Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002)

Ten deals with a kind of mobile claustrophobia. We've all experienced it, I think: the feeling that the automobile, which represented freedom when we were teenagers, has become a kind of cage, trapping us into the routines of commuting, carpooling, ferrying the kids to and from soccer practice and play dates, and so on. The feeling becomes more acute when we have a passenger whose conversation we can't escape: There's no place to run. In Abbas Kiarostami's movie, the unnamed driver is an Iranian woman (Mania Akbari), for whom the car at least provides an element of freedom denied to women less mobile, but also traps her into conversations that often reflect upon the status of women -- and not just women in Iran. We don't even see her in the first and longest of the ten segments of the film: The camera is trained on her pre-teen son, Amin (Amin Maher, Akbari's real-life son), as he berates her for divorcing his father and remarrying, and generally for nagging and correcting him. She responds in kind -- each accuses the other of shouting -- and bitterly explains that the reason she lied and said his father used drugs was that it was the only way she would be allowed to divorce him in their repressive society. We then see her behind the wheel in subsequent episodes. She drives her sister on a shopping trip and talks about their respective marriages. She picks up an elderly woman who is on her way to pray at a mosque, and learns that goes to pray three times a day -- a devotion that seems to inspire in the driver her own brief attempt at dealing with her problems in prayer. In the car one day, a friend removes her headscarf -- an act forbidden in public and even in the movies -- to reveal that she has shaved her head, thereby negating the proscription against removing her scarf. One night, she gives a ride to a prostitute who mistook her for a male driver and has a conversation with her about sex. The prostitute insists that what she does is no different from what the driver does when she sleeps with her husband for support and gifts: "You are wholesalers," she says. "We are retailers." Kiarostami filmed the driver and her passengers with digital dashboard cameras, so that we see only the one or the other at any given time. The only external shots are what we can see in the background as she drives -- sometimes including the stares of other drivers or pedestrians -- with one exception: Though we never see the prostitute's face, we watch her get into another car after the driver drops her off. The film, edited down from many hours of footage, was mostly unscripted: Kiarostami provided the concept of each sequence and relied on the actors to improvise. Akbari, who has gone on to write and direct her own films, gives a remarkable performance, as does her son. I have seen only three of Kiarostami's films, including Close-up (1990) and Taste of Cherry (1997), but it's clear to me that he was one of the major filmmakers of our time.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name* may be the movies' most famous picaro, the roguish hero who wanders through an often hostile landscape, surviving by his wits -- and in this case, his skill as a gunman. The picaro's heart is generally in the right place even if he doesn't mind breaking a few laws to get his way. In the first two films of Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy," A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965), he is a loner, but in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly he has picked up an unlikely (and untrustworthy) sidekick in Tuco (Eli Wallach), with whom he is working a scam: Tuco has a price on his head, which our hero collects by bringing Tuco in to justice, and then splits with Tuco after rescuing him from a hanging. Tuco is a more vicious Sancho Panza to No Name's more capable Don Quixote. I think it's interesting that The Good.... was filmed in Spain, where the picaresque tradition began with Lazarillo de Tormes in 1557 and produced its most influential analog in Don Quixote. Okay, I'm getting a little pretentious with the literary history here -- though Leone himself once admitted his debt to the picaresque tradition. But who, in the mid-1960s, when Leone was making movies derided as "spaghetti Westerns," would have anticipated such analysis or the veneration those films receive today? Half a century ago, when Leone's trilogy was being released, critics were raving about films like A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966), Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), and Becket (Peter Glenville, 1964): "prestige" movies on high-toned subjects that have dated badly, while Leone's movies still get enthusiastic viewings. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly currently has an 8.9 rating on IMDb and a 97 percent favorable on Rotten Tomatoes -- the only two negative reviews cited on the latter are the ones from Time and Variety at the time of the film's release. My own view is that The Good.... is overlong, especially in its latest restoration, which runs for 177 minutes, and that there's some confusion in integrating the Civil War's New Mexico Campaign scenes with the story of the titular triad. But there are few scenes in movies more dazzling than Tuco's dash through the cemetery and the subsequent three-way standoff. Lee Van Cleef is a suitably scary Bad guy; Eastwood demonstrates the growth as an actor that would continue as his career soared; Wallach gives one of his best performances: and the contribution of Ennio Morricone is breathtaking. Raw and unpolished as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at times is, it remains memorable filmmaking, while the films more celebrated in its day are mostly forgettable.

