Holofcener: Enough Said (2013)

Romantic comedies assure us of the future in much the same way that historical dramas assure us of the past, meaning that, in times of great precarity, romantic comedies have to become particularly ingenious to remain relevant – and reassuring. Enough Said belongs with such recent films as About Time and Celeste and Jesse Forever in its effort to grapple with such a time – except it’s possibly even more astonishing in the way that it manages to feel true both to its milieu and to the last great wave of romantic comedies in the 1990s. In essence, it’s about the burgeoning relationship between Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Alfred (James Gandolfini), two middle-aged people who meet at a party. They’ve both been married, had kids and been divorced, meaning that they’ve been living in their own respective futures for some time. As a result, they’re unwilling to have the future let them down one more time -  not only do they spend a great deal of their courtship trying to envisage their future as a couple, but they try to actually live in that future; it is, in its own way, as much of a time travel romance as About Time. And Holofcener makes that bind the centrepiece of her comedy, as Eva coincidentally forms a friendship with Marianne (Catherine Keener), a poet who she meets at the same party, and who she only gradually realises is Alfred’s embittered ex-wife. Caught between dating Alfred and hearing about everything that made him unbearable, she’s forced into a precarious position that’s almost unbearably tender: every criticism of Alfred makes their rapport feel more fleeting, bittersweet and devoid of futurity. Itinerant films set in LA often decentre the present, but few decentre the future quite so eloquently as this does – and if Holofcener recovers any form of futurity, it’s serial and televisual in nature; the future is something the characters are forced to admit can only happen one day at a time. Yet Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus are already in their own decentrered post-televisual future, meaning that it’s at once their return to their televisual heyday and their decisive break from it – and Holofcener brings all her work as a TV director to bear on a film that ultimately feels like it’s designed to be remediated on TVs that no longer exist, rather than on DVDs or mobile devices; it belongs to the tradition of lovingly rescreened and reborrowed comedies of the 1990s, while managing to be poignantly, painfully of its time. 

Dardenne & Dardenne: Le Gamin au Vélo (The Kid with a Bike) (2011)

On the face of it, The Kid With A Bike is one of the Dardennes’ sunniest films – it’s the first film that they’ve shot in summer, the first to include a soundtrack and the first to feature something approaching a sentimental narrative: a young boy, passed from foster home to foster home, who strikes up a redemptive rapport with a young woman. Moreover, it’s the first film to downplay Seraing as an industrial city – while the Dardennes’ earlier films have sometimes taken parks, green belts and traffic islands as their backdrops, they’ve never felt quite so uncontaminated by the city as they do here; this is the first film in which the brothers glimpse something like a genuine countryside. What’s striking, then, is that this is simultaneously, undoubtedly, the same universe - shot through with sudden explosions that bring everyone to the ground, Seraing still exudes a heightened gravitational field that you can only escape by setting yourself in compulsive, propulsive motion, latching onto the slipstream of its omniscient traffic flow.  Various narrative and stylistic touches recall The Promise, and so the film feels like a revision of that story for the next generation – a generation that’s still faced with all the same industrial subjugation and agony, but at the hands of a city that’s managed to somehow conceal its industrial exploitation behind a post-industrial facelift, a gentrification program that’s replaced the endless petrol stations of the Dardennes’ earlier work with boutique restaurants and service sectors. Insofar as industry does re-emerge, it’s as a backdrop to the video games that punctuate the narrative – and, unlike many other directors, the Dardennes aren’t especially critical of first-person shooters, since they provide a reminder that industry is somehow still with us, as well as offering a similar propulsiveness to the brothers themselves; as films like Rosetta make viscerally clear, the Dardennes are less interested in characters than in avatars. As a retreat from social commentary, then, it’s deceptive – it’s a bold challenge to a new regime, a regime that seems to preclude precisely the articulation of labour that has preoccupied the Dardennes throughout their career.

Stillman: Metropolitan (1990)

