Jesse and Céline forever: "Before Sunrise" at 30

Reissued this weekend to mark its thirtieth anniversary, Before Sunrise was several things happening at once. It was part of a post-Maastricht wave, unimaginable today, of films funded by the Castle Rock production shingle about the romantic misadventures of Americans in Europe, where it was preceded by Whit Stillman's marvellous Barcelona and followed by Billy Crystal's now mostly forgotten Forget Paris. It was the then-blossoming American independent cinema branching out, under the guidance of the ever-curious and open-minded Austin resident Richard Linklater. Most crucially of all, it was twelve or so life-changing hours in the lives of two characters initially encountered as strangers on a train, heading west from who knows where. In retrospect, it seems spooky that the pair's first conversation - sparked by a squabbling married couple in the same carriage - should be about the perils and pitfalls of growing old together. (Call it subconscious foreshadowing.) But they talk, and after they hit it off and disembark together for a layover in a sunkissed Vienna, they walk and talk, as young adults in major European cities and American independent movies have always done. If there was a twist on late 20th century romantic formula, it was that the guy, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), was characterised as the dreamier of the two, a surrogate for Linklater himself (co-writing with Kim Krizan), who'd undergone an experience much like this at a formative moment. It was his travelling companion, young Frenchwoman Céline (Julie Delpy), who would be characterised as the more pragmatic figure - though as she looked as Julie Delpy did in the summer of 1994, which is to say not unlike an angel in human form, she was also the kind of girl a guy might well get dreamy about. (Or so a friend told me.)

It wasn't new to make dialogue the whole shebang: the garrulous Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith had done similar, recently. What felt fresh was the sincere interest in the world(s) that lay beyond pop culture, and in places beyond American cities and towns. This was a film to counter the widely circulated statistic about the shockingly low percentage of Americans who owned passports; it could also be used to push back against anyone claiming Linklater didn't have much of an idea where to put his camera, that he was basically a man filming radio plays. True, it helps that Jesse and Céline pull into Vienna on a gorgeous summer's evening - which makes, say, sleeping overnight in a park less of a dampener than it might have been - but Linklater and Krizan's dialogue also serves to open up both the frame and the frame of reference: Céline cites the ongoing war in what were then the remains of the former Yugoslavia, while a passing encounter with a palm reader ("you need to make peace with the awkwardness of life") carries the leads and viewer alike towards the metaphysical realm. Linklater returned from his European vacation with a document of a particular place at a particular time: the streets, the quays, the trams, the bars. But he'd also arrived at a study of the people occupying this particular place at this particular time, and it was here that Before Sunrise began to work its specific charm.

Jesse and Céline felt like a new kind of screen character, possibly inspired by folks Linklater had ran into around Austin: bookish, but unsure what exactly to do with all their knowledge; socially engaged, but sceptical as to what good that did them; full of youthful vim and vigour, but only too aware of the short time any of us have on this earth. The casting was mid-Nineties hot but meant to last, not least because Hawke and Delpy had such obvious, abundant chemistry they could respond to one another mid-scene with gestures of their own invention. Individually, they could surprise and redirect each other, while ensuring their scene partner looked their very best at every turn of map and script; together, they could make this brief encounter seem real, special, magical, as evanescent as life itself. (Never more so than in their last scene.) The older the rest of us get, the more two things stick out. One: we now spend at least five minutes worrying that one or both parties have left luggage behind in some train or bar, never to be retrieved again. But Linklater intends these characters to be travelling literally and spiritually light, to be carrying the little-to-no baggage that is a privilege for many Western twentysomethings. Two (and not unrelated): we can see what an idealised vision of young love Before Sunrise is. Sometimes, the movie is actively dorky: intercutting that doesn't wholly match, non-starter conversational tangents ("This is a nice bridge"), Hawke's psychiatrist character. Linklater was young and finding his feet, too - though his closing montage was so masterly it would be taught in film schools for decades to come. More complicated and dramatically accomplished trysts would follow: Before Sunset in 2004, Before Midnight in 2013, their running flirtations and arguments already lurking in inchoate form here. These were Jesse and Céline's baby steps, this their debutante ball. It's still adorable.

Before Sunrise returns to selected cinemas from tomorrow.

Construction in progress: "The Brutalist"

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"Sky Force" (Guardian 25/01/25)

Sky Force **

Dirs: Abhishek Anil Kapur, Sandeep Kewlani. With: Akshay Kumar, Nimrat Kaur, Sari Ali Khan, Veer Pahariya. 125 mins. Cert: 15

The hope would be that the Hindi mainstream is learning from its current spell of commercial turbulence. The visual evidence, alas, suggests otherwise. For Republic Day 2024, we were offered Fighter, a glossy all-star flypast that found the industry aping Top Gun: Maverick with more explicit flagwaving; despite a considerable promotional push, it divebombed at the box office. This year, we get Sky Force, a period variation on much the same theme, unpicking the fallout from an Indian strike on a Pakistani airbase during the aerial conflict of 1965. While avoiding complete crash-and-burn, directors Abhishek Anil Kapur and Sandeep Kewlani are but tinkering within an increasingly resistible framework.