*Actually, he picks up a name in each of Leone's "Dollars Trilogy" films: In A Fistful of Dollars he is called "Joe," which is a generic name for an americano. In For a Few Dollars More he is known as Monco, the Italian word for "one-armed," in reference to his tendency to use his left hand while keeping his gun hand under his poncho. And in the third film he is dubbed "Blondie" by Tuco. (The color of Eastwood's hair seems to me like a minor characteristic, but I guess "Tall Guy Who Squints and Smokes Cheroots" would have been a mouthful.)  

Casque d'or (Jacques Becker, 1952)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Bougival

A gangster movie/love story set in the underworld of Paris at the start of the 20th century, Casque d'or feels slight, but its images have a way of tantalizing you. Perhaps that's because it evokes paintings like Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Dance at Bougival and Luncheon of the Boating Party. Jacques Becker began his career as an assistant to Pierre-Auguste's son, Jean Renoir, so it's easy to guess that there's an element of hommage in Becker's film. (Jean Renoir's wife, Marguerite, also worked as Becker's film editor.) The film's title, which translates as "golden helmet," is a reference to the blond hair of Marie (Simone Signoret), whom we first see as part of a boating party that lands at a riverside dance hall. Marie is the mistress of the gangster Roland (William Sabatier), but they're clearly not getting along. So when a stranger, Georges Manda (Serge Reggiani), joins the company at the dance hall, Marie begins to flirt with him. Meanwhile, the head of the criminal syndicate of which Roland is a part, Félix Leca (Claude Dauphin), is also making a play for Marie. Georges is an ex-con, trying to go straight as a carpenter, but he is drawn into a fatal involvement with Marie. The performances of Signoret, Reggiani, and Dauphin, as well as a colorful supporting cast, carry the rather thin story a long way, greatly helped by Becker's finesse as a director. There is a real chemistry between Signoret and Reggiani, which Becker had noticed in their previous teaming as the prostitute and the soldier who set the sexual carousel turning in La Ronde (Max Ophuls, 1950). In their first dance together, which is reprised in a haunting flashback at the film's end, Georges holds Marie with one hand on her waist and the other arm hanging free at his side -- a suggestion of their innate intimacy. Later, when Georges sees her again at a café, Marie is dancing with Roland, but she keeps her gaze focused on Georges: Becker and cinematographer Robert Lefebvre execute a dizzying tour de force in following the spinning couple around the dance floor, as Marie turns to look at Georges after every spin. The evocation of the seamy side of the Belle Époque is greatly aided by the production design by Jean d'Eaubonne and the costumes by Mayo (né Antoine Malliarakis).

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party

Ballad of a Soldier (Grigoriy Chukhray, 1959)

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union there used to be jokes about how Russians claimed to have invented everything from the light bulb to baseball. During a thaw in the Cold War that led to an exchange of films between the Soviets and the Americans, American audiences learned that the Russians had at least improved on a familiar Hollywood genre: the glossy, sentimental wartime romance. Even Hollywood was impressed, giving director Grigoriy Chukhray and his co-screenwriter Valentin Ezhov an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. Ballad of a Soldier was a substantial hit, thanks in large part to its appealing leads, Vladimir Ivashov and Zhanna Prokhorenko. Ivashov plays Alyosha, a private serving at the Front who single-handedly cripples two German tanks and is rewarded with a leave to return home and see his mother. But it's not easy making it cross-country in Russia during wartime, and he is forced to bribe his way onto a freight car carrying bales of hay. At a stop, he is joined by another stowaway, a young girl named Shura (Prokhorenko). She initially takes fright at discovering she has a traveling companion, but they eventually begin to fall in love, only to face an inevitable separation. The two young leads -- they were both untried actors still in their teens when they were cast -- are touchingly fresh and innocent, making the contrast with the harshness that surrounds them more poignant. It's a road movie as well as a love story, with some fine character bits by people they meet along the way, especially Evgeniy Urbanskiy as a soldier embittered by the loss of a leg and fearful of how he will be received by his wife. Although the core of the film focuses on Alyosha and Shura, their story is framed by some spectacularly filmed battle scenes at the beginning and Alyosha's painfully brief return home at the end, sequences that surround the love story with scenes of urgency. Chukray has a real gift for pacing and rhythm, aided by his editor, Mariya Timofeeva, though he sometimes allows his cinematographers, Vladimir Nikolayev and Era Savalyeva, to indulge in camera tricks: At one point when Alyosha is being pursued by a tank, the camera does a head-over-heels rollover shot that ends with Alyosha and the tank upside-down on the screen, a giddy, gratuitous bit of fancy photography. Ballad of a Soldier certainly didn't break any new ground, but it managed to make its genre clichés feel fresh.

