The Wicked Lady (1945, Leslie Arliss) is a devilishly juicy melodrama starring Margaret Lockwood as the ultimate femme fatale: a thrill-seeking, back-stabbing psychopath cursed by her unquenchable desire for desire. She performs many selfish, evil deeds and yet, to the movie's credit, her wickedness isn't one-dimensional. Her desire is so genuine, so raw and all-consuming, that she becomes pitiable, unable or unwilling to suppress her impish fancies, enslaved by her desire and the facility her physical beauty affords. Lockwood's nuanced performance convinces us of the vivid lust for life that flows through her veins, poisoning those around her and suggesting with each new infatuation that her desire is very human, merely errant, undisciplined; that the potential for love is there but thwarted; that she, too, is a victim of her uncontrollable nature. The movie suffers only from a tendency for expository dialogue, but it's competently directed and features a solid supporting cast that includes James Mason as a rogue who proves no match for Lockwood. Naughty fun.
****************
They Live by Night (1948, Nicholas Ray) is as gorgeous as it is tender, a Depression Era love story centered around a young man never given a fair chance in life, chance and circumstance branding him a pariah. You see this in the light alone, in the golden, almost heavenly luminescence attempting to illuminate faces shrouded in darkness. Ray's feelings for his lonely souls yearning for the light are so clear in these images, just as the gritty reality of the impoverished milieu can be sensed behind the studio backdrops. The sets convince us not of their own reality, but of the grim reality they represent, while the light interprets the moral ambiguities of the people struggling to live in that darkness. A remarkable directorial debut.
****************
Moonlight (2016, Barry Jenkins) opens with a complex, virtuosic shot encircling two characters out on the street. This is followed by a shaky handheld image chasing a boy as he is chased by other boys. The film doesn't return to either of these techniques, but includes many other devices, from stylized slow motion to long tracking shots that follow characters walking and even some conventional, invisible filmmaking. Clearly, it's the work of a man who has studied cinema, and the changes in technique are, like parts of the drama itself, open to interpretation. As I see it, the manner of trying out so many diverse cinematic devices mirrors the coming-of-age story itself: the stretched out self-discovery of Little/Chiron/Black through three pivotal sequences in his life matches, or at least justifies the kitchen sink of techniques. The camera, in other words, says “Who am I?” beside the protagonist. In any event, the characters and the milieu – an impoverished section of Miami with boarded up homes and drug-addicted single parents – are realized with convincing period detail, and the casting of actors who so resemble one another across the decades is extraordinary. That, perhaps, has been done before, but the central story of a vulnerable young black man coming to grips with his sexuality and sense of difference in a hostile environment is both new to the mainstream cinema and transparently personal, arising from lived experience. That it's rendered with such sensitivity and formal boldness makes it as admirable as it is genuinely moving.
Topic: What was the last movie you watched? (Read 1539523 times)