For starters, this sortie is sober rather than flashy about its saluting. Scenes are timestamped to underline the factual basis; the xenophobia gets dialled down as far as this genre allows. Yet the arms budget has also been slashed in Fighter’s wake. It’s not so noticeable on the ground, where Akshay Kumar’s upright Group Captain Ahuja briefs his squadron of young Tigers: flyboys with try-hard call names like Cockroach, Panther and Bull. (Imperfectly chiselled, almost-hunky, likable newcomer Veer Pahariya draws the short straw as Tabby, Sky Force’s own Private Ryan.) You can’t, however, miss the cheapness up in the air, where every other dogfight has the look of cut scenes from a mid-Nineties PlayStation game.

The obvious lesson is how these filmed military parades perk up whenever their characters travel off-base. Though curtailed by sirens, the one musical number has colour beyond khaki; there's even stuff to like in the perfunctory domestic scenes. Yet the boys keep being recalled to barracks for scenes organised less around spectacle than a po-faced idea of duty. As in 2016's Rustom and 2021's Bellbottom, period garb fits Kumar well, and the star displays some leadership in steering matters towards a humanist centreground. But the character still wants a medal pinned to his chest, and the movie still ends by insisting "dying for your country is an honourable sacrifice, not suicide". C’mon producers: give peace a chance.

Sky Force is now showing in selected cinemas.

In memoriam: Bertrand Blier (Telegraph 24/01/25)

Bertrand Blier, who has died aged 85, was a French filmmaker whose comedies – notably Les valseuses (Going Places, 1974) and Trop belle pour toi! (1989) – ranged from the provocative to the deeply politically incorrect. Almost as shocking now is that his oeuvre briefly synched with American tastes, landing him a Foreign Film Oscar for Préparez vos mouchoirs (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, 1978).

Bearded and pipe-smoking, the broadly incorrigible Blier began making mischievous hay at a moment where the once-radical New Wave filmmakers were being viewed as loftily academic or simply old hat. The very title of Les valseuses, by contrast, formed an offence-intending mission statement, being as it was slang for the testes.

This galumphing road movie, which its maker framed as “a French Clockwork Orange”, centred on a pair of hitchhikers (Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere) traversing the countryside in search of girls and cheap thrills. Both were found; but even in 1974, viewers had to weigh the earthy humour against the brutish treatment of women (among them Jeanne Moreau and the young Isabelle Huppert), varyingly harassed, groped and set upon, often discarded at the roadside.

Among those objecting was the filmmaker Chantal Akerman, who personally picketed screenings, telling queuing punters the film was “an insult to women”. But it had admirers, too, including Pauline Kael, who compared the film to Ben Jonson’s farces and found the leads’ crude energy “joyous”: “Life to them is like a big meal: they go at it like hungry workmen tearing at a carcass of beef, with greasy fingers.”

Six million people saw it in France alone, enough for Blier to be offered the film rights to stage hit La Cage aux Folles. Turning them down (as he later rued: “I would have made billions”), he instead refined his approach to some degree. Despite having its unhappy housewife heroine (Carole Laure) impregnated by a 13-year-old boy, Préparez vos mouchoirs was comparatively respectable: Mozart on the soundtrack, Depardieu and Dewaere recast as clueless cuckolds.

Even so it provoked division: TV’s Siskel and Ebert vehemently disagreed, with the latter insisting the film “should be cut up to make ukulele picks”. Audiences and awards voters had to decide for themselves; the Oscar win, as Blier admitted, was unlikely – People magazine called it “downright incomprehensible” – but helped by Ingmar Bergman’s decision to pull Autumn Sonata (1978) from the Foreign Language Film category, following his battles with the Swedish tax authorities.

For a while, Blier risked respectability. Buffet Froid (1979) sent up the thriller genre – dispatching Depardieu after a missing penknife – and won the Best Screenplay César. The hits kept coming: La femme de mon pote (My Best Friend’s Girl, 1983), a vehicle for national treasure Coluche; and Tenue de soirée (Evening Dress, 1986), a bizarre love triangle putting Depardieu and Michel Blanc in drag.

Trop belle pour toi!, wherein Depardieu ditched trophy wife Carole Bouquet to shack up with mousy secretary Josiane Balasko, outdid them all, sharing the Cannes Grand Prix with Cinema Paradiso (1988) and winning five Cesars, including Best Film and Best Director. Again, many were surprised. Yet Blier maintained even this crowning achievement derived from a familiar French urge: “I’ve always enjoyed shocking the bourgeois.”

Bertrand Blier was born in Boulogne-Billancourt [now Hauts-de-Seine] on March 14, 1939, to the actor Bernard Blier and his wife Gisèle (née Brunet). He soon found himself surrounded by luminaries, recalling one trip where “every night my father and [Henri-Georges] Clouzot would smoke their pipes while playing chess”. His mother, however, prompted trickier memories: in Fragile des bronches, an autobiographical novel of 2022, Blier recalled seeing Gisèle on a windowsill, apparently considering suicide.

Blier once claimed he slashed his own wrists so to avoid serving in Algeria; instead, he found work as an assistant director to Jean Delannoy and Christian-Jaque. He debuted with Hitler, connais pas (1963), a documentary profiling post-war youth, before casting his father in the thriller If I Were a Spy (1967).

