Baumbach: The Squid and the Whale (2005)

In some ways, The Squid and the Whale feels like Noah Baumbach beginning again, leaving behind the stilted, insular cosmopolitanism of Kicking and Screaming for something considerably looser, airier and more provisional. This time around, Baumbach draws on his childhood rather than his college days, crafting a loosely autobiographical film about his experience of his parents’ divorce and the dissolution of his family home. That might sound a little dour, but the very looseness of the film is a kind of joy, not least because of Baumbach’s decision to shoot on Super 8 film, which is perhaps what allows him to so powerfully evoke divorce as an emergent experience, untethered from any straightforward or unqualified emotion. At the heart of it all is Walt Berkman (Jesse Eisenberg), whose world is turned upside down when his parents – Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and Joan (Laura Linney) – announce that they’re getting a divorce, and that Bernard will be moving out of their Park Slope home. Their reasons are not immediately obvious, at least not to Walt, but that doesn’t prevent him immediately siding with his father, just as his younger brother Frank (Owen Kline) gravitates towards their mother. As the relationship between Bernard and Joan deteriorates, however, it becomes more ambient, not exactly diminishing but filling more and more of the space between them – the space where most of the film takes place, as the boys seem to spend more of their time commuting between their parents than actually visiting them, opening up a wonderful, incidental vision of 1980s New York at the corners of the screen. In the process, they start to fill in the blank spaces of their parents’ relationship – sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly – mourning their parents as a couple even as they’re drawn into an awkward, discomforting but also quite transformative communion with them as individuals, stranger and more seductive than anything they've experienced before. On the one hand, that forces Bernard and Joan into ever more preocious styles of parenting, which leads to some of the most comic moments in the film, especially from Bernard, a famous writer who’s fallen upon hard times and is anxious to resurrect his once-adoring fanbase in the guise of his children. At the same time, though, it beautifully captures the trauma and wonder of children encountering their parents as individuals for the first time, an experience that feels preposterously worldly but also mimetically infantile, as Walt and Hank are forced to grow up as never before while somehow being forced back upon their most childhood selves at the same time. The result is a beautiful bittersweetness that feels almost nostalgic for those first few tremulous days and weeks of living with divorced parents, the emergent sense of possibility that is so fragile and fleeting that Baumbach can end the film a little over 75 minutes in without it ever feeling incomplete. Every beginning feels like an ending, and every breathless threshold is tinged with anticipatory nostalgia, as Walt and Frank finally only seem to enjoy spending time with one parent for the sake of anticipating the other, always running, careening and commuting towards what seems like their real home - whether with Joan in Park Slope or at Bernard's new place in Prospect Park - only to realise that they've left home behind the moment they arrive. Nostalgic for the future that seems to be eluding them more with every scene, their first few days and weeks gradually come to feel like the last few days and weeks of the baby boomer experiment as well, the last moments before divorce became a baby boomer institution, which is perhaps why the film manages to achieve such an expansive, elegiac register despite its brevity, haunted by an autumnal 60s soundscape that segues into the Risky Business soundtrack before our very eyes.

Lyne: Foxes (1980)

Sometimes the best teenage films are those that come off as a little unformed, spontaneous, rough around the edges, since they’re the films you really feel are made exclusively for the teens they’re targeting – films that simply assume their demographic know all the characters already, casting a protective shell around audience and actors that imbues both with a fragility and fallibility that’s perhaps truer to teen experience than more big-budget productions or romanticised, glossy fantasies. Released on the cusp of the 80s, Adrian Lyne’s directorial debut is one of those films, revolving around a couple of weeks in the life of four teenage girls in the San Fernando Valley as they experiment with drugs, sex and other mind-expanding experiences. However, as if in a riposte to the sex comedies that were becoming so prominent at the time, the more sensational material is neither sensationalised nor demystified in the matter-of-fact manner that might make it more palatable to an adult audience. Instead, it’s more or less absorbed into the ambience of the film, which is largely driven by Jodie Foster’s role as Jeanie, the reluctant leader of the pack, but also stems from the way Lyne handles the backdrops and city. Although the girls move around a lot – at times, it’s a veritable panorama of 80s teendom – Lyne never moves much further beyond close-ups and mid-shots, which makes every scene feel a bit constrained, a bit trapped, while ensuring that the few genuinely panoramic moments feel like something of a fantasy, not least because they’re when Giorgio Moroder’s soundtrack kicks in. Even that, though, never quite settles into a disco beat – Donna Summer’s vocals are there, ghostly, in nearly every montage sequence, but never attain anything close to diva conviction – as Lyne creates a lingering boredom, a smouldering restlessness, a collective longing for some kind of escape from the sprawl that makes every cruisey outing feel like a runaway in slow-motion. Yet in L.A., as the girls know all too well, you can run forever without finding anywhere different, as we drift through a series of spaces that never quite feel outside but never quite feel inside either, poised at the threshold of an adult world that continues to recede while never really allowing the to girls even enjoy it as a threshold, since there’s always just another breathless horizon, another perfectly composited limit-space, just a block away. Even the most drastic, eccentric trajectories – including, most memorably, a skateboard-car chase – are absorbed back into the city, with barely a trace, while the film often feels like a succession of ever-escalating climaxes that are nevertheless devoid of even the slightest sense of catharsis. In other words, it’s an anguished hymn to Los Angeles, which feels even more Foster’s city than New York in Taxi Driver, especially once the action starts to centre on West Hollywood – her ability to summon up the cruisey ebb and flow between childhood and adulthood, day and night, communion and disaffection, is perfect for a character and city that “longs to feel the pain in things,” even as the film feels more and more narcotised, carbound and curfewed with every neon-clad moment.