A late masterpiece of the Gilded Age, Whit Stillman’s debut feature revolves around the last remaining pool of Old New York – the “Sally Fowler Rat Pack,” a group of aristocratic debutantes living on the Upper East Side. Although it’s nominally about what happens when a sceptical socialist joins their ranks, it’s really a taxonomy of a species in decline, a study in downward mobility that wryly admits that it’s only low-budget, independent cinema that can afford to cater to such a small, privileged demographic (the difference in intended audience from The Age of Innocence, released a few years later, couldn't be starker). More attuned to the 1890s than the 1990s, Stillman creates a costume drama set in the present, or at least condenses the present to a few rooms where divorce is still the latest cusp in public scandal, and the telephone is still greeted with a certain wonder and incredulity. As in Edith Wharton, that tends to contract – or perhaps expand – New York to a series of vestibular spaces, gilt wildernesses that manage to encapsulate the outdoors at its most agoraphobic and the indoors at its most claustrophobic, suspending us between carpet and chintz, setting us adrift among aristocrats who only really experience the city proper in montage, from a taxi window or the steps of a hotel. And, like the best montage sequences, this city’s connective tissue unfolds as a series of waiting rooms, antechambers for an aristocratic adulthood that is clearly never going to arrive. That might sound unbearably cloistered, but Stillman has a beautiful way of cutting a scene just before it ossifies, usually just as someone’s on the verge of that last stilted utterance that would turn everything to stone. Taking a breath with each cut, the film sustains the aristocracy even as it mourns them, constrains them even as it provides them with one last burst of energy, illluminating them from within like congealing amber. If they need the film, then the film also needs them – most of the actors are drawn from the film’s milieu, and none enjoyed crossover success – meaning that they’re never quite remote or present enough to feel wholly comic or tragic. Instead, this exquisite array of hand-drawn, handwritten shots feels like an elegy for the melancholy resignation that the aristocracy can only display by declining, a bittersweet bathos you can almost only recognise in retrospect. As one of the group's spokesmen puts it, they're not doomed to failure, but failing without being doomed, and it’s exactly that failure that Stillman has managed to make so wonderfully his own.

Eastwood: J. Edgar (2011)

J. Edgar is Eastwood’s first biopic since Bird, and it has a similarly elliptical, elusive feel. Although it covers J. Edgar Hoover’s entire career at the FBI, it’s mostly a study of his mannerisms, especially the way in which he learned to craft speech, sound bites and aphorisms, which makes for a perfect match with Leonardo DiCaprio’s strained, spitfire diction. In keeping with Hoover's particular insistence that “what determines a man’s legacy is often what isn’t seen,” Eastwood amps up the classicist palette of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, coming about as close as colour cinema can to a black-and-white palette. As a result, there’s darkness, obscurity and obfuscation everywhere (nearly everyone’s eyes are occluded, at least during the first third), as Eastwood creates tableaux that are never fully visualised or conceptualised as scenes. For all that the film has been criticised for sweeping Hoover’s private life under the cover, though, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black brings a classicism of his own to his refusal to paint Hoover’s friendship with long-time companion Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) as either liberated or closeted. Where a more conventional biopic might have been content to present Hoover and Tolson as gay, Black – and Eastwood – manage both more and less than that: they present them as married. That makes for quite an astounding male melodrama, a clear forerunner to Behind the Candelabra, as Hoover’s insistence on the FBI as a repository of long-term relationships segues quite effortlessly into his private life. Without allegorising too much, it’s hard not see the odd couple of Eastwood and Black as a corollary to the offhand support Eastwood gave to gay marriage around this time – and, as in Milk, the novelty of gay domestic life is that there is no novelty, so intricately does Eastwood weave it into his classicist texture; you barely notice that it’s what transforms John Edgar Hoover into J. Edgar. And that’s what allows Eastwood and Black to respect Hoover’s privacy even as they critique the very policies that allowed him to undermine American privacy, in a scrupulously courteous tribute to American private life, part liberal and part libertarian.

Boyle: Shallow Grave (1994)

Released midway between Thatcher and New Labour, Shallow Grave rejuvenated British cinema, and it’s not hard to see why. At a time when the market was dominated by gritty realism and period drama, Danny Boyle’s feature debut outlines a tone and style that’s neither realistic nor artificial but instead suffused with an off-naturalism, or psychedelic naturalism, that segues the conspicuous consumption of 80s Britain into emergent Cool Brittania. Featuring career-making performances from Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston and Ewan McGregor, the narrative revolves around a trio of macabre Edinburgh flatmates  – doppelgangers of the young professionals of This Life – who spend the first part of the film scrupulously interviewing candidates for a room in their sumptuous apartment. Although they finally find someone who seems cool enough, he promptly dies in his bed, leaving behind a suitcase of money that they decide to keep, with dire consequences. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they were mistaken about his candidature, though, since the process of disposing of his body – and disposing of the problems that it causes – feels pretty continuous with the interviewing process: in both cases, the trio are looking for a way to maintain their buzz, which always feels on the verge of decarbonating if it’s not intensified. That positions the whole film at a sickly, nauseating cusp between comedy and horror – this is how it feels to really play hard – as Boyle’s lurid colour schemes and offbeat framing produce a series of psychedelic algal blooms, fractalling to a near-constant rhythmic pulse. At one point, a critical scene plays out against footage from The Wicker Man – and for all his provisional embrace of rave culture, Boyle’s project isn’t that different from Robin Hardy’s: the film is ambivalent about the 1990s, the second summer of love, in the same way that Hardy was ambivalent about the 1960s. It’s not hard to see, then, why Boyle might go on to direct Trainspotting – in some ways, it’s Trainspotting in filigree, except that it’s possibly even more merciless in how it disposes of its characters, as Boyle turns their macabre glee back upon them, inviting the audience to play just as hard.