Blier followed Trop belle pour toi! with Merci la vie (1991) and Mon homme (1996), showcases for his then-partner Anouk Grinberg. Yet the new millennium saw a creative tail-off: all-star flop Les acteurs (1999) was followed by critical derision for the haranguing farce Les côtelettes (2003). Le bruit des glaçons (The Clink of Ice, 2010) drolly rebutted cancer-movie pieties, but there were few takers for Convoi exceptionnel (Heavy Duty, 2019), a final reunion with Depardieu. 

Blier was among those signing a 2023 letter supporting the actor in the wake of rape and sexual harassment allegations; the accusations resulted in the cancellation of a planned 50th anniversary TV screening of the pair’s breakthrough film in early 2024. Sixteen years earlier, however, Blier recalled his first grab at infamy with obvious glee. “With Les valseuses,” he said, “I got my hands on France’s package.”

He is survived by his third wife, the actress Farida Rahouadj, and three children: one by Rahouadj, one from his relationship with Grinberg, and one by his second wife, the producer Catherine Blier Florin. His first wife was Francoise Vergnaud.

Bertrand Blier, born March 14, 1939, died January 20, 2025.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of January 17-19, 2025):

1 (new) A Complete Unknown (15) **

2 (1) Mufasa: The Lion King (PG)

3 (3) Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

4 (2) Nosferatu (15) ***

5 (4) We Live in Time (15) **

6 (5) Babygirl (18) ***

7 (new) Wolf Man (15)

8 (8) Moana 2 (U) ***

9 (7) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

10 (6) A Real Pain (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Se7en

2. Babygirl

3. A Real Pain

4. Nickel Boys

5. Nosferatu

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Gladiator II (15) ***

2 (1) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

3 (2) Conclave (12) ****

4 (3) The Wild Robot (U) **

5 (23) Despicable Me 4 (U)

6 (5) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

7 (11) Terrifier 3 (18)

8 (36) The Substance (18) **

9 (6) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

10 (20) The Wizard of Oz (U) [above] *****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Juror #2

2. Speak No Evil

3. Kneecap

4. Evil Does Not Exist

5. The Apprentice

On demand: "The Blue Caftan"

From its opening exploration of a rippling expanse of royal blue silk being readied for tailoring by a masterly pair of hands, the enveloping Moroccan drama The Blue Caftan suggests a version of Phantom Thread with fewer eccentricities and altogether greater heart and warmth. Co-writer/director Maryam Touzani films two simultaneous crises in a small, husband-and-wife-run tailor's shop in downtown Salé. The first is professional: too much work has led ailing, devout Mina (Lubna Azabal) and her other half Halim (Saleh Bakri) to hire a handsome young apprentice, Youssef (Ayoub Missioui), to help out around the place. This Youssef does, but he also brings about a personal crisis. Mina, who may or may not have been aware of Halim's bisexual leanings when she entered into matrimony, can only observe the growing closeness between her man and this new recruit: the steering hand placed on the apprentice's scissors, the breath on the back of the neck. As these three begin to pull and push one another - and the commemorative commission of the title takes shape - we observe closely linked relationships stretching and straining like cloth, with the constant threat of tearing. The film's theme is alteration in all its forms, how - despite all the tradition in the world (and in the tailoring world specifically) - things do still sometimes change: waistlines, loyalties, materials, prognoses, attachments, desires.

What that gives rise to is a minor miracle of nuanced, layered screenwriting. Every other line here folds back onto itself, thickens with meaning and suggestion. Even when talking about buttons and grommets, these coworkers seem to be talking about themselves, and what catches their eye; much goes unspoken, but somehow a lot is conveyed. Somewhere in the background, Touzani seeds an idea about the accelerated pace of modern life - so much work, so little time - and how it limits our means of recovery. (It feels an especially resonant film to encounter as we disentangle ourselves from Covid and enter the brave new world of our tech-bro profiteers.) By contrast, The Blue Caftan stands resolute as a slow burn, an exemplar of judicious, measured craft. The small space of the shop forces the actors together, as it does customers and staff; the result is an astonishingly tactile film, full of expressive framing and gestures. You'll remember the close-ups of hands, picking fruit, smoothing down, reaching out. You'll remember the Vermeer-like still lives this camera captures in passing, the quality of light in the workshop and the couple's home. Most of all, you'll remember these actors: the yearning, smouldering Azabal, whose Mina only ever seems one smile away from a happier life; the upright, noble, Firth-ish Bakri, whose Halim knows the trouble he's causing Mina and loves her anyway; the no less sensitive Missioui, unaware of the behind-the-shutters turmoil he's caused, determined not to be anybody's plaything. It's rare to encounter a drama whose characters are so determined to do the right thing by others, even if it means denying and hurting themselves. Touzani doesn't want these innately good people to fall out of one another's good graces. We don't, either. But sometimes time passes; sometimes things change.

The Blue Caftan is available on DVD through New Wave Films, and to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, the BFI Player and YouTube.

