Where once our movie choices were limited by physical availability, now we have apparently limitless uncurated digital content; the mind reels at its vastness. So sometimes we need a “gateway” film for directors, an entry point which might not necessarily be that film-maker’s most famous work – being, as it may be, unhelpfully commercial or atypical. For Nagisa Oshima, you might not want to start with the sexually explicit In the Realm of the Senses or the David Bowie vehicle Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence: it could be more fruitful to begin with his more indirectly disturbing Max Mon Amour. For Howard Hawks … where to begin? Red River is the classic western but perhaps the gorgeous comedy His Girl Friday will better smooth the path to the rest of his work. And yet often the most famous is the most direct path: for Satyajit Ray, Pather Panchali is the most seductive way in. We need the keynote films to bring in all the rest. Peter Bradshaw
Mike Leigh
Nuts in May, 1976
The most reliably doleful voice in British cinema rings loud and clear through the misadventures of Keith and Candice Marie, innocents on a Dorset camping holiday. The comedy is flawlessly sharp, the easy laughs of drenched cagoules whittled to a point by the eye for detail. If the couple’s organic piety feels ahead of its time, a lot of the laughs echoed into the future. It was only a short step from Keith’s eventual meltdown to Alan Partridge assaulting a BBC exec with a wheel of blue cheese. But something darker ticks away too, Leigh’s world filled with the thwarted and put-upon. And here, damp campsites become a battleground of tribal identities, the kind of civil war we have all been living in lately. The best of Mike Leigh always peers into places no one else has thought to look. In Nuts in May, that place is England, the small patch of scenery where none of us can stand one other. Danny Leigh
Agnès Varda
Vagabond, 1985
Varda’s classic Vagabond, or Sans Toit Ni Loi (No Shelter No Law), is a film with the authentic spirit of the French New Wave: complex, questioning, demanding, passionate. Sandrine Bonnaire plays Mona, a young homeless woman whom we see dead in a freezing ditch in the film’s opening and whose life is opened up through a series of flashback episodes and interviews with the people who encountered her on the road. It is a testimony narrative that bears comparison to Welles’s Citizen Kane. Mona rejects her life as a wage-slave secretary and takes off with her tent on her back, sleeping in fields or on roadsides, getting cash-in-hand jobs where she can – and facing brutal misogyny and assault. She is mutinous, uncaring, inscrutable. As she says: “Je m’en fous – je bouge” (“I don’t care – I just move on”). Wherever she goes, Mona spreads unease. Some people are sympathetic; some even admire and envy her freedom and defiance. Some are resentful of her lack of gratitude when they help her. Mona is a parodic version of the workings of divine grace; a mysterious force in the lives of those she crosses. PB
Spike Lee
Do the Right Thing, 1989
Spike Lee’s classic is not so much prophetic as enduringly, tactlessly relevant – beginning with a warning about climate change and ending with a Black man killed in a police chokehold. It is an unbearably hot day in the Bed-Stuy area of Brooklyn, New York – then in the first stages of gentrification – and racial tension is rising on the streets. “If this hot weather continues, it’s going to melt the polar ice caps and the whole wide world,” says someone outside Sal’s Famous Pizzeria,…
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