Before Sunset (2004)
Before Sunrise is more romantic than this film and Before Midnight is more about the two leads, Celine and Jesse, what they think of each other, and their individual personalities. This film stands out to me because of the course the conversation between Celine and Jesse takes. Before Sunset is the only film in the trilogy that takes place in real time. Sunrise and Midnight condense a few hours into 100 minutes. Sunset depicts an unbroken conversation that takes eighty minutes.
It means Delpy and Hawke must act out in real time how the characters decide how sensitive the subject matter of their conversation should be, or how directly they want to answer each other's questions. This is visible in the other films too, but the subject matter is different and it's up to us to speculate about what might have happened in the hours not depicted. Jonathan Rosenbaum put it well when he said that out of all of Richard Linklater's films, Before Sunset (along with Tape) "delve[s] the deepest into the characters' moment-to-moment decisions." It is this, the way the characters disarm each other and tease out the ability to speak frankly about what they fear, that made the film extremely refreshing.
The conceit of playing out in real time, combined with the flowing camerawork that accents the act of moving from one place to another, also helps Before Sunset take advantage of one the principal elements of the Before trilogy: the fact that they all take place in gorgeous, historic locations. These are prime travel destinations, but the characters are always just passing through, present on limited time. Watching them talk and decide what they want to do and where they want to go encourages us to ask what we really hope to get out of places like that.
Every Man for Himself (1980)
Jean-Luc Godard was never a traditional filmmaker, but his distance from the mainstream certainly changed over the course of his life. Every Man for Himself closed some of that distance after a long period of politically radical, experimental filmmaking. But again, Godard was never a traditional filmmaker, and Every Man for Himself could only be his.
Early on in the film, a character narrates: "events still occur, but only tiny ones. Moments still exist, but horribly stretched out." True to form, the film frequently uses slow motion, to the extent that we can see actions proceed frame-by-frame. Narration collides with dialogue and different people's activities happen in the same spaces, but separately, or with surprising disconnects. We experience a world of overlapping individual moments, with little notion of overarching organizing principles that could turn them into large events.
And yet delusional men—specifically men—still insist on seeing themselves as movers of all else. "Only the banks are independent," the bankers say. We watch them strain awkwardly to realize their sexual fantasies while they claim the influence of figures from more ambitious times in history.
The American title of the film reflects the fragmented kind of individuality it depicts. The French title, "Sauve qui peut (la vie)," (for which Godard suggested the translation "Save Your Ass") reflects that this is a crisis. Like many of Godard's post May 1968 films, it's a crisis of not learning from the failures of the past. But it's also one of learning to take the world as it stands today for granted, and of a dwindling potential to rally people together.
Flowers of Shanghai (1998)
The characters are dressed in silk gowns and spend the entire film enjoying the perfect interior designs of Shanghai's "flower houses." Much as the characters in old Hollywood films are constantly smoking and ashing their cigarettes, the characters in this film are always smoking metal pipes. I couldn't take my eyes off the ceaseless pattern of movement in their smoking. This, combined with the film's long takes and the camera's slow, back-and-forth movement made this not only one of the most beautiful films I've seen, but one of the most hypnotic.
This is appropriate for a story about men indulging in habitual numbness. We never see an exterior space. The characters have come to the flower houses to smoke opium and isolate themselves temporarily from the other parts of their lives. It's meant to be an escape, but they take this reprieve so consistently that it becomes integral to their stability. It may be hard to tell at first—the film moves slowly. But eventually, their emotions boil over when something threatens to disrupt this habit. Everything is in its place in their lives, just like everything in the courtesans' elegant bedrooms. But the flower houses' courtesans have their own plans, and as the film progresses and they become more able to assert themselves, the house of cards starts to fall. There's a paradox in wanting to make a habit of numbness, in needing to control your own relief from the stress of exercising control.
Little Lise (1930)
Like many early talkies, this film is a strange and surprising mixture. Sometimes it looks like a silent film, sometimes it looks like something thirty years ahead of its time. The central characters are like ghosts, separate and hidden from the daylight and the natural rhythms of bustling streets, clubs, and prison bunks. There's a remarkable scene in the middle of the film that uses ellipsis and off-screen sound to great effect, generating the kind of frustrating inevitability that would become a hallmark of film noir decades after this film's release. The story is stripped down and loosely pieced together, but the style and performances are enough to make it enthralling until its final, devastating moments.