On demand: "A Woman of Paris"

Chaplin's short comedies had made him such a big star by 1923 that he had to insert a title card into the opening credits of A Woman of Paris, his feature-length directorial debut, pointing out that this romantic melodrama would be the first of his works in which he would not personally be appearing. In some respects, he was lying: Chaplin has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo as a railway porter, removed of his familiar Tramp get-up. Still, his fanbase weren't to know this, and you do wonder if any patrons of the time, drawn to the nickelodeon by the prospect of seeing a small man kicking a bigger man up the arse and then running away, let slip a disappointed "aw" before hastening to the exit; or whether the guarantee of seeing something Chaplinesque, albeit sans Chaplin himself, was still enough to keep them seated. (It's not as though the auditorium would have been over-subscribed; the film's commercial failure led Chaplin to suppress all prints until the late 1970s, by which time his legacy had been secured.) In the Chaplin filmography, this is something like his Interiors, the point at which a funnyman artist removes himself from the frame so as to assert the seriousness of his art - to impress upon us that he is no mere comedian - and to turn that frame over to unhappy women in his absence. Here the unhappy woman is Edna Purviance's provincial gal Marie, introduced being turfed out of her childhood home and separated from artist beau Jean (Carl Miller) en route to the big city, as if she were lost luggage. Once resettled, Marie takes up with cad-slash-bounder Adolphe Menjou, only to be reunited with Jean at a later date, precipitating a crisis of heart.

In its vision of guileless young lovers separated - and then reunited - by circumstance, A Woman of Paris sets the stage for Murnau's Sunrise four years later; it is not, as Chaplin must have realised, a simple matter of a small man kicking a bigger man up the arse before running away. Instead, we get a different form of movie art: the delicacies of framing, lighting and mood that would occasionally be apparent in its maker's later, better known vehicles, enhanced here by the extra time and perspective that follow from stepping back from the action and turning one's attention to the contributions of others. The movie remains largely setbound - where Murnau afforded himself greater scope to run wild and experiment with technique - but these particular sets facilitate as much finesse as they do control. They're impeccably dressed, for starters, bringing us close to the high life of 1923 - a milieu Chaplin would presumably have been familiar with - without obscuring the story's emotional stakes or our clear line of sight on our heroine's predicament. Who would you choose? The man who refers to you as his "little woman" and provides security, even luxury, but only the remotest access to his heart? Or the obvious equal, who can offer boundless love, but not a penny more? One further, site-specific complication for contemporary viewers to wrestle with: the fact Menjou, on his way to a long and celebrated career, is several times more charismatic than the naggingly flat and pallid Miller, left clutching to "penurious virtue" by way of characterisation. Yet even a century later, there must still be women, in many more cities than Paris, mulling over some version of the same quandary; the movie will endure so long as the wealth remains unredistributed.

The 2022 remaster of A Woman of Paris is now streaming via NOW TV.

In memoriam: David Lynch (Telegraph 16/01/25)

David Lynch, who has died aged 78, infiltrated our dreams and nightmares to a degree rarely matched by his fellow artists and filmmakers. From Eraserhead, his neurotically personal feature debut of 1977, through to 2001’s beguiling fantasia Mulholland Dr. via the various iterations of his cosmic soap opera Twin Peaks, Lynch operated in the Hollywood hills’ darker recesses, flooding our screens with voluptuous, provocative and often outright terrifying imagery. The majority of his projects rapidly secured cult status; several will endure among cinema and television’s major works.

Lynch’s body of work extended into painting, photography, design and beyond; he shot promos for Michael Jackson, and gifted breakfasters both a widely syndicated comic strip (The Angriest Dog in the World) and his own Signature Cup brand of coffee. The critic Pauline Kael, who witnessed his mid-Eighties transition from fringe figure to American art cinema’s new hope, described him as “the first popular Surrealist”, reflecting on a directorial persona that was equal parts folksy and eccentric. Lynch merrily confessed to frequenting L.A. diner Bob’s Big Boy every day for seven years, and spent the Noughties posting weather reports on his website.

David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946, the son of Donald Walton Lynch, a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, and Edwina “Sunny” Lynch (née Sundholm), an English tutor of Finnish descent. In the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, Lynch can be heard reflecting upon what was a generally blithe but naggingly unsettled upbringing in Atomic Age America: he became an Eagle Scout – serving among the ushers at JFK’s inauguration – but his father’s work required the family to move towns on a regular basis. 

By all accounts, this antsiness persisted into Lynch’s adolescence. He dropped out of the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts within a year of enrolling (“I was not inspired AT ALL in that place”), then abandoned a planned three-year trip around Europe with friend (and soon-to-be-noted production designer) Jack Fisk, where the youthful pair hoped to train with the painter Oskar Kokoschka, after just fifteen days. It was only upon entering the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1966 that his ambitions seemed to coalesce. Here, Lynch found a mentor in the painter Bushnell Keeler, and a wife in fellow student Peggy Lentz, whom he married in 1967.

  
A series of short films brought Lynch to the attention of the newly formed American Film Institute, and he was invited to join the Institute’s Conservatory for emergent talents in Los Angeles in 1971. After relocating to the West Coast and rejecting the wisdom of his more conventionally minded tutors, Lynch spent the next five years tinkering on the strange, obsessive Eraserhead, an entirely distinctive, eternally harrowing vision seemingly informed by its director’s disquiet at becoming a young father. (Peggy had given birth to daughter Jennifer in 1968, before the couple divorced in 1974.) 

Entirely at odds with the moment of Jaws and Star Wars, Eraserhead nevertheless came to be embraced on the midnight movie circuit and won the director admirers in high places: Stanley Kubrick claimed it as one of his favourite films, while Mel Brooks reportedly embraced Lynch after an early screening, declaring “You’re a madman. I love you!” It was Brooks who helped finance Lynch’s much-garlanded follow-up The Elephant Man (1980), a retelling of the John Merrick story elevated by John Hurt’s committed lead performance, and the director’s empathy for its tragic outsider-hero. It won three BAFTAs and was nominated for eight Oscars.

