Sketching the social spectrum of the time through hilarious vignettes, the first part of High Hopes is sparkling. Characters are quirky, the situations preposterous, and yet its realism is sharp and caustic as a documentary. In Mike Leigh’s words, ‘it’s the only film I’ve made that involves anything you could really call satire, is culpable of caricature, and where the deliberate device is employed of heightening in a comic way some characters against others in order to make an implicit statement.’¹
But what really turns High Hopes into a tragicomic masterwork is grandma’s birthday party, where the general hysteria climaxes in an absolutely exhilarating scene of acting and writing bravura. What follows is an unexpected plunge into an even deeper, brutal reflection on the current times and Mike Leigh’s harshest take on Thatcherism thus far. Somehow suggesting that grandma’s point of view coincides with that of the film itself, the final scene on the rooftop is particularly stunning and moving. Her overwhelmed staring look over the city evokes a vivid sense of frustration, defeat, anger, but also projects a certain unexpected positivity onto the whitish sky of London. Perhaps the title is not so sarcastic after all. And by the way, this is the cinema that had a voice.

1. From Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, Edited by Amy Raphael (Faber, 2021).

Mike Leigh’s debut behind the camera is far from being bleak. It is indeed, but it’s also hilarious, extremely witty, and admittedly quite political. On show is the aphasic awkwardness stereotypical of the postwar culture of the done thing—a ‘neurotic mantra,’ as described by Leigh¹, that shaped the British middle class for about three decades through a code of social habits accepted as proper. Communication is the idea, or rather a projection of one, around which the narrative of the film orbits, and of course its characters. A professor, a communicator by profession, who can’t articulate his interest in a woman loses himself in aimless lucubrations on the communicative value of textile design. A hippie loner working as a duplicator for an indie magazine dreams of making a living with his music. A woman escapes her disastrous social efforts seeking a connection with the spirits instead. Another attractive woman, lone sherry drinker, would like to be a writer. Her invalid sister is ironically the only one in the bunch inhibited by her physical condition as opposed to self-conscious restraints or, again, the received notion of how she should behave. Meaningfully, the film opens on Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2—a classical tune poorly played on an old piano. But these characters are particularly representative of their time, not just for the social spectrum they portray. While the adults chronically fail to find themselves at ease and go about either sporting their clumsiness or criticising any unconventional behaviour, there’s a rather greasy youngster who sings of drugs and freedom, and whose shy ambitions are already mining a structure that’s become obsolete and, as we well know today, will bring his generation far.

1. From the introduction to the 40th anniversary edition of Abigail’s Party (Penguin, 2017).

A pack of muscular horses are the only discernible thing in the freezing blizzard and the blinding white when something similar to a heavy breath surfaces from the hiss of the wind. But is that what we’ve really heard—a beastly grunt? Cut to the days of no nights of a nordic summer, the breathtaking views on the deserted nowhere, the day to day life in a remote barn and its little enchanted gestures like serving coffee from a thermos on the bonnet of a truck. The question remains suspended as the mysterious sound continues to echo, looming like a faint and menacing presence.
A folk horror, a dark fairy tale, an arthouse drama. Like its pivotal character, Lamb’s strange nature eludes any obvious definition. As an unimaginably excruciating grief is given an almost allegorical shape, an even more profound existential reflection unfolds in the background. But if on the one hand Lamb is elevated by its ambitious complexity, on the other it gives up digging deep enough, leaving all of its valuable points in a tangle of brilliant but largely unexplored intuitions.

Liborio opens on a scene of arresting beauty. A man trudges through an unforgiving storm in the tropical forest, dragging a bleating animal we never get to see. I immediately fear that I might not grasp all of what I am about to see for lack of knowledge about the context, spiritual in particular. But as the film progresses, effectively omitting some helpful factual and historical insights, I realise that I don’t need them. Nino Martínez Sosa takes us as close to Liborio as we would have been if we had met him—close enough to the mystery, not the man. Whether he was a prophet, a hero or a charlatan, Liborio the film is not much about the charismatic title character as it is about the people who believed in him—and the legacy of that belief. While recounting a fascinating and largely unknown real story, Sosa doesn’t encourage to understand or judge, but rather suspend our cynic rational urges and accept the myth for how it’s been passed on, looking for questions somewhere else—maybe within our own culture.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi composes a symphony in three movements, each one daring into the most brutal, caustic, but also romantic, nuances of love. Fuelled by spectacular coincidences, a recurring trait in Hamaguchi’s oeuvre, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a story of ‘what if’s’—the uneasiness to live with one’s own past and the impossible longing for having done things differently, perhaps. Meaningfully, every episode seems to find its centre of gravity around the opposite states of a physical mean of communication—a taxi reversing direction, a door kept open or closed, two adjoining escalators, one going up, one going down. But Hamaguchi’s triptych also questions, and somehow teasingly, around the theme of being and identity—what are we if not the idea of who we are?
Apart from the title, even more disheartening in the embellished international translations, this is a surprisingly layered piece of work which reveals its complexity and the uncommon bravura of its author one step at a time—and in this sense too, there’s no coming back.

