by Oscar O’Sullivan

Monday – A Matter of Life and Death

You may have noticed that I already reviewed this one – it’s such an exceptional film that it needed it’s own space. If you haven’t already you can read that review here.

Tuesday – Black Narcissus

Another film from director duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, but a very different beast from the supernatural wartime drama of A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus is about a group of nuns sent to found a new convent in a dilapidated Indian temple. Despite being invited by the local leader and seemingly welcomed by the villager, cultural tensions are high – most of the people have to be paid to attend the convent school, while superstitions over medicine make treating the ill a tricky situation. But worse than the external tensions are the internal tensions – head nun Sister Clodagh was promoted too young for the position and struggles to maintain morale among the other sisters, most especially Sister Ruth, who develops a dangerous attraction to British government worker Mr Dean. Mr Dean is callous and snarky, needling the nuns for their faith and believing their mission to be futile, but he’s just decent enough to lend them a hand when needed, and develops a grudging respect for Sister Clodagh. Their tense friendship is misread by an increasingly jealous Sister Ruth, and when everything is thrown into chaos by the death of a local child and the disappearance of their patron, Ruth snaps in spectacular fashion. The final act is practically a horror movie, especially since what precedes it is so uniformly calm and unhurried. The glacial pace of the story can feel awkward and, dare I say it, boring – but this is not an accident. The film wants to draw you in to the mood of the convent, where the remoteness and uncanny silence of their new home causes the nuns’ minds to wander, and their secret fears and desires to bubble up to the surface. Even when the film is taking it’s time, it’s undeniably beautiful to behold, stunning locations gorgeously photographed. The payoff at the end isn’t quite explosive or salacious enough for me to fully forgive some of the meandering (much of the incidental drama is never resolved or relitigated), but a relatively lean runtime complements the pace and the imagery alone makes this worthwhile. 8/10.

Wednesday – The People’s Picturehouse

No feature film today – I was moving and shaking at The People’s Picturehouse, Cork’s monthly film showcase and schmoozing event. It wouldn’t be fair for me to review the shorts shown there – after all, I was in one of them, so bias is unavoidable. The variety of films showcased is always fantastic, animation, comedy, documentary, music videos, experimental cinema, Irish language shorts, poetry and dance, everything is presented on a an equal playing field, and the crowd is wonderful no matter what’s shown. If you’re in Cork and you have any interest in independent film, go give them a follow on Insta for all news and announcements.

Thursday – Unforgiven

Clint Eastwood’s farewell to the Western, the final word on the genre by one of the greatest to ever do it. This was the film that finally allowed the genre to be ‘prestige’ – its blockbuster dominance long since past, the Academy finally saw fit to recognise a cowboy film as being the best of the year (for once I’d be inclined to agree), and it’s easy to see what inspired the glowing reception. Eastwood plays ‘William Munny’ (in reality he’s playing a stand-in for every cowboy he’s played in the past), an old farmer who used to be a notorious outlaw. From the start, his insistence on having changed his ways feels stilted, disingenuous – as if he’s trying to convince himself more than anything, clinging to the idea of a redemption he doesn’t believe he’s earned. Setting off to kill some bad men and claim a huge reward to provide for his children, he insists again and again that he’s not the man he used to be. Old partner Morgan Freeman isn’t convinced, but agrees to come along and help do the deed, alongside an over-eager upstart who suffers from near-sightedness and needs to two old-timers to show him the ropes. Standing in their way is Gene Hackman, local sheriff and pillar of the community – also a vicious bully who uses charisma and a steady nerve to launder his reputation. Hackman’s subplot is the most obvious in it’s themes – telling his tales of bravery and frontier justice to an impressionable biographer, he claims to be pulling back the curtain on the truth of the Wild West, but is simply changing the narrative to make himself more heroic, just like real-life lawman Wyatt Earp who sold his story to early Hollywood filmmakers and subsequently became one of the famous ‘heroes’ of the era. After playing so many cowboy heroes, Eastwood is clearly disillusioned with the idea. Unforgiven posits that there is no difference between the heroes and the villains – they’re all killers, and motivation doesn’t even come into it. But the killers are also the only people who are remembered, the only people who are significant. The quiet farming life at the start of the film comes across as pathetic and pointless, the reward for changing your ways and settling down being a life of scrabbling in the mud to make ends meet. When Eastwood sets out to claim the bounty he’s nobody, an old man with a name that used to mean something and a lifetime of regrets. Despite all his talk, he still can’t forgive himself – realising that he will always be unforgiven sets him free, and when he rides away into the night, he rides off into history. Eastwood both condemns and immortalises his stock character, the contradiction a vital part of the commentary – even if we confront the truths of the past, the stories are just too strong to ever fully abandon. 10/10.

Friday – Raging Bull

Is ‘method acting’ worth it? De Niro’s physical transformation certainly adds to the film, but is it really any better than prosthetics and a fat-suit? What’s important is that it seems to work for him – a common trait of method actors is that they aren’t as confident in their abilities unless they can physically or mentally transform themselves in some way. And it is always dangerous, angry, violent roles that method actors choose to embody – like Jake LaMotta here, a talented boxer with serious anger issues and a jealous streak a mile wide. His successful sporting career hones and directs his violent nature into something productive, but the mounting pressure of the sport also exaggerates his behaviour outside the ring. All of his issues come down to one core flaw – he lacks discipline. He lacks the discipline to control his appetites and becomes unfit to compete, he lacks the discipline to control his temper and alienates everyone in his life – the tragic part is that he knows this and he hates himself for it. That self-hatred holds him together for a long time, but unable to truly change, his downfall is inevitable. The boxing of this film is secondary to LaMotta’s disastrous personal life – bouts are presented in rapid and fragmentary fashion, dreamlike even, as if boxing is a temporary escape from reality. Boxing is the cause of his problems and his only escape from them – without it, he’s truly lost, acting out a hollow pantomime of life. 10/10.