The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

Thomas Vinterberg and his co-screenwriter, Tobias Lindholm, load so much misery on the protagonist of The Hunt that they find themselves in a bind: How do you resolve a plot that inflicts so much suffering on an innocent man without resorting to either a saccharine happy ending or a depressingly cataclysmic one? When Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), a man in his 40s who teaches in the kindergarten of a small Danish village, is accused by one of the children of exposing himself to her, his life goes to hell. He loses his job and his friends, including his girlfriend, and ruins his chances of a more favorable custody agreement with his ex-wife. And even after the authorities find that there is no evidence to substantiate the little girl's charge, he is still harassed by his neighbors and even denied service at the local grocery store. It's a superb part for Mikkelsen, whose death's-head cheekbones naturally made him the right choice as the most recent incarnation of Hannibal Lecter on TV's Hannibal, but who proves in this film that he can play a sympathetic victim as well as a psychotic villain. But the film depends equally on the performances of Susse Wold as Grethe, the principal of the kindergarten; Thomas Bo Larsen as Theo, the father of the little girl; Lasse Fogelstrøm as Lucas's teenage son, Marcus; and especially the very young Annika Wedderkopp as Klara, Lucas's accuser. The suspicions directed at Lucas gain credibility from the fact that he's an anomaly in the somewhat macho culture of the village: Well into middle age, he is the only male teacher in the kindergarten -- it was apparently the only available teaching job after the school he once taught at closed. Klara is drawn to him as a kind of father figure: Her parents spend much time fighting with each other. Somewhat withdrawn, she has a childish ritual of never stepping on the lines in the sidewalk, and she gets lost because she looks at her feet and not where she's going. Lucas finds her one day and gets her home safely, and promises her that she can come to his house and play with his dog, Fanny. But Klara develops a kind of crush on Lucas, and when she gives him a present and tries to kiss him on the lips, he is forced to establish some limits. Hurt by the rejection, Klara tells the principal that she doesn't like Lucas because he's a man and has a penis. The principal unfortunately takes her remark too seriously and pursues the matter, whereupon Klara remembers a pornographic image that her older brother had shown her on his phone and describes it as if it were Lucas's penis. The principal's amateurish investigation feeds parental hysteria which ultimately results in other children coming forward to accuse Lucas. The film recalls the widespread incidents of sexual abuse accusations that took place particularly in the 1980s, as in the notorious McMartin preschool case in Los Angeles. Fortunately, Vinterberg and Lindholm keep the larger issues in the background as they concentrate on its effect on Lucas, his family, and his friends. The end of the film is, however, something of a muddle: Lucas's life has returned to normal, as far as we can see, as he celebrates Marcus's coming of age by letting the boy join a deer hunt. Only in the concluding sequence do we get a suggestion that the incident will never be fully resolved.

Before the Rain (Milcho Manchevski, 1994)

