When eleven-year-old Zachary Cowan, armed with a stick – I’m sorry, carrying a stick (armed is a bit of a strong word, don’t you think?) – strikes his classmate Ethan Longstreet’s face one day in Brooklyn Bridge Park, the boys’ parents meet up to discuss the situation responsibly, as adults do. Naturally, Zachary’s parents, Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan  (Christoph Waltz) have made the trip, albeit reluctantly, to the Longstreets’ Brooklyn residence – based on the logic that the victim, or in this case the victim’s parents, shouldn’t go out of their way. On the contrary, genial hosts, Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael Longstreet (John C. Reilly) go all out for the Cowans, putting on a formidable show of middle class politeness, from the tulips (flown in from Holland, via Henry Street) and art books out to impress on the coffee table, to umpteen offerings of espresso, Cobbler and, as the conversation worsens, scotch. With drink and dessert growing heavier on the stomach, tempers – and gastric fluids – rise and what starts out as a mutually coerced picture of collective parental concern transgresses into a primitive brawl replete with far-reaching vomit and home truths, flying purses and anxieties.

On first glance, the Longstreet living room is pleasant and charming. But it appears here as stifling and cluttered, a room that festers in its own turmoil. Even the way the room is shot, from the many angles that become familiar living at home, becomes frustrating. Outside, there is the distant, grey New York City, a far off reminder that there is life beyond the windows, though that too is similarly grim. Nevertheless, the static theatricality of the Longstreet apartment nods to the play upon which the film is based. It is also the perfect stage for this wry comedy of errors. Throughout Carnage, we never leave the Longstreet apartment, only ever straying so far as the hallway in a series of attempted departures with the Cowans. But the living room is a magnetic minefield that propels them and us back each time; a raring jungle filled with books on Africa and the Expressionist art of Kokoschka and Bacon – all writer, Penelope’s taste – and primed for feral, carnal expression. Indeed, the Longstreets’ respectable, urbane living room comes to resemble a 21^st Century war ground for the well-to-do as the Cowans and the Longstreets battle for their boys and then, for and between themselves as it becomes less about the kids and more about their marriages. The couples seem to react to the type they take the other to be, though, in the process, project onto them their own marital quandaries. The result is a social experiment far more entertaining than any reality TV show, that does not depart from reality in its cruel isolation of the couples but rather, brings them together to face their similar and dissimilar but crucially, equally tedious realities.

Like the mirror, through which the camera occasionally filters its unhappy objects of reflection – as the saying goes, a mirror never sees but only reflects – the couples find in each other a version of their own familial despair. As Tolstoy wrote, ‘every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ For the Cowans and Longstreets, meant to represent the modern married couple with kids, there is much truth in this. In pinpointing that truth, Carnage is incredibly clever; taking as its premise something at once simple and problematic, primal and current – one child hitting another with a stick – it is transmuted into something larger and yet local to us all. With the particulars of each couple’s marriage dissected before us, we grow as irritated as Nancy by Alan’s business calls; as nonchalant as Alan in response to Nancy’s crazy; as weary as Michael in going along with Penelope’s pretentions; as disheartened as Penelope by Michael’s mediocrity. Fundamentally, each of the four characters, deftly and convincingly conveyed by their actors, is inherently human and therefore readily relatable; palettes of our most extreme and commonplace selves. When we laugh and despair with the characters, it is with the parts of ourselves we share with them, that they reflect back to us. Like the mirror, they do not see. Frantic, funny and frighteningly close to real – and a stroke of genius from Roman Polanski – Carnage, in its confirmation of life’s cold flatness, is like a slice of refrigerated Cobbler followed up with a warm can of coke. Like the truth, it goes down the wrong way but it is always right.

When Lana Del Rey emerged last year with “Video Games”, looking and sounding like a 1960s singer – one critic called her ‘a self-styled gangsta Nancy Sinatra’ – it was as though out of nowhere. It must have been the illusion of her beautiful song; the melancholic church chimes, tender trickles of harp, the looming, grey-cloud strings and that spellbinding voice as deep and low as the Southern states – the voice of an upstate New Yorker, no less. Sonically, “Video Games” has a rare visual quality; at once ethereal and natural, its atmosphere suggests an American pastoral scene, as gorgeously depressing as a still from Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven: a poised prairie daydream, rain coming down on a mansard roof, blankets of corn fields tussled by the wind. Lyrically, the song is more like a poem: ‘swinging in the backyard, pull up in your fast car, whistling my name’, ‘kissing in the blue dark, playing pool and wild darts, video games’, ‘holds me in his big arms, drunk and I am seeing stars, this is all I think of, playing video games’. There’s a weight to these words, sung charmingly deadpan and dreary. While Del Rey’s thin cry on ‘it’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you’, for example, rings out with a dull energy, the simplicity with which these high emotions are delivered makes them sound like they come from both a very real and heavenly place. Show me an unmoved listener.

“Video Games” was a smart second start for Lana Del Rey, who did not appear out of nowhere or from the 1960s but rather, as a readymade retro reinvention, most probably not ‘self-styled’; instead, a strategic spin-off of her former artistic failures. Del Rey has previously recorded as Lizzy Grant, her birth name, with the curious moniker of Sparkle Jump Rope Queen and as frontwoman of a band, Lizzy Grant and the Phenomena. In her fleeting reinventions, Del Rey’s a little like a hippy Holly Golightly, changing her name to change her luck. As Paul Varjak struggles with Holly in the film, we too struggle with Del Rey as it’s difficult to glean a sense of who she is from her debut, Born To Die. The most revealing song on the album is “Radio”, where Del Rey humblebrags, ‘No one even knows what life was like,/ Now I’m in LA and it’s paradise’ – as though anywhere but the glamour of LA means poverty. It’s a comeback kid song, but what has she comeback from exactly? ‘Baby love me ’cause I’m playing on the radio (How do you like me now?)’, she boasts. Quite frankly, because Del Rey doesn’t sing about the source of her pain, her moaning rings a little it’s-a-hard-knock-life and whiney. Above all, fame appears to be her key ambition, as though it doesn’t matter what the music sounds like so long as it makes the radio; this is all she needs to say ‘How do you like me now?’ to her haters. ‘American dream came true somehow’, she sings and means these words most; Del Rey is an incorrigible patriot. But it’s “National Anthem” that poses a real experiment in patriotism with a call for ‘red, white, blues in the sky’. The song starts off accordingly, with a string symphony and the crackle of Fourth of July fireworks but then takes a wonderful turn for the edgier, with a syncopated, nonsensical rap. ‘I’m your national anthem, boy put your hands up, give me a standing ovati-on’, she half-sings, half-raps. Again, the song doesn’t seem to reveal much, except ‘I need somebody to hold me’. Though it does little to establish an identity for the ever-enigmatic Lana Del Rey, what Born To Die lacks in depth it makes up for in pretty, moody pop and playful melodies.

