“Just because you can’t prove it, doesn’t mean it’s not true”

Conversations about David Fincher always seem to follow the same pattern: “Fight Club’s good, isn’t it? Yeah, but Se7en’s probably better. You’re probably right, there, mate. What did you think of Alien³, by the way? I think it’s underrated, but it’s not exactly The Social Network, is it?”

And that’s it. There may be the occasional mention of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button or Panic Room, but no one ever mentions The Game or Zodiac. While the first of these is certainly forgettable alongside many of Fincher’s other, more significant, films, the latter has been all but forgotten among the director’s extensive back-catalogue, which is strange considering that Zodiac is almost certainly his greatest achievement to date.

Based on the real-life serial killings in San Francisco of the late 60’s and 70’s, Zodiac looks at the various attempts to solve the case by the police, the press, and a cartoonist who likes puzzles. As the years go by and the case remains unsolved, those involved in the investigation quietly, and obsessively, continue their search for the Zodiac killer.

In comparison to Fincher’s other films, Zodiac is certainly an anomaly – it’s not extravagant in the way a film like Fight Club was, and does more with the art of cinema than any film Fincher has ever made. Like Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt have crafted a story in which the central narrative drive, in the case of L’Avventura this is the mystery of the woman’s disappearance, and in Zodiac it’s the mystery of the serial killer’s identity, disappears into the background. In Zodiac, the significance of solving the case is pushed to the back while Fincher examines how the case affects the lives of those embroiled in it.

This kind of storytelling is an incredibly rare thing, and to see David Fincher make a film like this, so elegant and subtle, and such a departure from his usual bombastic approach to filmmaking, only solidifies his status as one of the great American filmmakers working today.

The thing is, Zodiac will never be remembered as fondly as, say, Fight Club or Se7en, because it doesn’t have the same swagger or pomposity that won David Fincher legions of adoring fan(boy)s in the first place, which is a crying shame. What Zodiac does have, however, is one of the great stories of our time, as well as one of the most interesting uses of narrative form since L’Avventura. It’s also Fincher’s best film to date.

The phrase “criminally underrated” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

“I can’t imagine a worse thing than getting old”

Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries is (somewhat correctly) noted as being one of his most optimistic films, yet, as with much of the great Swedish director’s body of work, its themes are not entirely clear-cut. Wild Strawberries is, in this regard, one of Bergman’s more simplistic films, but it’s also one of the greatest works of his career.

The film follows Isak, a stubborn 78 year old doctor, as he travels across country to be given an honorary doctorate to mark his fifty year contribution to medicine. Along the way, he is confronted by the mistakes he made with his family and strives to change his ways.  

Wild Strawberries is a film set up much like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It follows the reaffirmation of a man who is respected but not loved. But the difference is that Bergman never explicitly shows Isak’s mistakes and flaws like Dickens does Ebenezer Scrooge. His parental failures are mentioned in passing, but only the good sides of his personality are placed on the screen, and this biased depiction of the character allows us to sympathise more with his plight.

It is this simple fact that makes Wild Strawberries a very different film to, say, The Seventh Seal, Bergman’s other film from 1957. Wild Strawberries opens with a man shrouded in bitterness, loneliness and resignation, and documents his reaffirmation of life; The Seventh Seal, on the other hand, opens with disillusioned yet shrewd man who believes he can save his own life by beating Death in a game of chess, which he cannot do. 

This is not to say that Wild Strawberries is a better film - both are extraordinary - but it is a film that shows Bergman in unusually optimistic spirits, and one that cements his status as one of cinema’s truest artists. 

Simultaneously depressing and uplifting, Wild Strawberries is not just an existential road movie, but the existential road movie, and justifiably one of Bergman’s most celebrated cinematic achievements. 

“You wanna get out of here? I can take you somewhere”

It starts with a wait on a cold subway platform in New York. A well dressed, attractive man boards a train. He makes and sustains eye contact with an attractive young woman – the wedding ring on her finger making no difference to his approach. As she gets up to leave, he leaves, and he chases her through a crowded station as the music swells. This is Brandon, and he’s a sex addict.

And this is Shame, Steve McQueen’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut, Hunger. Much like his debut, Shame is an intensive character study of a man on the edge, this time setting the story in New York City rather than a prison in Northern Ireland, and studying a well adjusted sex addict instead of a hunger striking political activist.

McQueen paints Brandon as a seemingly well-rounded citizen: he has a great job, an apartment, and looks to be a relatively nice guy, yet in private he’s a cold, mechanical man with one thing on his mind; sex. His computer at work is “filthy”, as is his home computer, he has a stash of dirty magazines strewn around his apartment, and he masturbates at work. But, interestingly, while doing so he seems distant, ghosting through his various encounters as if they’ve become second nature to him.

It’s this ghosting that McQueen seems to focus on in his direction, placing Brandon in an eerily evocative environment. The impersonal nature of New York and the colourless walls of his apartment all reflect his passive lifestyle. By carefully choosing everything from the colour of his clothes to the colour of the walls, McQueen is able to build upon the languid and hypnotic quality he sets up so diligently in the film’s beautiful style - lingering camerawork, ironically romantic music and a Haneke style disconnect from the character.

