rawlinson
Posts: 40206
Joined: 13/6/2008
From: Timbuktu. Chinese or Fictional.
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65. Le Cercle Rouge
(1970; Jean-Pierre Melville)
Highest Vote: Rhubarb, Toast
Melville's film mixes classic film noir with the honour of Japanese samurai movies, but it doesn't celebrate its gangsters in the way other directors do. It shows admiration for the characters while still acknowledging the futility of their life. In fact the whole film is fatalistic. the characters are manouvered by destiny, a theme set out by Melville right from the opening quotation "Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: 'When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever the diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle.."
Of course this could easily have become nothing more than some style over substance nonsense, but unlike many lesser directors, you never feel that Melville's films are a pose. While there is obviously something incredibly cool and iconic about his films, they never feel like Melville is indulging his style or obsessions over the substance of his work. His philosophy feels genuine and it adds a deeper level to the film than you might expect. He takes the honour codes of the genre and shows that the criminals have the same sense of morality as the police and that both are heading towards a conclusion beyond their control.
There's the sense that the characters are little more than chess pieces and they're doomed to repeat the same moves over and over. The entire film is a meditation on destiny and a sense of inevitabilty hangs over the characters throughout the film. Everything is business to them, fate is driving them and when you know you have a job to do what's the point in delaying it? There's very little in the way of dialogue and what there is avoids the hard-boiled cliches you may expect. Much of this goes to achieve a sense of tension, especially in the film's silent robbery sequence. It also goes towards adding to the relentless pace and the inevitable march towards a conclusion.
It's hard to escape that feeling of iconic cool when you watch a Melville gangster film and I feel that for many people that's all they've become, a name that gets dropped by Tarantino as an example of gangster cool. But they're so much more than that, there's a depth and a profundity about Melville's best work to equal any of the great directors and he deserves to have that acknowledged.
- Rawlinson
65. Solaris
(1972; Andrei Tarkovsky)
Highest Vote: Fritzl
On a space station in orbit around a planet named Solaris, the crew and the mission have fallen into a crisis. A psychologist named Kelvin is sent to explore the problem, discovering that the crew have been suffering from vivid hallucinations of figures from their past. Solaris is a planet covered with a vast, sentient, ocean and Kelvin soon finds himself plagued by hallucinations as well as he is haunted by the ghost of his wife.
Solaris is often compared to 2001 and while it's true that they're both slow-moving and meditative films, 2001 is more concerned with technology while Solaris mixes that science with philosophy and humanity as it exploresthe nature of love and what it actually means to be human. The replica of Kelvin's wife is no simple sci-fi double. She's self aware, she knows she's not real, she knows the person she's based on has died, she knows she's not really meant to exist. To Kelvin she looks exactly like the woman he loved, only she's alien to him because she doesn't understand human behaviour. Like many Tarkovsky films, Solaris is interested in what defines its characters. Also, like in other Tarkovsky films (The Mirror especially) Solaris is concerned with the past and how it always has some element of control over our actions and reactions.
In many ways Solaris is an old-fashioned ghost story. The space station stands in for the haunted house and elements of the film, including the initial appearances of the ghost like figures created by Solaris are similar to those we find in more artistic ghost stories. In fact for much of the film I found myself remembering stories like The Beckoning Fair One, The Haunting Of Hill House or The Turn Of The Screw, where much of the haunting takes place because of the psychology of the characters.
Many people find Solaris to be a cold film, and I really can't understand why. Maybe it's because it's Russian that we go into the film expecting a level of detachment, then we look for that coldness and place such emphasis on it that it overwhelms the film. For me, Tarkovsky's films aren't cold. It's true that he seems slightly detached from his subject, but only in a way that allows the viewer to see more of the film. I always found Solaris, like most Tarkovsky films, to be a beautiful, emotional experience. A great work by a deeply poetic director.
- Rawlinson
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ORIGINAL: matty_b
I would plough my way through MonsterCat 
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