“Diet Mountain Dew”, the album’s best near up-tempo song, is a fine example of such playful pop. Like its singer, “Diet” is a major revamp of an earlier version. In its original format, the song is slower, flatter, jazzier and not half as R&B as this new, audibly generated album version. Kitted out with a baseline and a faux hip hop style undercurrent, the new “Diet” – slicker, faster and marginally better – sounds as though attempting modern and therefore comes off a little out of step. In many ways, the song, meant to conjure a ‘New York heaven’, resembles the city; an audibly busy and crowded conurbation, its neighbourhoods of sound each playing to their own rhythm, the different beats of the city represented by the varied tempo of the song, the repetition of ‘you’re no good for me, baby’ as frequent as the sighting of another yellow taxi. “Diet” is a mini melting pot; the opening ‘hey, hey, hey’, the throbbing drum, the guitar riff with the Western twinge, the tinkling jazz bar piano and the sluice of baseline that cuts in towards the end. My one quibble with “Diet” is the hip hop sample (the aforementioned ‘hey, hey, hey’) which sounds rather messy and must have been thrown in for no other purpose than to support the singer’s claim of growing up on hip hop in “Blue Jeans”. OK, Lana, we believe you. In the song’s slower seconds, where it’s just a tinkling piano and Del Rey, a little quivery on the high notes and in her vocal element downtown (as she sings elsewhere, ‘take that body downtown’) the song is spectacular. In these more intimate moments, you can almost hear the sparkle and fade of the city lights, as though looking down on them atop the Empire State Building. It’s here that something magical – something nearer to the magic of “Video Games”, at least – happens, proving that it doesn’t have to be sadcore to be sensational. Albeit a tad too digitally primed and prodded, “Diet” is the closest thing to blithe on Born To Die, where it sits near halfway breaking up its self-indulgent sadness. The pulpy pop of “Diet” is like the little busy city of Manhattan, a wonderfully chaotic island unto itself.

Like her hometown New York and “Diet Mountain Dew”, Lana Del Rey is a bit of an island herself. As she sings on “Radio”, ‘now my life is sweet like cinammon, like a fucking dream I’m living in’ – and, in many ways, Del Rey lives the dream. In her alt-pop retro-wonderland dream, the colours of her American dream turned “Dark Paradise” are deep red, white and Levi denim blue. From this remote haven, she stands much like the Statue of Liberty, attracting a lot of attention whilst remaining always out of touch; we just cannot relate to her and it is her devout seriousness that keeps us at bay. In theory, an album’s title track is a designated indicator of its singer’s belief system. But where more ebullient, celebratory artists like Lady Gaga have “Born This Way”, Lana Del Rey has “Born To Die”, a title that, in just three short words, swiftly dismantles any hopes and dreams, prospect of future. For Del Rey, where we end is where we begin and the name of her debut, and perhaps its circulatory success and criticism, reflects that. Recording Born To Die, it seems Lana Del Rey forgot her own advice: ‘Don’t make me sad, don’t make me cry,/ Sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough,/ I don’t know why,/ Keep making me laugh,/ Let’s go get high,/ The road is long, we carry on,/ Try to have fun in the meantime’. Since death is our only certainty, as Del Rey is set on reminding us, why the need to kill us slowly with “Carmen”, a song that sounds like it’s in the process of dying itself ­– along with Del Rey’s slurred voice droning, ‘I’m dying, I’m dying’. A cough wouldn’t go amiss here.

Ironically, the last two songs on Born To Die, “Summertime Sadness” and “This Is What Makes Us Girls” are the most reckless. It’s as though Del Rey had a last-minute, pre-death revelation: oh, and before I go, let’s have some fun. Or something like it. The final songs are unadulterated girly pop – more “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”; less “Pretty Girls Make Graves”. “Summertime Sadness” is my favourite, the type of getting ready song without which no pop album is truly complete. When Del Rey sings, ‘I’m feeling e-lec-tric tonight’, I’m putting on my lipstick and by the time she’s sung ‘got my hair up real big beauty queen style’, sure enough, the ghds are on and so on. “This Is What Makes Us Girls” is a cheeky, Lolita-esque trip down memory lane where Lana Del Rey lets us in on a little secret she’s been hiding: a sense of humour, as she reminisces about ‘skippin’ school and drinkin’ on the job (with the boss)’ and ‘runnin’ from the cops, in our black bikini tops, screaming, “Get us while we’re hot, get us while we’re hot”’. This is more the kind of music I’d like to hear from Lana Del Rey. No doubt she was at her best with “Video Games”, but serious isn’t always her strong-suit and ballad-heavy Born To Die proves that. Del Rey is at her best when she lets us in, either letting her hair down as she did in “Diet Mountain Dew” and her girlier tracks, “Summertime Sadness” and “This Is What Makes Us Girls”, or when being romantic­ as in “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans” –and, above all, when she’s not depressive. There are rumours that Del Rey will re-release an album she recorded originally in 2010, this summer: the aptly-titled, Lana Del Rey A.K.A. Lizzy Grant. The record could be a second lease of life for Del Rey. For her sake, I hope it is released and that it fills the void created by Born To Die. I really want to love Lana Del Rey; I just don’t want to have to try quite so hard.

Hollywood greats like Casablanca, An American in Paris and An Affair to Remember have a lot to answer for. They have misled us to believe that loving someone is letting them go, in love at first sight and that love can withstand the ultimate test of distance and time. But real life and love isn’t like in the movies. How many of us would truly see the romantic side of letting Ingrid Bergman go? Always having Paris no doubt sounds far more appealing than its dismal reality. What about love at first sight? How does that work? More like, “love” until further notice. As for long-time-no-speak romance, in real life, Cary Grant would surely have forgotten all about Deborah Kerr after she stood him up at the Empire State Building and swiftly proceeded onto the next dalliance. Do you see where we went horribly wrong? It’s this question Woody Allen addresses in his scathing 1985 comedy, The Purple Rose of Cairo, an oddball love story set in Depression-ridden, small town New Jersey between movie character, Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) and maltreated housewife and cinephile, Cecilia (Mia Farrow). Noticing it is not her first, or even her fourth, visit to the same film, Tom promptly decides to walk off the screen and into the alarmed auditorium to profess his love – at first sight, of course – for Cecilia, compelled to rescue her from her woeful fate.

The Jewel, the local movie theatre, is Cecilia’s refuge. When she’s not being pushed around by her bum husband, Monk (Danny Aiello) or being yelled at by her boss over the umpteenth broken plate at the greasy town diner, Cecilia can be found there, absorbing the latest release and guzzling popcorn. Like a character out of a Jean Rhys novel, when fed up of the real world, Cecilia resorts to the cinema to divert herself, if only for a while, with someone else’s, where, she says, ‘everything works out in the end.’ And what better time and place to set Cecilia’s lacklustre life than 1930s Depression-era New Jersey? Such a context only sharpens the contrast between the glamour of the silver screen and the humdrum existence of our unlikely heroine. New Jersey, even amid the Depression, comes off looking bleak. Of course, Allen loves to poke fun at New York’s lesser neighbouring state, issuing a fantastic line to one of the supporting characters who says, after hearing that Tom Baxter is loose in New Jersey, in a state of panic, ‘Anything can happen in New Jersey!’ In his New York Times review, Vincent Canby wrote of the film’s location as ‘a drab little New Jersey town where even the sunlight looks grey’ – which it actually does. Even the town’s amusement park, closed for the summer, resembles a less than amusing place where fun might go to die. At a remove from the life she knows all too well, the flickering monochrome of the movies is a small consolation for Cecelia – that hope, though far off, is in full view, if only for an hour or two.