Haneke’s The Piano Teacher seems an obvious reference point for Shame, as it deals with sexuality in a similarly detached way. Isabelle Huppert’s Erika explores the deviant sides of her sexuality in a way reminiscent of Michael Fassbender’s Brandon. The only difference is that The Piano Teacher looks at sex as something to be feared; Erika’s complex, abusive relationship with her mother fuels her repression and subsequent anarchic sexual exploration, while Brandon functions in a world where sex is the norm. This is where the film’s problem lies: A film about a sex addict immersed in a world of sex simply cannot deliver a cathartic resolution; only an intense yet unfulfilled observation, and this is true of Shame.

As The Piano Teacher is about an insatiable desire for sex in a sexless environment, it leaves the audience with some kind of catharsis, whereas Shame simply does not. Brandon’s routine is not hindered by the actions of those around him, particularly his sister, whose possibly abusive childhood has left her emotionally unstable and dependant on others, for a second, and even when he shows signs of change, it never arrives.

It’s isn’t until the final scene that we see that his routine isn’t even a routine at all, but rather a cycle, and his addiction is so entrenched within his personality that not even his sister’s desperate cries for help register in his hypersexualised mind. He simply continues as he did before; discreetly and mechanically, and we are left with the realisation that, in spite of everything, nothing has changed at all. 

“I want you to help me catch a killer of women”

Cold and calculated; two words that could be used to label American director David Fincher, the man who made two of the great films of the past ten years, in Zodiac and The Social Network, and the man who made Fight Club, one of the best films of all time. His latest project, an adaptation of Steig Larsson’s best-selling novel The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, however, marks his first mis-step since 2008 – albeit a very slight one.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo follows Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced journalist, as he investigates the murder of a Swedish businessman’s grand-niece with Lisbeth Salander, a prodigious computer hacker and investigator whose traumatic childhood has made her hostile to society. As the two investigate the murder, they stumble upon something far more sinister than they could have imagined.

If there’s a flaw in the film it’s in the character of Lisbeth Salander, a wildly exaggerated caricature of an outsider. Her black clothes, dramatic hairstyles, fuck you attitude and love for tattoos all make for a very stereotypical perception of what disillusioned youth looks like, and embodies everything that the middle aged middle class fear about young people. This is something that was unavoidable due to the heavy-handed nature of the character in Larsson’s novel, and is no reflection on Rooney Mara’s depiction of the character – she’s only doing what’s required and she does so very well – but Fincher seems to exaggerate it further, making Lisbeth wear a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “fuck you you fucking fuck”, for example. It’s unusually heavy-handed for Fincher, and something that occurs sporadically throughout the film. The rape scenes, for example, are unnecessary and gratuitous, and serve no other purpose than to hammer home what we already know - Lisbeth hates society as much as society hates her.

Still, it’s not all bad, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is far better than its flaws suggest. The mystery at its centre is always fascinating, and Fincher’s meticulous visual style works wonderfully when transposed to snowbound Sweden. Of course, there are certainly going to be comparisons to the Swedish original as it’s so fresh in the mind, and, admittedly, much of the film feels familiar, but Fincher’s film feels more streamlined that Niels Arden Oplev’s original, and is certainly a far more rewarding experience.

It stands as testament to Fincher that even when he’s off his game he can make something so great, and, even in spite of its many flaws, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is an elegant, ferocious film that only enhances David Fincher’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s best working directors.

“Nothing is what it seems”

For a film often touted as one of the best British movies of all time, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is, at least on paper, a relatively surprising choice – just look at the towering achievement of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, or the grandeur and scale of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia; a huge number of films pale in comparison to two of the best films ever made.So what is it about Roeg’s film that on the same level as the best of British cinema?

Firstly, and quite simply, there aren’t many films that can claim to be as meticulously crafted as Don’t Look Now, and, in terms of technical skill, Roeg’s film is something of a masterclass. Squeezing tension from even the most mundane situations, such as the eerily prescient toy soldier Christine is playing with before her tragic death (“fall in”), Roeg manages to keep a deeply unsettling atmosphere running throughout the film from the opening sequence to the final credits. And what an opening it is, too. Roeg kicks the story off in dramatic style (an opening that Lars Von Trier surely drew influence from for Antichrist) with the tragic death of a little girl in a vivid red plastic coat.

This coat will be seen sporadically later on as John, the young girl’s father, is plagued by visions of his late daughter while working in overcast Venice. Are his wife’s obsessive attempts to speak to their daughter through a psychic eating away at his sanity? Or does he have psychic abilities himself? Either way, he’s not sure what’s going on in Venice, and he wants to know – and this inquisitive self-doubt is imbued in the audience; we want to know what’s going on as much as John does. But even the most invested of audiences would struggle to predict the grizzly outcome of this beautifully made story.

Don’t Look Now is a ghost story where even the ghosts aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem, as well as a film driven towards its devastating conclusion by a combination of smoke, mirrors, and a vivid red plastic coat. It truly is one of the greats.