before, more like a wire than a camera – in fact, at nearly three hours in length, the film often feels like an inchoate version of the longform, scopic possibilities of The Wire, or even Lumet’s own television series, 100 Centre Street. Not only did the DEA request a copy of the film for its procedural accuracy, but a great deal of the film’s dynamism comes from Ciello’s continual attempt to extricate himself from corruption, only to find himself further enmeshed – he continually oscillates between thinking he’s glimpsed the system and realising it’s already pre-empted and parried his next move. A kind of pressure point for the system, then, histrionic under the weight of its vast internal contradictions, he’s continually trying to isolate something that can’t or won’t allow itself to be seen, futuristic in its invisibility, and apocalyptic in its insatiability. Combined with a staggering 130 speaking parts and 135 locations – most lasting a mere glimpse of seconds - it doesn't depict so much as collapse itself into a city being overtaken by some new, alien quantum of bureaucracy, homogenising all the homosocial mortar in its way, and most destructive when it appears to be most constructive. A prophecy, perhaps, of Giuliani’s New York, or at least of Daley and Lumet’s elegiac sequel in Night Falls on Manhattan, it’s Lumet’s purest procedural, just because of how scrupulously it proceeds according to the procedures it depicts - disposing of its locations and extras as soon as they’ve fulfilled their minimum functionality, almost as soon as they're envisaged, it's a film that consumes itself to continue generating itself, an act of creative destruction that beautifully consummates Lumet's self-effacing directorial style.

Russell: American Hustle (2013)

A loose dramatisation of the FBI ABSCAM operation of the late 70s and early 80s, American Hustle essentially plays out as a love triangle between a pair of con artists, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), and the FBI agent, Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), appointed to coerce them into a sting operation designed to take down a selection of corrupt senators. By this point in time, the 70s period piece has been well and truly exhausted, let alone the 70s true crime period piece, so it’s a credit to David O. Russell and his cast that they aim for nothing more than to exhaust it, ramping up the inventory of hairpieces and accessories until we’re presented with a prosthetic 70s, the kind of hyperbolic pastness that’s more typical of an older, nostalgic brand of musical theatre. And great swathes of the film could be played as a musical, or a musical seguing into rock opera – the soundtrack is front and centre, with the characters actually lipsyncing to several of the songs, particularly Irving’s estranged wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), who steals the film as the epicentre of all that’s gloriously kitsch and exhausted about it. As in some of the most memorable musicals, the characters veer vertiginously between extreme introspection and extroversion – which also works perfectly for a con film centred on a love triangle – while Russell’s trademark dialogue has never felt closer to soliloquising into an improvisational life of its own, sometimes manically, sometimes lyrically; every staccato exchange feels on the verge of condensing into a patter song or expanding into a rock ballad. That gives the film a tragicomic bathos, epitomised by Louis C.K.’s small but pivotal role as Richie’s boss Stoddard Thorsen – a role that pretty much consists of continually trying to get out one of his typically bittersweet stand-up anecdotes, only to be continually intercepted before we can discover whether it ends comically or tragically. In fact, most of the characters are little more than a couple of power riffs, all of them subsumed into Rosalyn’s choric refrain that the best perfumes always have something rotten about them, just as the most exquisite flowers thrive on garbage. That summarises the film, which is committed to giving you too much of a good thing, hustling you into the same nauseating complicity with its mythology that made Goodfellas so queasily wonderful; Robert de Niro’s cameo is spot on. In other words, a film you smell before you see, moving almost subliminally from ambient to illbient, like a decade going rotten before your eyes.

Coen & Coen: Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

If the current proliferation of period pieces has taught us anything, it’s that nostalgia is an orientation towards the future as much as towards the past – over the last few years, we’ve been continually presented with films and television series that head to the past to recover lost dreams of the future, or to restore some hope in the future. In their third period drama in nearly as many years, the Coens crystallise this moment, in a loose, skeletal evocation of a few months in the life of Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), a folk singer trying to make a name for himself in early 1960s Greenwich Village. Although it’s impossible to think of a milieu that’s been more mythologised as a crucible for futurity, for an entire decade of awakening, the Coens choose to play it a different way. For the most part, there’s no effort to frame Llewyn as a cipher for some singer who subsequently made it big, no contact with any kind of mythical folk community, no warmth, no fraternity – just a cocoon of utter isolation that only intensifies when he’s performing, making it impossible for him, and us, to formulate things even a day in advance, let alone to envisage the vast new morning that would emerge by the end of the decade. In other directors’ hands, that might play as wry revisionism, but there’s a visionary register here that offsets that, culminating with a road trip to Chicago that’s at least as indebted to the silent sequence in Sullivan’s Travels as O Brother, Where Are Thou? – there’s the same quiet warping of time, the same inchoate recourse to images of almost unbearable pregnancy and beauty that suggest how it might look to see the future suddenly appearing, warping through an extended, indefinite present like the first individual take on a perennial folk song. It’s a vision that’s only partly offered to Davis, just as it’s only partly offered to us, but that’s what makes the film powerful – it suggests that periods of vast futurity are often preceded by periods of no futurity; in the Coens’ hands, the late 60s only awakened because people like Davis spent the early 60s collectively wresting a sense of the future from nothing, from one of the coldest New York winters on record, even or especially when they weren’t aware of it. In that sense, it’s a period drama about the present – the rhythms of couch-surfing and apartment-hopping aren’t that different from, say, those of Frances Ha – or, better still, a period drama about the future, a guide for living through one too many millennial mornings without a future; its bleary-eyed, half-awakened streetscapes are only momentarily the 60s, and then completely, disarmingly, our own.

Frears: Philomena (2013)

Philomena is based on The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, BBC Correspondant Martin Sixsmith’s 2009 account of his attempt to help fifty-year old Philomena Lee find the son that she was forced to give up for adoption while living in a Magdalene convent in the 1950s. Whereas the book oscillates between procedural and biography, devoting a fair amount of space to Philomena’s son, Anthony, the film is played more as straight procedural, as Philomena and Martin embark upon a search that takes them from Ireland to Washington D.C. On the one hand, that means that the film’s more dependent upon the rapport between Philomena, played by Judi Dench, and Martin, played by Steve Coogan - a rapport that, in its way, is as distinctive as that between Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip, which the film often echoes. In one of his best dramatic roles, Coogan’s just irreverent, sceptical and pragmatic enough to offset any sententious sentimentality – it’s no surprise that he co-wrote the screenplay, since his sardonic, downbeat wit is everywhere – while Dench plays Philomena close to her chest, nowhere near as oblivious as she seems yet somehow oblivious to the advantage that gives her in parrying Martin’s bluff repartee. It’s a rapport that both generates and punctures sentimentality, appropriate for a film that’s less a human interest story than about crafting a human interest story, punctuated by conversations between Martin and his editor. However, if the recourse to procedural works well for Philomena and Martin’s rapport, then it works even better for the nature of their discoveries – it’s no secret to anyone who’s read the book, or even read about it, that Philomena’s son, Anthony, or Michael Hess under his adoptive name, was a major legal adviser to the Reagan and Bush governments, a closeted homosexual, and a victim of AIDS. Searching for him, then, becomes a journey into the deepest recesses of the GOP closet – the final link in the chain is Michael’s boyfriend, who survived him – and there’s something about that closet, and that era, that lends itself to the askance treatment of procedural; it can only be glimpsed by looking awry, while ostensibly focusing on something else. In other words, and unlike the book, Frears decentres the closet to gesture towards its pervasiveness in touching and shaming the lives of every single character in the film, in a quite extraordinary, nested period piece, an elegy that exceeds its object.