And then, like in the movies, something miraculous happens and changes Cecilia’s world forever – well, for a bit. As one of the characters at the film studio says, when they learn of Tom’s groundbreaking disappearance, ‘Just because something’s never happened before doesn’t mean it can’t happen for the first time.’ A similar suspension of disbelief is required when watching Purple Rose as when watching Allen’s latest time travelling picture, Midnight in Paris. In many respects, Purple Rose is an earlier, less raucous model for Paris. The main characters in both are, to their detriment, incorrigible romantics; where Gil Pender longs for the Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Cecilia desires the cheek-to-cheek romance of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Moreover, their respective obsessions – a form of escapism from their similarly unhappy relationships and realities – manifest themselves in improbable romances; as Gil falls for Adriana in the 1920s, Cecilia falls for a character from a film or, as she puts it, ‘he’s fictional, but you can’t have everything.’ In much the same way that Gil is inevitably unable to deny the present, Cecelia cannot depart from reality. Though Tom is the perfect (imaginary) man for her and most probably for any woman, it is precisely because he is written to be. Reeling off a list of his qualities, Tom will tell you, ‘I’m honest, dependable, courageous, romantic, and a great kisser.’ But he’s also unfailingly one-dimensional and therefore as dull as he is dependable. In always sticking to the script, he’s perpetually predictable – so predictable that one of his lines is, ‘I’m sorry. It’s written into my character to do it, so I do it.’ There’s another problem: he isn’t written to function in reality, and so he doesn’t. Dining Cecilia at a flashy restaurant, Tom is disheartened to discover that they don’t accept movie money. Jumping into a car, he expects it to start without a key. Kissing Cecilia for a while longer than is PG, he’s flummoxed by the lack of ‘fade out’. Oh, and he walks around everywhere in a pith helmet. On the plus side, after a brawl with Monk, he still looks good – ‘one of the advantages of being imaginary’, he tells Cecilia who needn’t brush him off. But Tom’s funniest lines are, strangely, delivered in a brothel. So innocent, he doesn’t know what a prostitute is, Tom is lured by working girl, Emma (Dianne Wiest) – out of the sheer kindness of his heart – back to the brothel, where he tells the scantily clad women there that they’re dressed awfully seductively and isn’t it a pity none of them have husbands. When he finally gets the gist of what they do, he is awestruck and evidently impressed – remember, the guy’s never had sex without a fade out – but refrains from taking them up on their kind offers, even when they suggest a freebie: because he’s actually that nice! Unlike any other Woody Allen persona and human, Tom fails to err. It is just not in his character.

Another trait Purple Rose shares with Midnight in Paris is a character named Gil. This Gil, in Purple Rose, is Gil Shepherd (Jeff Daniels), the actor who plays Tom Baxter. In an effort to rein in his unruly character and salvage his acting career – in his next picture, he really wants to play Lindbergh – Gil journeys to New Jersey to get Tom back on the screen. A real version of Tom, if a little more self-absorbed, Gil soon wins Cecilia’s affections and it isn’t long before Cecilia goes from being unloved altogether to being loved by two men; both of whom, she exclaims, are the same person! The Purple Rose of Cairo, full of witticisms such as this, elicits some of Allen’s best comedy writing. After Tom’s great escape, for example, the other characters in the film must remain in the scene where he left them and cannot progress onto the next: dinner plans at the Copacabana. It’s particularly irksome for the other characters, as they become hungrier, that Tom didn’t have the sense to desert them until after dinner. Meanwhile, in Tom’s absence, there’s uproar at the Jewel as characters, moviegoers, the theatre manager and even the police grow increasingly restless. There are some hilarious interchanges between characters and their audience when one of the characters tells a complaining viewer to pipe down and makes a rather unkind reference to another viewer as a bag of guts. An especially Allenesque phrase comes from a more philosophical moviegoer, who says, ‘I want what happened in the movie last week to happen this week; otherwise, what’s life all about anyway?’ There’s even an allusion to Tom Baxter’s walking off the screen as an act of Communism, as a Red thing to do and, therefore, a wrong thing that must be stopped. The hilarity of it all rests as much in its overall impossibility as it does in Allen’s cutting writing, no doubt on top form here. 

Not the only Allen movie to merge reality with film, The Purple Rose of Cairo is vaguely like Play It Again, Sam, in which Casablanca fanatic, Allan (Allen) enlists an imagined Humphrey Bogart as his alter ego to shed dating advice with Linda (Diane Keaton), but Purple Rose is the antithesis of films like Manhattan, Annie Hall, Midnight in Paris and Vicky Cristina Barcelona; the kind of postcard movies that make you wish you were in New York, Paris, Barcelona. Purple Rose seems to scream out: look what you’re not missing! A film that’s enough to discourage even the most romantic from falling hard, if at all, with New Jersey, Purple Rose is a revision of the Hollywood romance for real life. With its superfluous title, as ridiculous as the prospect of a character stepping out of the screen at a cinema in a gloomy New Jersey town, The Purple Rose of Cairo is a pithy, remarkably grounded realization of the relationship between real and pretend, movie love. In bridging their unfortunate inconsistencies and ironical similarities, Allen postures the idea of what life might be like if it ran like a movie; ultimately, he decides, much of the same. In this superbly wry, risible comedy, Allen grants the moviegoer their ultimate wish but only indulges their fantasy to a certain extent. Much to our dismay – and to Cecilia’s – the film ends, the curtains close and the magic is over. Entering the foyer, we’re back in the light again and back to reality.

September 2011 at the Cambridge Film Festival. In between sentences about his latest film, Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn wolfs down handfuls of popcorn. A director scoffing popcorn is a strange sight to behold. It’s a bit like a priest throwing back communion wine on his day off; an act so banal, you don’t expect it to happen let alone bear witness to it. Aside from the difficulty of discerning what Refn is saying mid-mouthful, the director’s popcorn performance (a known motif in his interview etiquette) is goofily endearing and seems to make a statement about the kind of director he is. Here is a director – 2011’s Best Director at Cannes, no less – with a visible hunger for cinema.