By this point, Lynch had remarried – to Mary Fisk, Jack’s sister, in 1977 – and started receiving the major studios’ more promising scripts. He turned down Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Return of the Jedi (1983) to partner with the Italian producer Dino de Laurentiis on an ambitious filming of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction doorstopper Dune. Opinions vary on the outcome, which was heavily recut by distributors Universal and eventually emerged as one of 1984’s biggest financial disasters, but all accounts suggest it was not one of Lynch’s happier creative endeavours.

Producer and director patched up their differences for 1986’s Blue Velvet, which now seems like the first full definition of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous adjective “Lynchian”. A subversive coming-of-age tale in which boyish naïf Kyle MacLachlan falls under the spell of a sexually masochistic chanteuse (Isabella Rossellini) and her brutal gangster lover (Dennis Hopper), it was wide-eyed and wondrous one moment, deeply disturbing the next, the tonal shifts alarming critics and audiences alike: both Roger Ebert and Mark Kermode have written about overcoming their initial visceral dislike of the film to appreciate its dark visions of adolescence and small-town Americana.

Lynch sealed his unlikely place within the mainstream with his next project Twin Peaks, a primetime TV series for the ABC network co-created with Hill Street Blues veteran Mark Frost. With its young, sexy cast, abiding murder-mystery hook (“Who Killed Laura Palmer?”) and idiosyncratic approach to screen time and space, the show became a global sensation, revolutionising television’s approach to serial drama, and for a while, an albatross around Lynch’s neck: he couldn’t top it, not with a second run in 1991, nor the much-maligned movie prequel (the crushing Fire Walk with Me, 1992) nor the succession of one-season wonders (1992’s On the Air, 1993’s Hotel Room) he found himself developing.

His solution was to retreat once more to the fringes, walking away from Twin Peaks during its second run to direct Wild at Heart, a Cannes Palme d’Or-winner in 1990, full of those wayward energies the ABC censors wouldn’t let pass. The filmmaking became stranger and stranger still. After Fire Walk with Me was booed at Cannes, Lynch embarked on the violent neo-noir Lost Highway (1996), before throwing fans for another loop with the atypically linear, U-rated road movie The Straight Story (1999): the director reported overhearing one preview screening attendee asking “Isn’t it odd that there are two directors called David Lynch?”

Such duality may have factored into 2001’s Mulholland Dr., a project borne of an abandoned TV pilot and the director’s fascination with the twisting, Moebius-like roads around his L.A. retreat. Intertwining the fates of two actresses – one light, one dark – it was immediately embraced as an early 21st century classic, with David Thomson citing it as “one of the greatest films ever made about the cultural devastation caused by Hollywood”. Subsequent projects ventured further off the beaten path: 2002’s Rabbits was a web series that re-envisioned the sitcom with human/rabbit hybrids, 2006’s Inland Empire an experimental three-hour splurge.

For a while, it seemed as if Lynch might never direct again: sequestered in his Hollywood Hills studio, he returned to painting, weathering his parents’ deaths and a one-year marriage to his long-time collaborator Mary Sweeney. A pair of 2016 documentaries – The Art Life and Blue Velvet Revisited – helped sustain the director’s mystique, while suggesting how his hands-on methods might just have passed into obsolescence in the new digital age. Then in October 2014, the cable network Showtime announced Lynch would be returning to television with a revival of Twin Peaks, picking up where the first two seasons had left off.

The result – 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return – was unlike anything aired on television at its moment, and not terribly like the original show, despite the return of several key performers. Working for a cable channel rather than a major network and utilising new digital technology allowed Lynch to expand and travel beyond the boundaries of the small-town America he and Frost had described a quarter-century before. Neither an exercise in easy nostalgia nor simple fan service, unsentimental in its depiction of the effects the years had wrought upon its cast, this revival instead built towards a major meditation on old age, and our inability to turn back the clock.

Lynch himself remained cheerily enigmatic in interviews, speaking only to present new variations on the idea all his works should ultimately speak for themselves: “Life is very, very confusing, and so films should be allowed to be, too.” His personality and outlook expressed itself elsewhere: in a run of offbeam performances that stretched from his FBI agent Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks to a bartender in Family Guy and as John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022); in a love of music that grew out of his extraordinary sound design and eventually yielded several albums; and in his lifelong advocacy for the benefits of transcendental meditation.

 
He is survived by his fourth wife, the actress Emily Stofle, and by four children: the director Jennifer Chambers Lynch (by Peggy Lentz), Austin Jack Lynch (by Mary Fisk), Riley Lynch (by Mary Sweeney) and Lula Lynch (by Stofle).

David Lynch, born January 20, 1946, died January 16, 2025.

