What I Watched in Lockdown
For what now feels like the entirety of 2020, life has felt halted and immobilised. While lockdown is transitory, it has been, for me, an opportunity to re-engage with cinema. Little else has afforded me the same comfort and satisfaction as the process of working through watchlists of films. Deliberately, I prioritised a mixture of must-sees I had been neglecting, as well as some more obscure features, all of which possess cultural reverence. Below is a carefully selected list featuring just some of the excellent films I discovered over the previous few months; films which offered me the escapism I sought and, for some, what I would describe as new favourites.
Water Lilies (2007)
In 2019, Céline Sciamma’s award-winning Portrait of a Lady on Fire enamoured audiences with its honest and ethereal portrayal of sapphic desire, memory, and immortalisation. Before Sciamma’s extraordinary feat of period filmmaking, her films leaned towards more quotidian experiences, especially within the coming-of-age genre. In Water Lilies, the fifteen-year-old girls who commune at their local swimming pool begin to come to terms with their sexuality. Sciamma is masterful at thematically reconciling sexual experiences and growing up, and Water Lilies, in its abundance of feeling and visual splendour, is a perfect point of entry to immerse oneself into the genius of her craft.
The Farewell (2018)
Lulu Wang’s The Farewell is a story of carefully orchestrated ignorance. The film follows a family who, upon the discovery of their matriarch’s terminal illness, decide to shield her from this knowledge to ensure her final months are unsuspecting and blissful. To complicate things further, in order to surreptitiously bring the family together and to enable some sort of covert farewell through time spent together, they decide to stage a wedding for one of the grandchildren. Although the narrative is constructed upon an almost farcical premise, Wang creates space between the comedy beats to implicate the philosophical weight of the family’s concealment. The ethics and emotional consequences of this ruse are navigated specifically through the central, earnest performance of granddaughter Billi (Awkwafina) and the adversity she faces in sustaining the lie. While she opposes the family’s decision, Billi’s emotions become obscured by the silliness of planning a fake wedding, accompanied by moments of nostalgia. Seemingly subconsciously, the narrative’s most compelling aspect is Billi’s assimilation into the chaos, as she comes to overlook the farcicality of the situation, instead choosing to enjoy what little time she has left with her grandmother.
Wang reconciles the national subjectivities of an American-Chinese family and the globality of a large and dispersed web of relatives through their necessary, and oftentimes confrontational unity in death. Through envisioning this complex sense of cultural displacement, felt intensely by Billi who rarely visits her ancestral home and birthplace, Wang deftly represents a multifaceted, culturally specific experience of identity and loss. She explores this universal experience with nuance, sensitivity, and lightness - never at the cost of personal specificity.
Pain and Glory (2019)
Pedro Almodóvar is a gift to cinema, and his latest feature Pain and Glory lives up to everything we have come to recognise and expect from his filmography: stylised examinations of sexuality, motherhood, memory, and loss, all with spellbinding attention to detail. Fronted by the inimitable Antonio Banderas, the narrative follows the physical decline of film director Salvador Mallo, interpolated with reflections on his rural childhood and the eternality of his first love.
Almodóvar manages to wrap up so many elements of the human experience into his films, and in Pain and Glory, the honesty and sincerity of his filmmaking is astounding. The anxieties of artistic creativity and the endurance of ‘being’ are not abstracted themes; they exist in every object, every line of dialogue, every transition. They are the film’s very fabric.
Girlfriends (1978)
The widely under-seen Girlfriends, written by Vicki Polon and directed by Claudia Weill, is a clear precursor to mainstream films such as Frances, Ha, Mistress America, and The Meyerowitz Stories, to name a few. The titular girlfriends refers to two, twenty-something-year-old, New York inhabiting best friends, one of whom gets married whilst the other sustains a rather isolated lifestyle as a struggling photographer.
Girlfriends moves with a cadence that is both endearing and authentic; it is a film that is completely and tenderly self-aware. Its interlinking politics of gender, religion, and sex are prevalent yet softened in order to befit the pacing and lightness of tone. The natural wit, combined with the warmth and generosity of its character-building, is both glorious and life-affirming. Girlfriends is absolutely a must-see.
Perfect Blue (1997)
Another widely unseen film is Satoshi Kan’s Perfect Blue. An urgent and provocative fusion of feminised animation and noir thriller, Perfect Blue teems with prophetic commentary regarding the autonomy and instability of fame. Based on Yoshikazu Takeuchi’s novel Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis, we follow Mimi Kirigoe and her departure from a Japanese idol group in the hope of pursuing a career as an actress, to the grave disapproval of her most devoted fans. In dramatic turns, Mimi’s descent from the manufactured pop-industry into the novelty of acting is underscored by nefarious threats of violence that begin to engulf her sanity.
Satoshi Kan interposes an unstable fantasy with gritty, unremitting paranoia, yielding a sense of fragility which has clear influence on Darren Aronovsky’s Black Swan. Perfect Blue is a dizzying suspension of reality, surrealism to perfection, and the result is utterly arresting.