One gets the impression that Refn is a movie buff dressed up as a director, or maybe it’s the other way round. It comes a surprise, then, to learn Refn wasn’t ‘really conscious of’ the driving movies that came before Drive when making the movie, though he does commend driving films like Vanishing Point as ‘really great cinema’. Then again, it’s not altogether astonishing. For a film called Drive, as many have quite rightly pointed out, there’s not all that much driving. While this comes as a disappointment to some, I see it as a great attribute. Thankfully, Drive doesn’t set out to be another The Fast and Furious film, nor does it need to be fast or furious. Though there are some hot wheels (among other rides, he’s got a 1973 Chevelle and a Chevy Impala at his disposal) and impressive tyre tracks (see Driver’s 360-degree turn in a car chase), driving isn’t glamorized here in the way of Hollywood movies with speeding cars. Ultimately, driving doesn’t steer this plot; it’s not about the car or how fast it goes. It’s about the driver. Driver (Ryan Gosling), the only name he’s given, will be your man for five minutes – a minute either side of that and you’re on your own, goes his superhero saying. A man of few words, on Driver’s behalf, his boss, Shannon (Bryan Cranston) gives us his brief back-story: the kid showed up in town one day, asking for a job as a mechanic – naturally, he was a natural – and ever since then, he’s been working under Shannon’s wing, quietly going about his business, hunched over car hoods with oil on his brow. Oh, and he drives for the movies. You know, stunts and stuff, but it’s ok, it’s not dangerous or anything; as he tells love interest, Irene (Carey Mulligan), ‘it’s only part time.’ For a spectacular driver, he’s a simple man; ask him who he is, he’ll tell you he’s a driver. But there’s more to Driver than what he does, just as there’s more going on inside the car than there is its exterior. At the start of Drive, the female voice in Kavinsky and Lovefoxxx’s “Nightcall” insists, ‘There’s something inside you, it’s hard to explain’. She sings against a pulpy, impenetrable beat, just getting through the song’s surface as Irene gets under Driver’s thick skin. The lyrics of “A Real Hero”, by College and Electric Youth, the film’s own synth-pop hymn, offer a similar interpretation of Driver: ‘you have proved to be a real human being and a real hero, real human being and a real hero, real human being and a real hero’, she repeats. The song is Driver’s theme tune (every superhero has one); its tinny pulse, like the easy purr of an engine, his heartbeat. There really is something inside Driver. As a car has an engine, a human, even a hero, has a heart.

We first glimpse this underlayer of Driver’s humanity in the smile he flashes to Irene, when she visits the garage where he works with car trouble. He can’t help the smile; though not much seems to, she makes him nervous. Later, when Irene’s husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac) returns from prison, we see Driver sitting in his room, his hands occupied in nimble work on a car part (a heart part, perhaps), his mind elsewhere as the music pounds from Standard’s welcome home party in the next apartment. The song is “Under Your Spell” by Desire, another synth-pop number with a shuffling beat. ‘I don’t eat, I don’t sleep, I do nothing but think of you. You keep me under your spell, you keep me under your spell, you keep me under your spell’, its hypnotic lyrics sing, like much of the film’s soundtrack, what he cannot say. Despite Standard’s arrival, Driver is the kind of man that doesn’t throw a punch at his love’s husband but rather lends him a helping hand; Standard is being blackmailed and, of course, Driver makes it his mission to protect Standard’s loved ones who have become, incidentally, his own. It’s his fatal flaw; at the best of times and at the worst, Driver’s a hero. In the gangster story that emerges here (think Pulp Fiction with cars), Driver increasingly begins to put actions to his emotions. In his most heroic moment, which comes in perhaps one of the greatest emotionally charged elevator scene ever shot, Driver follows Irene into the lift of their building, which they happen to share with  a gun-holding gangster. We see two things, within seconds of each other, in the elevator: first, Driver kissing Irene, softly then rapturously, and then Driver kicking, quite literally, the shit out of the gangster’s head. In mere moments, we see Driver at his most raw, given into love and lust, then ruinous rage. When I asked Refn about this particular scene, and Driver’s symbiotic expressions of love and violence, he suggested that ‘maybe art consists of sex and violence. You can use the same mechanism for both expressions… I try to [shoot] sex, it just ends up really violently!’ In a similar way, there’s a real sleaze attached to the gangster’s murder; it begins violently, but ends up somewhat euphoric. The  gangster’s disfigured face like that of a Francis Bacon figure, his blood and guts sprayed on the lift walls; such visuals are utterly visceral and indulgent, spectacular in their grotesque. All at once, Driver has shown Irene every part of him, even, and especially, the ugliness of being a hero. In this case, the bloody innards of a dead man.

At the time of the interview, having just watched the film and still reeling from the elevator, I found it bizarre when Refn admitted that he ‘spent a lot of time thinking about the Grimm’s fairytales’, which he called ‘the main inspiration for the movie.’ For a film so explicitly violent where a man’s head is stamped into mush, a gangster stabs a fork into another gangster’s eye and a sliced wrist spills blood like overflowing water – hardly the stuff fairytales are made of  – the Grimm connection couldn’t have been further off.  On second thought, however, the connection is unequivocally obvious. As Refn elaborated, Drive ‘starts very pure and then it gets…dark and violent, and all the characters are archetypes: the knight is the driver; Carey Mulligan is the dame in distress; Ron Perlman [who plays thug, Nino] is the evil king; Albert Brooks [who plays another thug, Bernie Rose] is the wizard.’ Also worth a mention here is white trash bad girl, Blanche played by the superb Christina Hendricks. Like the characters who respectively fit the mold of their archetypes, Drive is a warped, almost modern day fairytale – almost, because, like the city in which it’s set and its music (just listen to “Nightcall” again), the film is arguably stuck in the ’80s. Trade in the knight’s horse for a steel-coloured Chevy Impala, swap the knight’s brazen armour for a champagne-coloured jacket emblazoned with a scorpion symbol and you’ve got yourself a Los Angeles love story. On selecting parts of LA to shoot, Refn calls himself ‘a face filmmaker. I just shoot what looks interesting… I just drive around town and I say I like that or I like this…and I just go and shoot it. I didn’t have an agenda… What’s interesting about LA is that it very much looks like an ’80s city, it hasn’t evolved since the ’80s.’ True to the efforts of Refn’s ‘face’ filmmaking, the best views of LA aren’t, predictably, of the city lights at night, from the rooftop of Driver’s building – where, like most superheroes, he goes to answer phone calls – but from inside the car, looking out and under the sun. LA’s golden moment comes when Driver cruises through vast dust tracks with Irene and her son in tow, showing them his favourite drive in LA as he lets Irene a little way into his heart.