Mirch Masala (1987)
A wealthy tax collector arrives in a small Indian village and begins abusing the villagers. A woman named Sonbai becomes the first one to stand up to him, and he starts pursuing her, hoping either to tempt her with his wealth or force her into submission. She resists by retreating into the spice factory where she works. Abu Mian, the factory guard, seals off the factory and threatens the tax collector's henchmen. The tax collector starts harassing the rest of the villagers to help him get inside.
Eventually, the tax collector sends the owner of the factory to open the door. When Abu Mian refuses, the owner insists. "Do as I say, I'm the owner!" he says. Abu Mian responds: "And I am the guard." This is a movie about people finding themselves in certain roles, given certain sets of tools. They were also given purposes for which they were meant to use those tools. But they learn that they can break away from those purposes, reinterpret their roles, and assign new purposes to their tools.
That's how the film ends: the factory workers find a new use for the spice they made. It's rather remarkable how much weight that one action carries. The film feels somewhat off before that point: the popping, beautiful color of the peppers, laid in mounds creating beautiful scenery, feels out of step with their utterly mundane purpose. When the film enters its last few seconds, we wonder how it's going to tie off all its threads. But it all makes sense the moment the workers assign the spice a new purpose.
M. Hulot's Holiday (1953)
Tati captures a world more complex than what any individual character can see. Often the joke is that a character's surroundings are not what they thought they were: a man mistakes another person's cane for a coatrack. A man playing cards has his chair turned around while looking at his hand, and accidentally places a card on the wrong table. There's another side to it as well, where the motions, behaviors, or postures of certain people are misinterpreted by others.
In his films, our tendency to act absent-mindedly on habit can make our lives dull and provincial, and this provincialism is partly responsible for the ignorance that drives Tati's comedy. But on the other hand, the deeply-ingrained habits of the characters are fascinating. The human capacity to internalize environments is remarkable, even if it is incomplete and can make you look silly in the wrong context.
In M. Hulot's Holiday, we witness a group of beachside hotel guests who are supposed to be on vacation, but aside from the children, they don't seem to have much fun or do anything out of the ordinary. Tati's character, Monsieur Hulot, disrupts the rhythms of these characters, sometimes on purpose but usually by accident. We often see him learning new things or trying to be a social chameleon. As Kristin Thompson put it, he "seems to try to conform and simply cannot manage it...Hulot's perception of objects and activities is, unlike that of the other guests, not conventional."
Some of the guests find him annoying, but a few befriend him. Their gestures of friendship at the end of the film let us know that somebody was having fun after all. It's rather satisfying, the way Tati will make a gag out of
something as simple as the sound a door makes when you open it. The
potential for seeing things in a different way is always there.
Vida en Sombras (1949)
This is the sole feature directed by Lorenzo Llobet-Gràcia, and it's not hard to see why. The film contains no overt political statements, but almost feels incomplete without them. This is for two reasons: one is that the characters are all educated, thoughtful people whose lives are deeply affected by politics, and it seems natural that they should have opinions about it. The other is that the film was, in fact, significantly altered during its production due to censorship.
The film starts with the main character, Carlos Durán, being born in a movie theater at the dawn of cinema, when there were only silent shorts and the technology of film was as alluring to audiences as the films themselves. As a young adult, Carlos becomes a film theorist in the vein of Eisenstein or Kuleshov, and falls in love with his eventual wife at a screening of Romeo and Juliet. During the Spanish Civil War, he shoots documentary footage until his wife is killed, after which he can no longer bring himself to engage with cinema.
As Carlos types his theory, in the background we see the towering silhouettes of zoetropes and cameramen. The film makes frequent use of strange backgrounds like this as well as superimposition to paint a picture of a life lived alongside war and cinema. There are many films about film lovers and filmmakers, but they only rarely touch on what happens when their lives are uprooted by politics. Filmmaking is a political act in Vida en Sombras, but not for propagandistic reasons. Rather, it's because it affects how individuals perceive the world and the leaps they take.
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