On demand: "No Bears"

Good news for those of us keeping an eye on these developments: Jafar Panahi is on the move again (sort of). 2022's No Bears, Panahi's most recent dispatch on life inside Iran and on the conditions to which he himself has been made subject, serves as an unpacking of how this director's films now have to be made following his censure by the authorities: on the hoof, under cover, most of all remotely. The Panahi we see on camera has travelled from Tehran to a village on the Turkish border - perhaps for a recce, perhaps for reasons besides - while simultaneously overseeing the shooting of a docufiction about two lovers fleeing the country on counterfeit passports; Panahi's crew, both back in the city and out in the sticks, wonder whether maestro is opening the door to an escape of his own. Caution must be exercised. Hence Panahi does most of his direction over a laptop, at some plausibly deniable remove from the work that he's creating. There are problems with this: the laptop falls victim to connectivity issues, the filmmaker's hosts keep intervening and interrupting, and handing your camera to others doesn't always get you the shots you want. Sometimes, indeed, it gets you shots you weren't expecting; you get taken in a different direction. This process of being out in the world is often as despair-inducing as it is surprising. A scene of celebration will be returned to, late on, as a site of mourning. The subjects of the film-within-a-film, themselves weighing up whether to fight or fly, fight battles of their own. At a critical point in No Bears, they're even observed to turn against Panahi, lambasting him for forcing them to hit their marks and stay in place. One of many things Iranian films and filmmakers have mastered since their international breakthrough at the turn of the 1990s: erasing the fine line separating drama from documentary, and thereby folding in the circumstances of their own making.

Even so, No Bears - being this creative's strongest and boldest statement for some while - pushes further still. Those movies Panahi teased out while under house arrest in Tehran were comparatively comforting: they stayed close to home by jurisdictional necessity, and were informed as much as anything by the laughable absurdity of the situation their maker found himself in. Here, though, we're out on the fringes of Iranian society, where the jackals and coyotes roam, and a large part of No Bears' palpable tension stems from our understanding that Panahi himself may actually be weighing up whether to run for Western cover, and what the consequences would be for him and his film. Should I stay or should I go? It's not just that the onscreen Panahi is operating far from his usual comfort zone, it's that he's spiritually out of place: a figure of modernity - touting camera, laptop and rationality, prescribing magnesium tablets for a neighbour's joint issues - in a Stone Age landscape still governed by the old ways, traditions and superstitions, talk of djinns and of bears. In a further complication, his hosts want to use his pictures - or pictures they believe he's taken - to settle a contentious local matter, and so he soon finds his own imagemaking being put on trial again. Once more, we might wonder how much of this derives from lived experience, and how much constitutes the filmmaker's worst fears.

Either way, the diagnosis this involving and finally gripping film ventures is of a widespread inability to let people be - a social failure, we note, which extends some measure beyond the filmmaker's immediate purview. It's no coincidence that the film-within-the-film - the film Panahi is seen directing remotely - concerns the struggles of those seeking room to move; no coincidence, either, that these scenes have been shot on backstreets that could as easily pass for bohemian London, Paris or New York as they do Tehran. Panahi permits himself room for another self-portrait, though it's hardly what you'd call a flattering one: older and sadder than the larky DIY auteur who thrashed out This is Not a Film, cursed with a smoker's cough from the cigarettes he feels obliged to light up at moments of stress, this Panahi is a man at the mercy of the powers-that-be, who sees no resolution to his conflict with the State and no sign of any improvement for those seeking personal or creative freedom. (Encoded within these extraordinary films: a sense of frustration at how much better the filmmaking could be if these projects didn't entail so much hush-hush and other hassle.) In No Bears' closing movement, Panahi brings everything close to home once more - the alarm bells are going off; there's finally nothing remote about what we see - leaving us to ponder how a film made thousands of miles away, in defiance of the most oppressive conditions, can offer a clearer line of sight on developments in the wider world than 95% of films made under so-called functioning liberal democracy.

No Bears is currently streaming via the BBC iPlayer; it is also available to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, the BFI Player and YouTube.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of January 10-12, 2025):

1 (2) Mufasa: The Lion King (PG)

2 (1) Nosferatu (15) ***

3 (4) Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

4 (3) We Live in Time (15) **

5 (new) Babygirl (18) ***

6 (new) A Real Pain (12A) ***

7 (6) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

8 (5) Moana 2 (U) ***

9 (7) Better Man (15) **

10 (new) Maria (12A) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Se7en

2. Babygirl

3. A Real Pain

4. Rocco and His Brothers

5. Nickel Boys

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

2 (2) Conclave (12) ****

3 (16) The Wild Robot (U) **

4 (new) Se7en (18) *****

5 (5) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

6 (4) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

7 (3) Dune: Part Two (12) **

8 (new) The Apprentice (15) ***

9 (8) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)

10 (12) Survive (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Juror #2

2. Speak No Evil

3. Kneecap

4. Evil Does Not Exist

5. The Apprentice

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Innocents (Wednesday, Channel 4, 1.50am)

2. Face/Off [above] (Friday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

3. Pitch Perfect (Thursday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

4. Eastern Promises (Saturday, BBC1, 11.40pm)

5. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Saturday, BBC2, 2.40pm)

Stakeout: "Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter"