One critic called the film ‘an exercise in style’, and in many respects – it’s a driving movie without as much driving; a gangster film with over the top, Tarantinoesque horror; and a Brothers Grimm fairytale without the fairytale ending – Drive is a pulp fiction of sorts. But it is no matter of style over substance. Like Driver, who proves in the duration of an elevator ride that he’s both human and hero, Drive, even at its grittiest, is irrevocably stylised and yet unbearably romantic. The driving’s fast but the pace is slow in this slick thriller. Like the scorpion on the back of Driver’s bloodstained jacket – which he wears, quite unconvincingly, everywhere without a soul pulling him up on it – Drive is, for the most part, a quiet film with a vicious sting in its tail. For those who feel a little cheated by the movie’s title, perhaps Driver would have been a more appropriate title for Drive, a movie that is all about the driver, about a hero with a human inside him. When I asked Refn, why Gosling for the part of Driver, quite simply, he said, ‘Wouldn’t you want to be saved by Ryan Gosling?’ To which I replied, ‘Yes, yes I would.’

1927. Life screens in silence. A cinema auditorium full of gleaming faces and clapping hands. A sombre shadow cast on a vacant film screen in an empty room. Film reels burn in an inferno of increasing self-pity. A man slumps over a flat mirror, peering at his reflection as though a stranger’s. Pours his drink over the face in the glass, creating a grey pool that looks like something out of a Dali painting. Life is surreal; suddenly people are talking.

But not the artist, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin). We meet George at the height of his fame as a silent movie actor. Whilst at the top, George meets and falls for livewire, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) – peppy by name and nature. George and Peppy’s is an ideal meet-cute; she is an adoring fan and wannabe actress, he an unreachable star, unhappily married. They meet outside the premiere of George’s film, “A Russian Affair”, where Peppy is one of many screaming fans. Craftily making it across to the other side with a neat pocketbook stunt – or is it a perfect accident? – Peppy plays to the newspaper cameras and to George’s affections as she smacks him a bold kiss on the cheek. Soon enough, she’s front-page news and Peppy finally lands her big break – opposite George Valentin, no less. Before George and Peppy’s romance can even begin, talkies interrupt them. As Peppy soars to stardom as a Hollywood darling and talkie sensation – ‘They like me because they can see me and hear me’, she says to an interviewing journalist – the rise of talkies is George’s demise. As he says of terrible talkies to his manager, Al Zimmer (John Goodman), ‘If that’s the future, you can have it.’ In other words, shut up.

Elsewhere, behind the screen, stocks crash on Wall Street and the Depression looms. The world is a different place. Quiet chaos beautifully, woefully ensues. Like a film reel, George coils up in his own shell of pathos, drinking away the days and remembering the distant flicker of his former successes. In its melancholy moments, The Artist is a dark, brooding film; as self-indulgent, pathetic and proud as George. As the film goes on, it’s difficult to remember the George we met at the start, the George performing party tricks for a guffawing crowd with his sidekick show dog (who, incidentally, gives a marvellous performance), bags of gumption and a Hollywood smile. Nevertheless, the film retains its own glimmer throughout, with pinches of humour that lend a requisite frothiness, easing the heaviness with intervals of light like the silver that occasionally appears in its black and white.

Visually, The Artist is a masterpiece. Attention to detail is paramount, right down to the art deco font of the film’s opening credits, the beauty spot George pencils on Peppy’s cheek – like a painter adding his final detail – and the delicate reminders of silence inserted throughout, signs issuing pleas of quiet behind screens and on movie sets. The real artist of all this is Michel Hazanavicius, the genius writer and director who has made a silent film in 2012 not only watchable but more engaging and heartbreakingly gorgeous than many of the talkies we are all too used to watching. Nor is the acting in this silent movie, as Peppy would say, ‘mugging’ to the camera. In fact, there is no overacting in sight – except when George and Peppy are acting – as Dujardin and Bejo master playing mute; their thoughts, feelings and relationship communicated subtly and more meaningfully, adding nuance, tone and exclamation to the sublime silence. Indeed, silence is not substituted for talking in The Artist. Rather, what is not there prompts us to open our eyes and to take what is there all in. In our talkie times, where silence is second nature, The Artist is a silent film to shout about. I look forward to hearing the Oscar acceptance speeches.

At times, Tony’s memories, as he revisits them, yield new truths; at others, no such light is shed and we are left, with Tony, in the dark foraging for answers to impossible sums. But the beauty of Barnes’ novel lies in its inherent incompleteness. From the outset, it does not promise the whole truth; as it is written on the first page, ‘what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.’ Here is a book not afraid to show its age spots and mind gaps, that stumbles over itself and alerts us, on its quest for clarity, to its grey areas.

The reader’s aim is clear: we are enlisted to piece together Tony’s past – with and without him – to lodge together memories that have become dislodged over time, not always on Tony’s side as listening to David Bowie has made him want to believe. The Sense of an Ending reads much like an elaborate history book: it is a collation of documents – letters and e-mails – and words, spoken and unspoken; there are witnesses and survivors, victors and the defeated; there is as much speculation (and misconception) as there is fact. Unlike textbook history, however, this version of a past tells not only what happened and what might have, but what should and could have happened if. It is upon this tiny word that Barnes’ entire novel hinges and with which Tony dives into the annals of his story – history – to deliver the truth, or something like it.

The Sense of an Ending thus comprises a careful experiment in history, an alternative answer to a question of history that supersedes those offered by Tony’s old bore history teacher, Old Joe Hunt – ironic for a history teacher to be ‘Old’.  It’s this kind of wit Barnes elicits throughout, an unremarkable, easy humour that suits its equally unremarkable, everyman protagonist. As with any first person account, however, other than the given evidence we have, that is the physical documentation that we take with the word of an elderly man to be true, how can we trust our interlocutor? This instability, inherent to the novel – itself only a sense of an ending and never an ending – leaves us at great unrest. The loss of control in our lives, how time helps us and deceives us is all part of his story, which really becomes, as we piece it together, our own. Quite simply, there is no making sense of The Sense of an Ending. As the young Tony Webster would often say, ‘That’s philosophically self-evident.’

On paper, “New Girl” comes off all too “Two Guys and a Girl”, with an additional guy in lieu of the former’s former pizza place. “New Girl” reverses that formula, though; it’s less Three Guys and a Girl, more a Girl and Three Guys. This time, the onus is all on her. Zooey Deschanel, like her character in (500) Days of Summer, Summer Finn, is magnetic; she sports an effortless quality best articulated by the signature chat-up line of Crazy Stupid Love: ‘the perfect combination of sexy and cute.’ It might have been the poster of a sexy and cute lingerie-clad Zooey Deschanel on the side of a bus that attracted you to last night’s pilot, maybe you’re a sucker for (500) Days and thought it might be a bit like that – it’s not, really – or you just really liked She & Him’s (released not so long ago) Christmas album. Either way, there’s something about Zooey.

