Linklater: Before Midnight (2013)

Before Midnight takes up the story of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) ten years later. They’re now married, living in Paris and holidaying in Greece, where the film is set over a single afternoon and evening. It’s far more sombre than the previous two films, both of which were alive with the sense of possibility and futurity. That hasn’t entirely vanished here, but there’s an inevitable shift in tone, if only because the conversations we’re witnessing are no longer privileged, singular or exemplary in any real way; unlike the frisson of witnessing characters converse for the first time, as in Before Sunrise, or the first time in a decade, as in Before Sunset, these are characters who’ve now been conversing for a decade. Perhaps that’s why there’s less of a sense of splendid isolation as well – this film has more conversation with other people than the previous two combined, to the point where there are moments where Hawke and Delpy almost dissolve into something resembling an ensemble cast. Still, the most compelling moments are the extended conversations which, wandering through ruins as evening falls, partake of an almost neorealist melancholy, relegating 1994 to the annals of deep history. In essence, these conversations anatomise an argument, from its most incipient stages – stages that are possibly only visible to the couple themselves, or those who’ve been haunted by them for some twenty years – to its climax and denouement, in something like the mood and momentum of Tape. That doesn’t necessarily make for a miserable film – in fact, it’s the funniest film in the series, but the humour is dependent on a certain irreverence for the first two films, a slightly spiteful puncturing of their romantic dreams and longings, to the point where it feels like the best move for these characters is to spend some time apart,  and learn how to miss each other again. And so there’s something oddly optimistic about the fact that the whole film moves towards Jesse’s departure for France, as well as the more general prospect of resuming a long-distance relationship – it’s that dawning possibility of not talking properly or regularly for a decade that allows them to talk properly for the first time in a decade, opening up some much-needed breathing space and silence before the next part of their story.

Gainsbourg: Je T'aime Moi Non Plus (I Love You, I Don't) (1976)

Serge Gainsbourg directed this film based on his iconic song – and it plays as an extended gloss on that song, an attempt to visualise what was happening during those infamous sighs and pants. At one level, that might seem to diminish the song – surely, what made it powerful was the way it suggested some act that was too perverse to be visualised or articulated – so it’s a testament to Gainsbourg’s commitment to the song, and his own status as sexual outlaw, that he presents us with a film that’s just as confronting and titillating some thirty years later. In essence, it’s about a lavender marriage coming to terms with a sexually liberated mileu: Jane Birkin plays Johnny, a tomboy who finds herself drawn to an itinerant gay truck driver, Krassky, played by Joe Dallesandro, against a drifting, rambling desert backdrop, part New Wave, part New Hollywood. Johnny and Krassky’s attraction is sexually charged, and yet it doesn’t seem to conform to their sexual proclivities: in particular, Krassky can’t achieve orgasm unless he penetrates Johnny anally. For the most part, then, their relationship charts Johnny’s loss of anal virginity – a process that never seems to get any easier, as her screams of anguish and pain attest, with an audioverite that makes you wonder whether these scenes involve real sex. Although Gainsbourg’s song tends to recur at these moments, what’s striking is that it never loses its lush romanticism: in fact, the romanticism only seems to be heightened by contrast, lending the sex scenes a quite tender and ravishing quality, even as their discomfiture seems to climax, for Krassky as much as Johnny. And Gainsbourg shoots the whole film like an extended sex scene – his sensibility is inextricably pornographic, if picaresquely pornographic – that beautifully charts out the complex relationship between pleasure and pain, not just in anal sex, but all sexual experience. And, in its yearning to experience sex in every conceivable way - as a gay man, as a lesbian, as a man, as a woman, as pleasure, as pain - it ends up virtualising it, or at least generalising it into an undifferentiated sexual access that feels quite incorporeal, a clear forerunner to both the Cinema du Look and art porn movements.

Zackham: The Big Wedding (2013)

One of the most bizarre stabs at late work of the last few years, The Big Wedding plays like Nancy Meyers or Nora Ephron on autopilot. It’s about a wedding that brings together a comically fractured family – and, although the ensemble cast stretches pretty wide, the focus is squarely on the older generation, which includes Robert de Niro, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton, Robin Williams and Christine Ebersole, who steals the show. To say that it’s flat is an understatement – this film is so oddly tone-deaf that it doesn’t even feel written by committee.  It’d be easy to dismiss it as sheer incompetence, a film on the verge of senility, but it feels there’s something deeper going on here, epitomised by the fact that it’s almost impossible to simply enjoy the actors themselves. Usually, in a film where great actors play bland roles, it’s possible to just luxuriate in their mere presence, their residual charisma - or at least your memory of their previous roles - but all that is quite strangely occluded here; there is no metaphysics of presence, no sense that that really is Diane Keaton standing in front of the camera. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that it’s based on a French film – every utterance feels dubbed, or translated, while the narrative itself is essentially a series of comic mistranslations. At the same time, though, it calls to mind recent speculations that, in the future, digital technology will progress to a point where we’ll be able to cinematically reincarnate dead actors and actresses for feature-length performances – that’s the world this world belongs to. At least, that accounts for its weird presenceless, the way it jettisons the audience in much the same way as a sitcom minus the laugh track. At moments, it doesn’t even feel made to be watched – it doesn’t contain the possibility of an audience in the manner of most films - giving a bit of a sense of what it might be like to experience Keaton, De Niro and Sarandon digitally revived for a 2113 audience, an audience who never knew them in the flesh; an archive of tics, postures and facial expressions that have been collected and preserved in anticipation of a new kind of posterity.