Kapadia: Amy (2015)

Crafting a documentary about Amy Winehouse presents something of a challenge, since one of the main things that drove her over the edge was excessive, obsessive media scrutiny. It’s even harder in that much of the so-called liberal media, media that was initially quite sympathetic and respectful, turned on her in the end as well, with a viciousness and cruelty that is partly the subject of Amy, Asif Kapadia’s incredible documentary. From that perspective, the most appropriate way to make a film about the late great soul singer – short of not making a film at all – would seem to be to divest it of images entirely, perhaps focusing exclusively upon conversations with her friends, family and colleagues. So it’s a bit surprising, initially, when Kapadia goes in the opposite direction, compiling a film out of almost nothing but footage of Winehouse. Although the film is narrated by a vast ensemble of friends, family and colleagues, they’re relegated to voiceovers – we never see them in the present, and don’t even see some of them in the archival footage – which means that the focus, visually, is squarely on Winehouse, with barely a frame going by that doesn’t have her in it. As might be expected, a great deal of the footage is taken from concerts, live appearances, interviews and, occasionally, what appears to be paparazzi sources. However, the overall feel and tone of the film manages to be quite anti-paparazzi, even as Kapadia seems to get closer to Winehouse’s life and career than even the most dedicated and unscrupulous paparazzo. In part, that’s because the official and promotional footage is actually secondary to the home movies that Winehouse and her circle of friends and acquaintances started making from their early teens, wielding their digital camcorders like proto-SmartPhones, as they conducted their own mock-interviews and mockumentaries about their emerging lives and careers. Even as Winehouse skyrocketed to success on the back of Frank and Back to Black, she never seemed to stop mediating her friendships in this way, which provides Kapadia with an enormous wealth of material to draw upon, with the film ending just as it seems like the transition to a SmartPhone would have been the logical next step. In that sense, it plays more as a collection of home movies than a documentary per se – albeit a beautifully collated, curated and compiled collection of home movies, as Kapadia seems to know just when to cut, pause or slow down the footage to get a sense of Winehouse’s mercuriality, the utter lack of entitlement to fame or talent that rendered her so diminutive, vulnerable and unique. Like the most resonant home movies too, the footage is so incidental, incomplete and forgettable, that it seems to preserve Winehouse’s privacy even or especially as we get closer and closer to her, until she feels as immune to scrutiny as she might actually have felt in person, or at least at the kind of small-scale, jazz-club gigs she preferred the most. Immersing yourself in all the tics and nuances of her footage, then, is a bit like immersing yourself in all the tics and nuances of her voice – it seems to undo, moment by moment, her media image – until the film feels a bit like an accompaniment to the albums, or a sustained music video, a way of staying true to the mercurial music that made up her life.

Higgins: 9 to 5 (1980)

From Baby Boom to Big Business, the 80s abounded with films – usually romantic comedies at heart – that attempted to come to terms with women as corporate creatures. None of them, however, were as clear-eyed in their radical feminism as 9 to 5, which also managed to pull off one of the funniest comedies of the decade, suffused with a delirious, campy sense of joy that completed Dolly Parton’s country-pop crossover, and propelled Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda even further into the cinematic stratosphere. Part of what makes the film so powerful is that it operates more or less as a revenge fantasy that refuses to ever give up on its fantasy, as a group of three female employees form an unexpected alliance after discovering that they’ve all dreamed of taking down their misogynistic boss, Franklin Hart, played by Dabney Coleman in the 80s corporate schmuck persona he owned before it was gentrified by Michael Douglas. All three women have different grievances – Judy Bernly (Fonda) is bullied throughout her entire probation period, Doralee Rhodes (Parton) is repeatedly sexually harassed and Violet Newstead (Tomlin) is passed over for promotion because she’s a woman – but they’re united in their cause, and even more united by the fact that the film makes no efforts to explain or justify why they’ve chosen to work, despite the fact that they’re all in some variant on the nuclear family setup. In fact, some of the most utopian moments actually take place against the backdrop of their family and home lives, as writers Patricia Resnick and Colin Higgins envisage a cinematic universe in which women can be presented as professionals without some laborious back story about how they’re extra-hard-working mothers and wives: these three women just simply happen to have relationships, and to work, and that’s it. Perhaps that’s why so much of the revenge takes place at Hart’s own home, as the trio’s revenge fantasies start to unexpectedly come true, launching the film into a dark, picaresque comic register that often plays as a siege narrative as much as anything else, a series of logistical hurdles and pragmatic challenges standing in the way of the equal rights they’re so keen to sequester. As Hart is progressively poisoned, shot and imprisoned, Judy, Doralee and Violet are forced to confront their deepest longings for liberation, the dicta of their most subscionsious selves emerging before their eyes, while also playing wife and mother to Hart as never before, creating a wonderful double bind in which their greatest burden is protecting their boss, co-workers – and themselves – from the corrosive rage forged from years and years of sexist subjugation. How they manage it is the ingenuity, beauty and comedy of the film, which draws on the gritty realism of 30s comedy, the backstage sisterhoods of early sound cinema, to envisage a fully unionised workplace, driven by proper benefits, job-sharing and equal pay. Of course, that can’t completely last, but the grandeur of the film is the way it refuses to dismiss fantasies as fantasies – if anything, the comedy is a way of keeping fantasies resilient – thanks to Dolly in particular, whose robust, bluegrass ability to present herself as a kind of grounded fantasy gives the film a lot of its heft. Still, it takes all three to remake every workplace montage sequence over in their own image, as they yearn for an alternative to the 9-to-5 day that nevertheless avoids the pitfalls of the flexible, casualised labour that has also started to emerge around female workers in particular – an alternative that may only exist in their welfare state of three, their charismatic communion, but never feels any less utopian for that, or makes them feel any less a force to be reckoned with.