Unlike Summer Finn, Jess, Deschanel’s character in “New Girl”, is no smooth talker (more rambling and bad singing), nor does she have quite the same sexual pull. She’s not the cool new girl at the office, listening to The Smiths in the elevator and making out with a colleague in the Xerox room. In “New Girl”, Jess’s model friend, Cece (Hannah Simone), is hotter than she is. As Jess, Deschanel invites opportunities to take the piss out of herself, playing her as a bespectacled, happy-go-lucky klutz; doing sexy things with pillows and plants, burning her hair in a curling tong and blubbering at Dirty Dancing, which she watches six, maybe seven, times a day. Though she couldn’t be further from the voice coyly singing Christmas songs in the shower in Elf, Jess sings to herself a lot (she even sings the word a lot) and made up her own theme song, a slicker version of which makes up the show’s own zippy jingle: ‘Who’s that girl? It’s Jess!’ And who is Jess? Jess is the girl in the pretty LBD throwing the bad dance moves. Jess just sent seven inordinately long texts to her rebound date. Jess unashamedly admits to purchasing – brace yourselves – jeggings which, she says, ‘look like jeans but they’re really leggings.’ Jess is seriously funny and funny in all seriousness, while Deschanel does a great job of making Jess’s uncool cool.

While “New Girl”, like other sitcoms with singular titles – “Everybody Loves Raymond”, “The King of Queens”, “Frasier” – is centred around the main character, there is no “New Girl” without the supporting trio of boy flatmates who, whilst serving together as a tonic to Jess’s character, throw their own respective quirks into the mix. There’s Schmidt (Max Greenfield), the goon of the group, who stuffs a dollar in the Douchebag Jar all too regularly to compensate for his verbal transgressions. Coach (Lamorne Morris) is a personal trainer with, quite suitably, anger issues and, he admits, he doesn’t know how to talk to women. And then there’s Nick (Jake M. Johnson), the sexy and cute bartender guy in plaid and American Apparel whose girlfriend broke up with him six months ago and who Jess will probably end up with, her own unlikely Patrick Swayze.

Future plot predictions aside, one gets the impression that “New Girl”, with its unique group dynamic already coming through its shiny veneer, will take on the vein of “How I Met Your Mother” and “Friends”. It already shares some of the tongue-in-cheek bar humour of “HIMYM” and clearly follows the ‘I’ll be there for you’ ethic of “Friends”. Overall, with its balance of sexy and cute (what I might just give over and call Deschanelness), its serious funniness, and quite simply because Meriwether managed to pack in both a Douchebag Jar and Dirty Dancing in the pilot, “New Girl” makes a promising first impression for a sparkling comedy series, with substance.

Henry James wrote in The Portrait of a Lady, ‘Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself.’ With sophomore LP, Take Care, it’s clear that Drake – drink in hand, chips on the table and eye on the girl over there (or, maybe that girl over there) – is doing just that; taking care of himself and, while he’s at it, taking care of the hip-hop industry. Like the spoken words, Take Care is loaded; a heavyweight record, each of its tracks a mini-autobiography into which Drake freights his past and present, working his experiences of love and loss, fame and fortune into nifty rhymes and self-affirmative hooks. In its entirety, the album comprises a composite journey of selfhood, a soundtrack to the rise and rise of the star that is “Drizzy” Drake. Take Care is a reflection of who Drake is, and who he’s becoming.

Take Care starts where Thank Me Later left off, with the first words Drake utters on the opening track, “Over My Dead Body” recapping the success of the former: ‘I think I killed everybody in the game last year, man,/ Fuck it, I was on, though.’ Ever confident, Drake makes room for further triumph: ‘Second album, I’m back paving the way’. Take Care is the perfect comeback record; with more depth both musically and lyrically, it’s a huge step-up – actually a whole other flight altogether – from his debut, which proliferated more talk than talent and presented Drake as a cocky rapper and singer who boasted he was at the top of the game before he actually was. Drake admits it himself in “Under Ground Kings”, Take Care’s answer to the American gangster track, as he raps, ‘I’m the greatest man, I said that before I knew I was’. While Take Care retains much of the early swagger of tracks like “Over”, it is to greater effect as Drake finally finds his stride as a rapper and singer, balancing both vocal talents to flaunt his full potential. In no way does Take Care’s genius purge or even tame Drake’s huge ego; if anything, it gives him all the more narcissistic license. Quite simply, to borrow the words of Beyoncé – a certified expert on all things egotistic ­­– Drake ‘talk[s] like this ’cause he can back it up’.

In the way of self-confessional rap, the songs on Take Care reveal much about the many faces of Drake. For instance, he doesn’t take much care of his money: ‘Drizzy got the money, so Drizzy gon’ pay it’ (“Headlines”); he has some very complicated relationships: on “Shot For Me”, Drake, the arrogant ex-boyfriend, sings, ‘bitch, I’m the man, don’t you forget it’, only to confess in his soft-spoken rap, ‘girl, I can’t lie, I miss you’; and very straight-forward ones: ‘girl you ain’t the only one that’s trying to be the only one,/ At least I admit that, if you get that, and you with that,/ Then, fuck, let’s get it then’. There’s one more thing Drake is willing to admit: like everyone else, he hates being alone; on “Take Care”, he raps, ‘you hate being alone, well you ain’t the only one’ and on bonus track, “Hate Sleeping Alone” (a giveaway title), he describes a life lived ‘hotel to hotel’, in which he ‘could use [some] company’.

For an artist as self-involved as Drake, Take Care is a surprisingly collaborative effort with contributions from regular Young Money affiliates, Nicki Minaj on blithe R&B track and predictable future hit, “Make Me Proud” and Lil Wayne on thug love song, “HYFR (Hell Ya Fucking Right)” and again on uber-slow jam, “The Real Her”, along with hip-hop’s go-to guy for a slick verse, Andre 3000. Birdman jumps in on monster track, “We’ll Be Fine” while Rick Ross gives his two cents on the retro religious, “Lord Knows”. Replete with cascading, church-acoustic choir vocals produced by Just Blaze, there’s something “Jesus Walks” about “Lord Knows”, reminiscent of an early College Dropout Kanye West. Its upbeat, swooping rhythm even lends it a little “Touch the Sky”. Evidently an inspiration to Drake, there are other Kanyean traits to be found elsewhere in Drake’s rap, with traces of his glove in hand humour in “We’ll Be Fine”: ‘she said, I’m such a dog,/ I said, you’re such a bone’ has Kanye all over it; it’s like his rap on Chris Brown’s “Deuces” remix, ‘you should have your own travel agent ‘cause you a trip’ and ‘you should make your own toilet tissue, since you the shit’. Drake even borrows Kanye’s trademark, ‘huh?’ as he peppers his second verse of “Over My Dead Body” with it: ‘Feel like I’ve been here before, huh?/ I still got 10 years to go, huh?’