Before the Rain wears its fractured and inconsistent narrative proudly, as if daring us to make sense not only of the film's plot but also of the centuries-old tradition of violent revenge that had recently manifested itself in the states of the former Yugoslavia. It seems to be three stories that, by the time the film ends, have merged -- or like the snake eating its tail, begun to swallow up one another. The first story, "Words," set in the Republic of Macedonia, is about a young monk (Grégoire Colin) who shelters a girl (Labina Mitevska) from a pursuing mob. The second, "Faces," which takes place in London, centers on a photo editor, Anne (Katrin Cartlidge), and her relationships with a prize-winning photojournalist, Aleksander (Rade Serbedzija), as well as her husband, Nick (Jay Villiers). The third, "Pictures," returns with Aleksander to his home village in Macedonia, where, weary of and disillusioned by his career, he plans to settle. Each segment of the film ends violently, suggesting that the murderous impulse is immanent not only in the world's hot spots but in the heart of civilization itself. As director and screenwriter, Manchevski attempts to explore the dark side of human nature and society without suggesting that he has an explanation, much less a solution, for it. He intentionally undercuts the coherence of the film by introducing inconsistencies between the three sections, such as photographs in one section of events that have not yet happened if the three stories are to be rearranged as a linear progression. The effect is to unsettle the viewer, to heighten the emotional impact of events by denying the intellectual response to them. I think Manchevski largely succeeds, although the London section strikes me as the most weakly conceived, and its climax rather too cinematically staged, especially in comparison with the more subtly terrifying scenes in Macedonia.

Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)

Like Zvyagintsev's 2014 Oscar-nominated Leviathan, Elena is a scathing portrait of contemporary Russian society. But where Leviathan was rough and boisterous, Elena is quiet, austere, and slow. Perhaps too slow for some tastes: The film begins with a long take of the balcony of an apartment house seen through the branches of a tree. For a long time, nothing happens. We hear only the bark of a dog and some street noises. Then we gradually become aware that we are watching the sun rise, reflected in the windows of an apartment. It's the sleek, modern home of the wealthy retired businessman Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) and his wife, Elena (Nadezhda Markina). A couple in late middle age, they have been married for ten years, having met when he was hospitalized for peritonitis and she was his nurse. It's the second marriage for both, and each has a child from the previous marriage: he a daughter, Katya (Elena Lyadova), she a son, Sergey (Aleksey Rozin). But Elena resents the fact that Vladimir dotes on the spoiled playgirl Katya, complaining that she gets in touch with her father only when she wants money. And Vladimir disapproves when Elena gives the money from her own pension to support the unemployed Sergey, his wife, and their two children, 17-year-old Sasha (Igor Ogurtsov) and an infant, who live in a cramped Soviet-era apartment house with a view of the cooling towers of a nuclear plant. Elena wants Sasha to go to university -- otherwise, he'll be drafted into the army -- and appeals to Vladimir for financial help. He refuses: Sergey should get a job and support his own family, besides, the army will be good for Sasha. Then Vladimir suffers a heart attack, and while recovering decides that he should make a will, leaving his estate to Katya and an annuity to support Elena. Before he can see a lawyer, however, Elena slips a couple of Viagra -- knowing that they are contraindicated for heart attack patients -- in with his other meds. After the funeral, the lawyer tells Elena and Katya that the estate will have to be divided between them. The story, by Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin, moves with the inexorable melancholy of the excerpts from Philip Glass's Symphony No. 3 that sometimes accompany it on the soundtrack. Zvyagintsev's refusal to urge along the story and instead to concentrate on the measured pace of Elena's life, gives the film a grounding in actuality, reinforced by Markina's subtle underplaying of her role. It's a chilly film in many ways, but in its depiction of a society defined by the extremes of new rich and old underclass, it has a decided impact.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)

Picnic at Hanging Rock is an unstable mix of a film, playing on, among other things, themes of sexual repression, homoerotic attraction, colonialism, and the curious draw of geological anomalies: Hanging Rock is to the characters in the film as Devil's Tower is to Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) or Sedona is to contemporary New Agers. We never learn how two schoolgirls and a teacher disappeared on their visit to the volcanic outcropping, but it doesn't much matter. What's clear is that the characters are misfits in both place and time, Australia in 1900. As one of the disappeared girls, Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), says, "Everything begins and ends in the right time and place." Like the hoopskirted women and top-hatted men in the wilds of New Zealand in Jane Campion's The Piano (1993), these schoolgirls are uncomfortably muffled against the reality of an Australian summer, to the point that, when they set out for the picnic, they are prevented from even removing their gloves until they have left the village of Woodend, their outpost of civilization. So the three girls who set out on their rebellious adventure shock a fourth, the whining, conventional Edith (Christine Schuler), when they dare to remove their shoes and stockings and proceed barefoot. Edith, who decides to leave the group, will later report that when she met Miss McCraw (Vivean Gray), who followed the girls' path, the teacher was not wearing a skirt. And when one of the girls, Irma (Karen Robson), is found alive but with no memory of what happened, she has mysteriously lost her corset. Several other stories, including the persecution by the headmistress (Rachel Roberts) of the misfit student Sara (Margaret Nelson), are interwoven with the principal incident. But for all its inconclusive narrative and sometimes clashing themes, the movie works by creating a complex symbolic texture. Peter Weir and screenwriter Cliff Green, adapting Joan Lindsay's novel (which was initially thought to be non-fiction), craft a story that tantalizes without frustrating. (Lindsay drafted but didn't publish a chapter with a sci-fi solution involving time warps; her editor was smart to excise it, and Weir and Green were wise to ignore it.)