If cinemas are going to have to rely on reissues while we wait for the pandemic, strike and now wildfire-slowed movie machine to return to something like its former speed, far better our screens be filled with off-piste titles, rather than the same small handful of crowd favourites we've all seen ten times over. Given the current ascendancy of horror at the box office, it's also very shrewd for Hammer to offer renewed access to less familiar titles from its storied back catalogue - not least as any profits can presumably be funnelled back into the revived studio's 21st century endeavours. First up for reassessment: 1974's Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, overseen by Brian Clemens in the pause between TV's The Avengers and The New Avengers, and a film that spliced classic Hammer tropes with elements of Richard Lester's then-popular Musketeers films, and possibly even something of Bergman's The Seventh Seal in its central clash. Horst Janson plays the titular Army officer, a dashing, blond-haired figure of enlightenment whose trajectory across the greener stretches of the Home Counties intersects with that of a far darker force: a cowled figure who turns the wildlife he or she passes through to rot and is introduced dispatching several fair, white-gowned maidens by aging them irrevocably. Cue swashbuckling, vamp-slaying and one moment of pure early Seventies ripeness - so ripe, indeed, you half-wonder whether Clemens handed the day's directorial duties over to one Dean Learner. "I'll stay if you'll have me," simpers Kronos's glamorous assistant Caroline Munro, a former dancing girl the Captain has liberated from the stocks with one flash of his mighty sword. "Oh, I'll have you," our hero parries, followed by an overemphatic crash-zoom onto Munro's expectant features, so thrustingly phallic that the camera may as well have been mounted on our hero's manhood. Boiiiiiiingggggggg!!!

Mostly, the film rattles along. Just 90 minutes from pillar to post, worldbuilding without fuss, it finds room for post-Wicker Man folk-horror eccentricity (toads as vampire motion detectors!) while sketching in a variety of intriguing narrative backroads and byways: Ian Hendry in leather trousers as a rival swordsman who gets all his scenes done on the one alehouse set (textbook Hammer efficiency), Wanda Ventham (Benedict Cumberbatch's mum) as a shadowy lady of the manor. Its flaw is that it never really develops beyond this initial sketchiness. We were closer to the Three-Day Week than we were to Hammer's golden era, and audiences who'd just been terrified by the expensive Hollywood horror revival of The Exorcist could have been forgiven for finding this throwback on the cheap side. Clemens arrives at terrific isolated images - a bloodied hand piercing the frame, Carrie-like, from below; eyes reflected in a sword; faces turned to death masks; some very Bergman-ish crucifixion shadowplay - but they tend to rattle around inside devil-may-care storytelling. Janson, the German actor who would have been semi-familiar to audiences of the time from roles in The McKenzie Break and Murphy's War, is a princely, sporting presence - a James Hunt on horseback - who equips himself well in the action scenes, but we're barely introduced to the character before he rides off into the sunset again. Intended to launch a series, the film's commercial failure instead helped put a stake through Hammer's heart - but it wouldn't surprise me if someone associated with the company still entertains hopes of picking up where Clemens' blueprint left off.

Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter returns to selected cinemas from tomorrow; a limited edition 4K collector's edition Blu-ray is available from January 27.

Dylanland: "A Complete Unknown"

Could we have known thirty years ago - around the time he left the Disney of Oliver & Company behind to fashion 1995's delicate, pulsing indie fable Heavy - that James Mangold would someday become such a bedrock of Dad Cinema? After the second-gear exhilaration of 2019's Le Mans '66, Mangold returns to the territory of 2005's Walk the Line with his latest A Complete Unknown, which recreates Bob Dylan's formative years on the US folk scene. This milieu has been picked over many times before, most recently by the Coens' Inside Llewyn Davis, which defined Dylan by his absence (and who he wasn't). Here, the tousle-haired troubadour is set front-and-centre in an Oscar shot for Little Timmy Caramel, a process that involves the usual compression of timelines, rewriting of history and smoothing over of jagged life experience; what was once fringe activity gets made more palatable for the mass audience in a series of scenes you will have seen (and perhaps enjoyed) a dozen or more times over. You know the score: characters who introduce themselves by their full name ("I'm Bobby Neuwirth", "I'm Al Kooper") so as to impart their import to connoisseurs, the first notes of masterpieces scratched out on guitars (the musical biopic's Eureka moments), a closing bout of onscreen text to remind us This Is History. Mangold's film hedges its bets further by framing Dylan as one among many folkies who might yet suffer the indignity of their own Hollywood biopic, from oldtimers Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) to upstarts like Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Practically the one surprise is that it's altogether more of a group shot than the expected portrait of an artist as a young man, repackaging multiple greatest hits compilations for the price of one ticket; even Johnny Cash recurs, played here by Boyd Holbrook as a wayward musical lodestar. Yet as a damning social-media post by Merrill Markoe has detailed, A Complete Unknown - directed by a man, written by two, and produced by five - is more dismissive of its women than a film on the Sixties folk scene needs to be, and generally proves content merely to replay familiar tunes, to stir dusty memories of boomer youth.