Done before Kanyeisms aside, the most experimental sound on Take Care, featuring the incredibly talented vocalist, The Weeknd, can be found on choppy dub step banger, “Crew Love”. In spite of its minimalism, “Crew Love” is a multi-layered, James Blake-esque polyphony; ethereal and harmonious yet disruptive and cacophonous, a sublime song that does a lot by doing relatively little in equally little amounts. Its echoed lyrics produce an audible gooeyness while The Weeknd’s hauntingly cooed, ‘ooh ooh’ acts as a buffer to the song’s thumping beat throughout, from which sonic flairs and trickles of piano are launched like fireworks, with a quietness and then an explosion, as they melt into the track’s almost chilled chaos. Like a fire that’s just burned out, the fade out of “Crew Love” makes room for the album’s stunning title track, “Take Care” to emerge from its ashes, kindle and spark.”Take Care”, which sees Drake reteam with Rihanna and a new hook up with producer, Jamie xx – as well as a sampling of Gil Scott-Heron’s “I’ll Take Care of You” – is evocative of early ‘90s dance music, with its bouncy piano chords and techno beat, but slower. Updated by an electric guitar riff and frenetic drum beat, the pace of the song flits back and forth in pendulum-like conversation between Rihanna’s soberly sung melody (‘if you let me, here’s what I’ll do, I’ll take care of you’), and Drake’s resolute rap (‘they don’t get you like I will,/ my only wish is I die real,/ ‘cause that truth hurts and those lies heal’). Between them, Drake and Rihanna fondle an undeniable sexual tension but of a different variety to that flaunted in their video for “What’s My Name”, the steamiest of milk-spilling music videos that curdles even Kelis’ “Milkshake”. “Take Care” instead achieves, in its endeavour to smooth out the pains of heartbreak, a careful delivery of its brimming chemistry. The result: a heartrending, vulnerable song about love and recovery and learning how to take care of somebody else whilst still taking care of yourself.

Take Care has so many drop-in guests that it sounds like one big party, but in no way do Drake’s collaborators prop up his LP. Like the people we try to surround ourselves with in life, they bring out the best in Drake. Here is an album that’s collective and personal; a solo project made up of many parts and people. For this reason, Take Care is Drake at its very essence. Shelling out the humanity beneath the stardom, it presents us with a man that’s not perfect though he sounds and looks it and that, for all his greatness, fears what everybody fears: loneliness. With its eclecticism of voices, sounds, rap and song, samples and references to the past, present, future, Take Care is a postmodern testing palette for Drake, a platform for the kind of music he was born to make. Above all, Take Care is a testament to the Drake that’s here, and the star and the man well in the making, as he decides in “Crew Love”, itself a divided song riven with the conflicts of its multiple layers: ‘I think I like who I’m becoming.’

Before Lykke Li’s grand entrance, bouts of smoke fill the Roundhouse stage to the tranquil close of “I Know Places”, its swelled pangs of guitar fading out against the syncopated drum beat that is the pulse of Wounded Rhymes. This is the calm before the storm as Li surges onto stage with “Jerome”, performed with a drama and electricity it doesn’t have on the album where it sits mid-tempo and mid-feeling. On paper it’s an unlikely opener for the last UK installment of Li’s tour but the song’s emotionally charged performance led by a hair whipping, drum-smashing Li is what really makes “Jerome” come alive. The song’s hybridity, sharing the tortured vigour of “Youth Knows No Pain” and the haunting sobriety of “Love Out of Lust”, also makes it an appropriate précis for what is to come: a repertoire of songs that pour from an open and healing wound; wounded rhymes both loud and quiet (‘silent cries’), staged and spontaneous, revealing and contained.

Dressed in all black and kohl-heavy under the eyes, Li looks like a pretty half-ghost under the stage light ­­– not an unsuitable look the night after Halloween. For all her sombre chic, Li is a truly energetic performer. She oozes confidence as she swings the mic like a rock star and occasionally pounds the drum set next to her, carried away by and into the hypnotism of her music. Li is constantly busy on stage. In fact, she doesn’t stop moving, making some interesting shapes; throwing her body back to “I Follow Rivers”, rocking out to “Rich Kids Blues” and suggestively swinging her hips to “Get Some”, beckoning some woos from her hipster audience on the lyrics, ‘I’m your prostitute, you gon’ get some.’

Though an assured performer, Li appears to be a somewhat withdrawn character and isn’t all that talkative. Of course Li very politely goes through the motions for her fans: a Hello London, a courteous Thank You here and there and a This Is For You before her last song, “Unrequited Love”. If the lyrics of “Dance Dance Dance” are anything to go by (‘dance, dance, dance, words can never answer for what you do’/‘my hips they lie ‘cause in reality, I’m shy shy shy’) Li is most adventurous in her music, someone who sings what she doesn’t speak. Maybe it’s for this reason that Li’s music sounds somehow rebellious live, especially “Youth Knows No Pain” – the latter part of which was performed through a megaphone over a sample taken from Kanye West’s “Power”, a heaving undercurrent that plumped and amplified the adolescent tribal beat of Li’s song.

Like Li’s performance of “Youth Knows No Pain” with its brilliantly out of the blue Kanye sample, the gig as a whole was not what I expected; I predicted something altogether less audacious, quieter, more stripped back. While there were a few tender moments when it was just the huskiness of Li’s gorgeous voice and the music – as with “I Know Places”, “Silent My Song” and “Unrequited Love” – it was, for the most part, an electric, emotionally charged production with a true star at its helm.

SET LIST: JEROME/I’M GOOD I’M GONE/SADNESS IS A BLESSING/I FOLLOW RIVERS/DANCE DANCE DANCE/I KNOW PLACES/LITTLE BIT/LOVE OUT OF LUST/SILENT MY SONG/RICH KIDS BLUES/YOUTH KNOWS NO PAIN/GET SOME/POSSIBILITY/UNREQUITED LOVE.

The above article was also published in November 2011 on Rockfeedback.com

In the darkness of the vast Thuringia forest in Dreileben, Germany, a killer flees from the hospital where he is detained. Dreileben, a trilogy of films with the surtitles, Beats Being Dead, Don’t Follow Me Around and One Minute of Darkness, uses Frank Molesch’s escape not so much as its starting point but rather as its locus, from which the peculiar events of others’ lives conspire and coincide. Both the lives of the hunted (Molesch and his victims) and the hunters (the police, a detective, a psychologist) are intricately interconnected in this sinister, ambitious saga that screened this October as part of the German film series in the 55^thLondon Film Festival. Dreileben is one of the most talked about pictures from this year’s festival, and its length (three 90 minute films; 270 minutes in total) is not the only reason why.

What is so fantastic about Dreibelen – aside from the self-assurance it must have taken on the part of the directors, Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler who presumed, quite rightly, that a cinema audience will gladly sit through 270 minutes of a film – is its deft balance of scope and focus. Here are three pictures, each alone perfectly viable and watchable (the first and second more so than the third, admittedly) which take a different angle on the same theme, on Molesch’s escape and the next murder he might commit now he is on the loose. As with approaching a stranger in the dark (something that happens often in these movies), the Dreileben trilogy comprises a series of careful gropes into the unknown.