Through moments of swine irony, mutual tenderness, and sublime nudes compositions, Taste tells of the human need of exploring his inner nature versus the unbalanced reality of existence. Put aside by a world that has treated them as disposable accessories, Lê’s ensemble of characters take a hiatus from society and retreat in a mazed, seemingly industrial abandoned building to rediscover life through sheer sensorial experiences.
While days are paced by simple acts whose acknowledgement alone suddenly makes them unique and real, as opposed to what has hardly become an idea—an unlikely career, family members lost or far, and a balloon that will never be seen in the air—something reminds us that our nature is constantly attracted by what destabilises it.
Its blue and bronze seductive aesthetics—literally, from the very first scene where a coach silently arranges pieces on a miniature football pitch under the watchful eye of a group of bare-chested players—might have tricked me into thinking that Taste is more than what it actually has to say. No matter. I still found its near cubistic narrative fascinating, and young Lê Bảo’s talent one to follow.

Tommy is British Seventies enough to have captivated me for a while. Halfway through though—more or less as Tina Turner’s therapy preposterously materialises into a rather naff Tin Man prop lubricated with acid and the camera starts pulsing, again, to Ken Russell’s habit—I started to wonder if I was really liking it. Blurring creative genius with random kitsch to an arguable degree of success, Russell’s nuts and garish vision for The Who’s rock opera is quite a strange beast, at least for me. While its religious allusions might be a little on the nose, the parallel between the message of the film and the commercial attitude of its production does provide an unexpected and intriguing sense of irony. As in Roger Ebert’s words, ‘How the makers of the film feel about this commercialization can be gauged by the prominence with which the end titles inform us that the soundtrack album is available on Polydor Records. To make money on a rock opera attacking those who would make money on a rock opera: that was the brave moral stand taken by Tommy.’
Somehow attractive for being so undefinable, for its music—and for Oliver Reed’s utter beauty even as a sweaty nasty fella—it’s certainly one to watch, but not necessarily to love.

The main irony of Ken Russell’s film of The Devils is how its ridiculous and unresolved trouble with censorship mirrors the atmosphere of the times it portrays, sadly proving that in four hundred years not much has changed. If Russell clearly intended to suggest that a certain human attitude is timeless, he probably couldn’t foresee he would have become a victim of that same ignorance. It is far beyond belief that any form of sanitisation should still exist and be applied to art. Man has rarely been as prudish and obtuse in history as he is today. Too bad for us, bound to watch near samizdat copies while dodgy butchered versions are still the only ones officially available, over five decades on.
Having read Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun long before seeing the cinematic adaptation, it took me a few iterations to appreciate the latter beyond its obvious virtues such as the glorious aesthetics, the masterful operatic structure, the brilliant performances, and the metaphorically algid brutalism of its architecture.
Ken Russell’s artsy take on the historical facts that seem to have fed the creativity of many over the centuries, it’s just the surface under which lies a more profound reflection. Here is the slight difference between the book and the film. Whereas the former delves with a sociological slant into the intricate intersections within the faceted culture of the time, the latter furiously focuses almost entirely on politics. Religion provides only a lame background. Even the theme of sexual repression, however apparently central, is explored without much conviction. ‘And so you must take up your little whip and start scourging your body. This is discipline. But pain is sensuality. And in its vortex spin images of horror and lust. […] Anything found in the desert of a frustrated life can bring hope. And with hope comes love. And with love comes hate.’ says Grandier to Madeleine referring to poor deranged Sister Jeanne.
Where fear and need for answers loomed over Huxley’s account in the binary sort of way that made God responsible for what was inexplicable and good, and Satan for what was unknown and felt potentially menacing, it is human greed for power and control—of any kind—what chiefly pulls the strings in the film. ‘You have seduced the people in order to destroy them!’ roars Grandier finding the city in foolish turmoil on returning after a brief exile. They have destroyed a film in order to numb any intellectual need of the audience, should shout we today, and again.

The end music of a film is far from being an ornament—here is a notion that Gomorra made me reflect upon the first time I saw it and one that never ceased to fascinate me.
On a beach immobilised by the setting sun, a front-end loader carries away two lifeless bodies. The disproportion is grotesque, poetic, and metaphoric at once. As the huge vehicle slowly drags our disconcerted stare towards the horizon, an electronic sound discretely chimes in and takes us even farther. Herculaneum, the amazing track written by Massive Attack for Matteo Garrone, springs from the waves gently breaking in the dimming light of the day. Like the sea inexorably deletes any sign on the shore restoring  its natural immutability, so its crescendo erodes unspeakable memories somehow echoing the hopeless outburst of Rosaria Costa at the funeral of her husband, killed during the Via D’Amelio bombing—‘but they don’t change, they don’t want to change, they never will.’
Furthermore, as the diegetic shifts progressively to the non-diegetic, Gomorra’s end music doesn’t shout at us that the show is over but rather respects our need to stay with the film a little longer. On the one hand, it feeds the obscure anxiety that the images have left us with, on the other it gives us time to elaborate the bewilderment into astonishment, then disheartenment, perhaps even indignation. Its pulsing beat follows our emotional states creating an exhilarating sense of resonance.

For the sake of recording a couple of notes on the 2021 version, the new edit feels actually better than the original. The film is essentially the same, but the new shots are brilliant and of those omitted are not particularly missed. What really struck me as an unnecessary addition are the many explanatory cards. I found them pedantic and distracting, but more than anything they made me feel patronised—and for no reason. In whatever incarnation Gomorra will always be a miracle act of cinema, but art is not a passive experience and this unexpected redux seems disappointingly to doubt it.