La Ronde (Max Ophuls, 1950)

Love supposedly makes the world go around, but in La Ronde it's sex that provides the spin. Ophuls and his fellow screenwriter, Jacques Natanson, put us in the hands of a narrator (Anton Walbrook) who facilitates the couplings of the various characters, beginning with a prostitute and a soldier, followed by the soldier's liaison with a chambermaid, her fling with the young man for whom she works, his with a married woman, and so on, until the merry-go-round (a literal presence on the screen) brings us back again to the prostitute. It's an ingenious business, first devised for the stage by the Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler in 1897 -- one reason why the film takes place in Vienna in 1900. At its best, La Ronde is a showcase for some lovely performances, including Walbrook's, but also those of Simone Signoret as the prostitute, Simone Simon as the chambermaid, Danielle Darrieux as the married woman, and, later in the circle dance, Jean-Louis Barrault as a pretentious poet. There are some witty moments: When one of the characters experiences erectile dysfunction, the merry-go-round breaks down and the narrator-facilitator is forced to repair it. In 1950, the movie taught American audiences who got a chance to see it what they were missing because of the hidebound Production Code. The Academy, whose members often chafed against the Code, honored it with two Oscar nominations: Ophuls and Natanson for their screenplay and Jean d'Eaubonne for art direction. Ophuls has a little fun with the censors, too, when one very close encounter is interrupted by the narrator seizing the film and cutting a section from it. Our age, haunted by various STD's, might take a darker view of the film's blithe copulation, which is why, I think, Ophuls's film seems a little hollow: too much style, not enough substance. Even in its day, La Ronde was little more than a charming anachronism, a fantasia about a world that never was, and if it had been, would have been swept away by two World Wars.

The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)

There are few scenes in movies that I cherish more than the encounter of Gerry (Claudette Colbert) and the Wienie King (Robert Dudley). Then again, The Palm Beach Story is filled with things I cherish: The wonderfully enigmatic opening credits, which must have had people sitting through the film twice to comprehend. The way William Demarest drawls out "bangbaang" when he's pretending to shoot targets on the train -- before the rest of the Ale and Quail Club arrives with loaded shotguns to blow the hell out of the club car. J.D. Hackensacker III's (Rudy Vallee) inexhaustible supply of pince-nez. The fetching outfit Gerry fashions from a pair of men's pajamas and a bath towel, using the pajama shirt as a blouse, the pants as a kind of snood, and the towel as a wraparound skirt -- as she remains blithely unconscious that the word "Pullman" is emblazoned on the backside. The way Sig Arno as Toto steals every scene he's in, even if he's only standing in the background. Mary Astor's giddy, horny Princess Centimillia. The sly fun poked at Vallee's past as a crooner. The way Sturges finds something funny for even bit players, like the cops on the street, to do or say. Joel McCrea and Colbert are of course peerless at this sort of comedy. I do have to admit that I'm a little distracted every time I watch Colbert on screen, tracking the way she always manages to get on the right side in every scene, the better to show off the preferred left side of her face. I wonder, though, if Sturges and cinematographer Victor Milner didn't pull a trick on Colbert in the scene in which Gerry is sitting at a dressing table: Though she's on the right side of the screen, the only view we get of her face is a reflection in the mirror of her supposedly inferior right profile. The Palm Beach Story is not as sexy as The Lady Eve (1941) or as satiric as Sullivan's Travels (1941), but it remains for me an inexhaustible delight.