Saturday – The Bikeriders and Easy Rider

Surprisingly chilled out for a film about a biker gang, though context explains all – this is a story set in the ‘Golden Age’ of motorcycles, before crime and violence corrupted the hobby. The Bikeriders becomes an odyssey of changing cultural values and the deterioration of masculinity. The guys who start the gang are respectable, all-American fellas, family men and business owners with a shared hobby who just want to hang out and feel cool. Club leader Johnny is a suburban trucker who downloads his new personality from a Marlon Brando film he sees on the tv – Tom Hardy’s ridiculous American accent actually fits for the role of a man who adopts a tough-guy persona. The second wave of club members are young, directionless men who are attracted to club ethos of freedom and brotherhood. Protagonist Benny, a perfectly charismatic and brooding Austin Butler, is one such lad, so dedicated to the Vandals that he refuses to take off his jacket on pain of death, but also too independent to consider Johnny’s offer of taking over – leadership would be a prison for him. His fierce loyalty foreshadows the third wave of members – as the club grows and absorbs chapters all across the midwest, the quality control for membership goes out the window. These men are largely Vietnam vets, nutcases and druggies, attracted to the biker lifestyle not out of a love for biking, but a love of violence – being a part of an organisation that gives them an excuse to fight and maim. No matter how pure the intentions of the club were at first, this element inevitably forces out the old guard and turns the hobby into exactly what society feared it to be all along. All this is relayed after the fact by Jodie Comer, playing Benny’s wife Kathy, in a series of interviews with photojournalist Mike Faist. Her perspective cuts into the childishness and the inadequacies of the riders from the very beginning – while there is an element of romanticisation, the film is very clear in it’s criticism. While Kathy herself fell for the dream of the club, marrying Benny only five weeks after their first encounter and throwing herself into the lifestyle, she’s also the first to see the writing on the wall for the Vandals. The film is expertly paced, the dialogue is sharp and the cast is fantastic. The story is well-trod territory but told with enough flash to feel fresh. 9/10.

Easy Rider is more than just a great film – it’s a moment in culture. Released in 1969, the film stood apart from traditional Hollywood pictures by being built on two key pillars – hippie culture and European filmmaking techniques. Hippie culture is obvious to see here – a story of two long-hairs who make a killing on a drug deal and ride down to New Orleans to blow their ill-gotten gains on pleasure and debauchery. Along the way they stop in with fellow counter-cultural types and clash with everyday Americans, who invariably greet them with curiosity at best and violence at worst. The beauty of the film is that it’s not simply a pro-hippie screed – while the conformism of capitalist living is definitively portrayed as evil, the film is very honest about the failings of the hippie lifestyle and it’s ultimate incompatibility with the world they live in. Despite rejecting a working lifestyle, they’re still obsessed with money, and a particularly striking sequence near the end reveals the emptiness goals as they drift through a waking nightmare, having gained nothing for their journey but a transient pleasure. Then there’s the filmmaking – first-time director Dennis Hopper was deeply invested in outsider art, and took a ton of visual inspiration from the French New Wave, with it’s distinctive rapid editing and mobile camera, as well as it’s soundtrack of popular music rather than the then-traditional score. Hopper could be considered the first of the ‘New Hollywood’ generation of directors – young and politically-minded guys who studied and emulated European cinema and changed the face of Hollywood with their out-there techniques and provocative subject matter. It makes me wonder about what motivates our modern young directors – while many of them are still studied cinephiles, emulation can easily become stagnation, and the real issue is figuring out what they stand for culturally or politically outside of echoing the themes of past greats. Do we even have a strong or unified counter-culture in the digital age? Easy Rider is a magnificent reminder of how powerful culture and cinema can be when they are truly in dialogue, artists with a real vision for the world using the medium to it’s fullest to tell their story. 10/10.

Sunday – Samaritan Zatoichi

Zatoichi films always have at least an element of comedy, but once in a while they lean into it for something truly slapstick. Entries like this can often feel comparatively weak, but Samaritan Zatoichi strikes a perfect balance. Fittingly for the title, Zatoichi is at his most good-natured and gregarious, spending the entire film making up for a murder he’s tricked into carrying out. On a journey to help a hunted woman get home, Zatoichi cavorts from one comedy beat to another with glee. He gets wrapped up in straw and waddles through a horde of enemies, stuns a crowd of onlookers by jauntily winning over and over at a ball-throwing carnival game and clings for dear life to a runaway horse. There’s always something hilarious happening, but the story still feels consequential – Zatoichi’s chemistry with the female lead is platonic but compelling, and the escalating tension of the villains’ pursuit keeps things focused. It’s also a wonderfully shot film, a rare entry in the franchise that cycles through a wide variety of locations, and as always, the action doesn’t disappoint. 9/10.