Argento: Phenomena (1985)

One of the curious features of giallo is that – unlike virtually any other genre – it benefits from being dubbed, or from transnational casts that feel dubbed, since so much of its horror stems from the disassociation of sound and image – the space between sound and image – that Peter Strickland captured so uncannily in Berberian Sound Studio. Released in 1985, Phenomena is one of Dario Argento’s dubbiest films, at least from his classic period, taking the basic narrative of Suspiria – a serial killer stalking a girl’s school, this time in the Alps – but extending it in ever more preposterous and absurd directions. With Jennifer Connelly as the main character, Donald Pleasance as her mentor, a variety of Italian and Swiss extras, and a chimpanzee as a main character, there’s very little effort to regulate tone, manner or inflection – in fact, it is probably one of Argento’s most tone-deaf films, at least in a conventional sense, as everyone seems to be speaking in a voice that is not his or her own. Of course, that’s a very natural register for Argento’s particular brand of supernatural slasher film, which usually fixates on the telepathic communion between killer and victim more than its American counterpart. At the same time, that studied tone-deafness is the perfect starting-point for what turns out to be one of the most flamboyant dissasociations of sound and image in Argento’s career, with great swathes of the film poised at that moment when a montage sequence has started to go on a little too long, and you start to forget how the sound and images you’re experiencing relate to the narrative, or even to each other. That can be bewildering, but it also imbues sound and image – and images in particular – with the freshness of silent cinema, or a dream sequence – or a silent cinema dream sequence – as Argento sketches out something like a pre-conscious, phenomenal world, a world in which the visceral experience of looking precedes meaning, language or sonic accompaniment. With sight disassociated from any other sense, sight itself starts to feel somewhat prehensile, which perhaps explains why the actual murder sequences somehow manage to be both hyper-violent and non-physical at the same time, as if looking and murdering were functions of the same organ. At the same time, to help things along the way, Argento clutters and complicates many of his scenes with more than we can visually process or navigate at any one time, creating a spatial surplus, a lurid, exotic sense of space, that makes your eyes feel as if they have to work extra hard to traverse the tangled, distorted passage from one space to the next, even or especially when various eccentric transportation devices are inserted into the narrative to provide you with a bit of assistance, funiculairing, driving and elevating your eyes from mise-en-abyme to mise-en-abyme. In that sense, the Alps feel like the perfect backdrop, providing Argento with vistas that force you to redefine your sense of scale moment by moment, as well as putting more and more pressure on your eyes to keep up with the oversaturated circumambience of it all. Insofar as there's a story to ground all these visual challenges, it's partly about theorising or explaining this hypersight, as Argento variously imagines the film from the perspective of sleepwalkers, insects, serial killers and sex offenders. But, in the end, it feels as if it's the audience's perception that most fascinates him, the way that a cinephile will attach to a sound or image, beyond any rhyme or reason, long after the film has finished, until it's more real, in some sense than the film itself. In other words, for Argento, cinephilia is a way of grasping the hyperreal potential of film as a medium, which makes Phenomena's hyperlyricism feel like a consummation of cinephilia as well, devoid of anything but cinephilic moments, invitations to cinephilia - shots of wind in trees abound - that quickly make you feel as if you're experiening the after-effects of a horror film more than a fully-fledged horror film per se. And it's that sense of being haunted without having been entertained, of experiencing phenomena without a film to ground them, that makes the sense of horror so anti-cathartic and unsettling, in one of the least satisfying - but most terrifying - efforts of Argento's long career, destined to enrage critics and haunt cinephiles for decades to come.