It should be noted that Mangold, who apprenticed at a time the studios were still teaching their directors craft, is better than most at smoothing over. From an early stage, we feel we are in safe hands; this is presumably why Fox (or what remains of Fox after the Disney buyout) brought the film's release date forwards so as to compete for this year's awards. As a production, A Complete Unknown is broadly handsome: though a touch more cramped than Walk the Line - even studio budgets aren't what they used to be pre-2008 - that's not unhelpful for a drama that largely unfolds around a sunny (Australian-built) replica of Greenwich Village, and these sets do much to preserve the chilled atmos of a less cluttered era, wherein a provincial boy might well have had the time and space to rethink and reinvent himself as the voice of a generation. (The movie is meticulous in its recreation of how white people of a certain age remember the Sixties: that may be enough to ensure it's a hit.) These rooms are populated by performers who are also likely fans, and so feel especially compelled to channel the look and spirit of those they're impersonating; this extends to doing their own singing and playing their own instruments, as Walk the Line previously insisted. The pick of the pack is Norton's Seeger, a genuine character, and the one person on screen who seems any fun to be around, dorky as he is. The limitation is that much of the rest never gets past the level of surface impersonation: A Complete Unknown largely resembles some folk-themed holiday special of Stars in Their Eyes with unusually detailed linking segments. It's terribly bland for a Dylan movie - ploddingly prosaic, where Todd Haynes's I'm Not There was chancy and imaginative - and Chalamet-as-Dylan, nursing his cigarettes with maximum preciousness and never once appearing to age, at all points proves a far less compelling focus than the refusenik star of Don't Look Back, observed with jagged edges very prominently intact. Truth is almost always more interesting than these sorts of fictions.

A Complete Unknown opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

In memoriam: Jack Bond (Telegraph 14/01/25)

Jack Bond, who has died aged 87, was a filmmaker who emerged from the British counterculture to specialise in portraits of artists, whether strictly non-fiction – as in his feted TV doc Dalí in New York (1966) – or wholly fantastical, as in It Couldn’t Happen Here (1987), the big-screen Pet Shop Boys vehicle described by its maker as “a saucy seaside postcard come to life and gone mad”.

His directorial career almost ended before it began. Hired on a BBC trainee scheme in 1962, Bond faced the sack after inventing outraged viewer responses during an early dry spell on Points of View (1961-present). He was only spared by controller Huw Wheldon, possibly sensing creative gifts that would be better deployed elsewhere.

Commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary of WWI’s outbreak, The Pity of War (1964) soon returned Bond to his employers’ good graces. He followed it with the career-making Dalí in New York, an hour-long study of the artist in residence at the St. Regis Hotel, fashioned at the point the Spanish surrealist was transforming his body into a canvas for performance art and his name into a saleable brand.

The Dalí that Bond filmed was equal parts exasperating (demanding his handlers source five thousand black ants for a performance piece) and fond. If it wasn’t for his wife, the artist admitted, “I would be lying in a gutter somewhere covered in lice.” Bond was both amused and charmed: “[He] always knew exactly what he wanted, and he got it… He was grand in the real meaning of the word.”

Seen calling Dalí’s chauvinism out was the Welsh-born polymath Jane Arden, Bond’s then-lover and collaborator on three intense, experimentally inclined features: Separation (1968), which Arden wrote and starred in, and Bond directed; the trippy The Other Side of Underneath (1972), which Bond produced for Arden to direct; and Anti-Clock (1979), a Godard-adjacent surveillance saga, co-directed by Bond and Arden, which became a minor US hit upon attracting Andy Warhol’s patronage.

After Arden took her own life over Christmas 1982, a wounded Bond suppressed these films (“along with a lot of thoughts and feelings”) and lived a self-described playboy existence, sailing his boat Moonsaga around Europe. He was eventually tempted back to dry land to contribute to Melvyn Bragg’s The South Bank Show, and “Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum”, Bond’s imaginative Roald Dahl profile of 1986, led to an offer to direct It Couldn’t Happen Here. 

Initially conceived as a Pet Shop Boys video album, the project developed under Bond’s eye into an idiosyncratic, Clacton-shot theatrical feature, with the band’s Tennant/Lowe double-act being menaced in passing by Joss Ackland as a serial killer whose end-of-the-pier puns echoed Bond’s own back catalogue: “I’ve just been fishing with Salvador Dalí. He used a dotted line.”

Jack Cameron Bond was born in London on December 10, 1937, to insurance agent Frank Bond and postal worker Pat (née King). As a child, he was caught up in the Blitz: “We went to a beautiful house in the country. Very quickly we got bored, so we came back and spent the rest of the time being bombed.” The war, he said, turned him into “a fighter”. Leaving home at fifteen to move in with a barmaid who’d caught his eye, he subsequently trained in the Royal Army Educational Corps; his teaching plans were abandoned, however, after discovering the low rates of pay. 

In later life, Bond completed several independently produced documentaries. The Blueblack Hussar (2013) was a revealing study of former pop pin-up Adam Ant on his comeback from mental health issues, wearing his bruises and battlescars as he once did warpaint; An Artist’s Eyes (2018) followed the instinctive young painter Chris Moon, poised on the verge of a commercial breakthrough that never quite follows.

The new century, however, brought plentiful appreciation of Bond’s own work. Dalí in New York went on permanent show at Florida’s Dalí Museum, earning its director a medal from the Raymond Roussel Society in 2023; while his collaborations with Arden were issued on DVD by the BFI, as was It Couldn’t Happen Here, complete with the promo for festive chart-topper “Always On My Mind” and Bond’s wry audio commentary: “Were we ever examined by doctors to see if we were sane?”

Bond is survived by his partner Mary Rose Storey, stepdaughter Lily Marlene von Kalbach, and three of his four children by his first wife Moira Tulley; his daughter Rebecca died in 2018.

Jack Bond, born December 10, 1937, died December 21, 2024.