Fuqua: Olympus Has Fallen (2013)

Olympus Has Fallen belongs to the same moment as Roland Emmerich’s White House Down. Both are big-budget blockbusters about an attack on the White House – and for a short while, Olympus Has Fallen could be mistaken for an Emmerich vehicle in its peculiar flair for choreographing catastrophe. In particular, the opening set piece, in which a group of North Korean terrorists takes over the White House, is operatically plausible, capturing the full horror that ensues when “the most protected house on Earth has fallen,” and “a self-contained, total isolation system is infiltrated.” The thing is, the film doesn’t seem to bounce back from that horror with quite the same aplomb as, say, a classic 80s or 90s action thriller, meaning that the exquisite spatial cognition that Fuqua brings to bear on his treatment of the exterior of the White House doesn’t really translate into the interior, even or especially as FBI agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) sets out to traverse every space between the walls and the bunker where the President (Aaron Eckhart) is being held by the terrorists. This would seem to cry out for a sharp, intricate gradation of space and time, but Fuqua conspicuously fails to take that cue, dissolving the White House to a series of dark rooms – just another house, really – and scaling the action down to a home invasion drama. Even the two most interesting reticulations of the White House – its drains and tunnels – are dealt with in a fairly peremptory manner (earlier action films would have positively relished them), and repeatedly dismissed as outdated fixtures, largely irrelevant to what’s taking place now. That makes for quite a disarming, disorienting experience, in which the White House becomes positively anamorphic – as soon as you walk inside, the walls dissolve, like a castle built on sand. And in the absence of any tight, hierarchical spatial discrimination, the final victory feels quite unconvincing – after all, what else defines the President, in most action films, other than his spatial priority, his identification with the most sequestered or privileged spaces in a world of set pieces? 

Goldberg & Rogen: This Is The End (2013)

It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of bromance. At least that’s the premise of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s latest offering, an apocalyptic comedy that sees the extended Bro Pack bunkering down in James Franco’s house when the end times hit Los Angeles. At first, the film includes pretty much everyone who’s had any contact with this core of comedians over the last decade, from Michael Cera to Aziz Ansari, but it’s gradually whittled down to Rogen, Franco, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson and Danny McBride.

In some ways, that’s a natural move, since these actors have all been working together for years now. Their rapport is so natural that it might not really be that different from how they would act or interact with each other if left to their own devices, which makes the film seem as cosy, intimate and incidental as a sitcom, or a sitcom seguing into reality television, even as Los Angeles is decimated outside. Danny McBride and Jonah Hill are particularly memorable, just because they seem more willing to skewer their own pretensions than any of the others – especially Franco, who can’t quite seem to laugh at himself as pointedly or as profoundly as the film wants him to. Admittedly, McBride devotes a lot of his role to trying to rectify that, to the point where it feels like he’s rehearsing Franco’s celebrity roast. But without the rest of the cast to share his viciousness, it tends to fall a bit flat, and perhaps feels a bit more vicious than it really is.

For all the pleasures of seeing these actors working in tandem, though, the sheer sweep of familiar faces in the opening party scenes is perhaps most fascinating. Encompassing all the fringes of the bromance universe, it’s too broad and fleeting to constitute an ensemble cast, but too irreverant and casual to feel like a series of cameos either. Instead, it’s somewhat like the proliferation of celebrities and celerities in Robert Altman’s The Player – a series of faces and figures who seem to cross in and out of the diegesis quite casually and obliviously. While it doesn’t quite give the illusion of being shot at an actual party at Franco’s house, it doesn’t quite feel staged either – it’s as if Franco had a party for the purpose of shooting the scene, and the party organically morphed into something other than the movie, meaning that there’s all kinds of cinephilic glimpses of actors in conversation and interaction that are quite fascinating. In that sense, it’s a canonical gesture, a gathering of the comic threads of the last few years – Michael Cera is here, but so is Aziz Ansari – as well as an apocalyptic gesture, since it’s just as fascinating to figure out who hasn’t been chosen as to calibrate how the centre of comic gravity has shifted and settled among the elect. Films that look like a lot of fun to make aren’t always that fun to watch, but this is an exception, since there’s an oddly poignant intimacy and access to these actor-characters that’s both elegiac and irreverent, an end-time that's of its time.