So as not to lose you along the way, as it goes when talking about monster movies such as Dreileben (a monster of the best kind, I assure you), here is a very brief summary of all three parts…

• The first film, Beats Being Dead sees an unlikely love develop between sensible medical student, Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) and biker chick, Ana (Luna Zimic Mijovic). Their relationship plays out against the narrative of escaped killer, Molesch (Stefan Kurt) and to the elegiac sound of Julie London’s “Cry Me a River” as they dream of a life together in Los Angeles

• Don’t Follow Me Around gives us the narrative of a psychologist and mother named Johanna (Jeanette Hain), called upon to travel to Dreileben to aid the investigation surrounding Molesch. Johanna stays with a friend from her past, Vera (Suzanne Wolff) and her oddball writer husband, Bruno (Misel Maticevic). Vera and Bruno’s dilapidated house with its crumbling wallpaper and unruly garden was around “when Hitler was in primary school”, we are told, and is an unheimlich place where peculiar happenings live behind locked doors

• One Minute of Darkness brings us to the font of the crime, to Molesch himself, as we accompany him along his escape route and into the wild of the forest. The film alternates between Molesch’s warped view and the more sane perspective of the detective trying to understand him, Marcus Kreil (Eberhard Kirchberg). One Minute of Darkness is a double-sided effort to take us on an empathetic journey, getting to grips with the humanity of inhumanity and the human within the murderer.

The first Dreileben film, Beats Being Dead is the finest of the trilogy. The most revealing in terms of emotional development, though as a result also the most insular, it centres almost exclusively on Johannes and Ana’s relationship and barely addresses Molesch’s escape; a story that remains very much in the background, like a predator in the shadows waiting to pounce. The subtlety of the Molesch story works to great effect, however, as it contributes to the overall uncanniness evoked by the three films thus allowing for a more impactful development of the story later. Beats Being Dead begins itself on a note of uncertainty, with an unlikely event. At the local petrol station, with an upward punch to the nose from a thuggish biker, the world of hospital intern and aspirant medical student, Johannes is shaken forever. Just before the hit, a gentler-looking member of said biker’s motley crew stood outside the shop blows Johannes a cheeky kiss through the window. The kiss-blower is Ana, a troubled girl who works as a room maid at a nearby hotel. It is a moment of sheer playfulness, at once an intimate and audacious encounter – what is to become the first of many between the two.

That night, Johannes takes a skinny dip and falls asleep in the forest only to wake to the sound of revving motorbike engines. As he hides naked in the night from the same Hell’s Angel hoodlums he encountered earlier, Johannes witnesses Ana performing a sexual favour on one of the men who then takes off with the rest of his posse, leaving Ana half-naked, alone in the forest. Johannes, by now respectfully dressed, approaches the creature and takes her into his care. In the close quarters of his student-sized room, Johannes and Ana fall quickly and madly in love. Their relationship is passionate in a Heathcliff and Kathy kind of way with only turbulent turns that swing as sharply as a pendulum; on-again-off-again and vice versa, with much name calling in the forest as one of them (usually Ana) storms off­. Ana’s penchant for walking away from Johannes and unaccompanied in the forest is made all the more unnerving each time, given that there is a killer on the loose – a murderer of a similarly young woman, no less.

While the fickle nature of Ana and Johannes’ romance lends it a constant instability, there is always, fundamentally, something much stronger holding them together in the throes of their often trivial makes and breaks: they simply cannot, emotionally – physically, even – bear to be away from one another and will do anything to be together. Ana, for example, is quick to hang up her job at the hotel to commit more fully to her relationship and, she says, to motivate Johannes study for his dream (now her dream also) of moving to Los Angeles. “Sex then study, then sex again and then study”, Ana says, outlining her master plan. The bliss of Ana and Johannes’ relationship is disrupted, however, by Johannes’ ex-girlfriend and the daughter of the hospital’s head doctor, Sara; with her rich doctor daddy, expensive car and easy lifestyle, Sara is a convenient partner for Johannes. With Sara, his future would be laid out neatly for him, whereas with vehement, melodramatic Ana, his own Katherine Earnshaw, it is set to be unstable. Of course, there is a more sinister threat to the security of Ana and Johannes’ relationship in the form of the dangerous hospital escapee, the fear of which is perpetually simmering; lurking in the shadow of a birch tree, on the brink of emerging…

The fear of something is almost always greater than the fear itself: all three Dreileben films seem to play out this paradigm. By traversing unknown territory, there is an inherent uncanniness in all three films, similar to the kind of fear brought about by movies like The Wicker Man. Unlike such cinema, however, Dreileben does not package itself as a horror movie and yet, perhaps because it keeps the viewer in the dark, it instigates a dread of the worst kind. The forest surroundings are used to great effect here, with tension created by the rustle of a creature in the forest or an eerie noise from someone’s garden, as in Don’t Follow Me Around with Vera and Bruno’s haunted house where a myriad of peculiar noises come from the garden. Bruno, quite strangely, knows exactly what sound belongs to which animal. Also, in One Minute of Darkness, the detective, Marcus is convinced that the murderer is traipsing about in his garden as he calls out in a loud and haunting whisper, “Molesch? Molesch? Molesch?” With the actual events of Molesch’s escape and the details of the murder he committed kept obscure, only illuminated more fully in the third film, dread is the only constant in theDreileben films. Nothing is ever certain except the feeling of terror, represented by the constant cacophony of police sirens and the chopping sound of the roving helicopter as its rotor slices through the air overhead – a pulse to which the whole trilogy runs and a reminder that things aren’t safe, not even between Sara and Johannes.

Nevertheless, there are occasional moments of enlightenment; points of reference for the viewer to mark out Molesch’s trail so that they finds themselves always looking out for something – a clever cinematic tactic sure to keep an audience on their toes.  For one thing, there are familiar faces to be found as the characters appear in each other’s movies, interwoven in significant and mundane ways. Moreover, a number of motifs repeat themselves across the Dreileben films. The sameness of the dense forest, for instance, induces an eerie feeling, perhaps akin to an experience Freud intimates in “The Uncanny”, of losing ‘one’s way in the woods [...] after being overtaken by fog, and, despite all one’s efforts to find a marked or familiar path, one comes back again and again to the same spot, which one recognizes by a particular physical feature.’ A feature of this kind might be a name. In Beats Being Dead, for instance, there is Johannes and Ana and in Don’t Follow Me Around, a Johanna whose name is an amalgam of those of the aforementioned couple. Johanna and her friend Vera realize they both loved the same man, Patrik, who we learn has a hearing problem; in the third film, another man, Marcus, has a hearing problem. Fire is another returning symbol. There is the Firemouth cave in One Minute of Darkness where killer, Molesch hides out, while fire is depicted in the paintings that hang in Vera and her husband Bruno’s house in the second film. In Johannes’ room, there is also an image the camera draws us to: a black and white landscape of the forest, a picture that eerily hangs in the hospital’s Dead Room where he once saw Molesch.

Ultimately, all those 270 minutes of Dreileben in which a series of haphazard, contradicting events unfold culminate in an accomplished, exhilarating, wildly ambitious foray into the dark forest that is the unknown, leading to just one definitive minute: the moment where the screen goes static and all that is left is an impenetrable fuzz.

This article was originally published on The What Where When.