This started in August with three French filmmakers I love: Julia Ducournau, Coralie Fargeat and Gaspar Noé. Three directors who have made me flinch, laugh, look away, question my own reactions and, somehow, come back asking for more. I wanted to write about cinema’s troublemakers, the people who make films that refuse to behave.

Then I thought it would be more interesting to invite other writers to tell me who their troublemakers were. One invitation led to another, and before I knew it, we were more than twenty people exchanging essays, stories and increasingly questionable film recommendations in a group chat. We agreed on one thing: we loved cinema enough to let it make us uncomfortable.

Defining what made a filmmaker a troublemaker proved considerably harder.

Enfant terrible is an old French expression. Originally, it’s the kid who asks the embarrassing question at dinner. The one who says the thing everyone else was trying to avoid. Over time, we started using it for adults too: rebellious, disruptive, nonconformist people with a certain talent for refusing to behave.

There’s also a little piece of cinema history hiding behind our title. In 1949, Objectif 49, a French cine-club formed around young critics including André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, organised the Festival du film maudit in Biarritz under the presidency of Jean Cocteau. Alongside figures such as Robert Bresson and Roger Leenhardt, they championed another kind of cinema: neglected films, avant-garde work, films that struggled to reach audiences or had fallen foul of censorship. Cocteau spoke of films that broke rules, challenged dogma and dared to be heretical. Decades later, a documentary about Objectif 49 and that festival would be called Les Enfants terribles du cinéma.

For a while, I tried to translate the expression. Troublemaker was the closest thing I could find. Then came provocateur. Maverick. Disruptor. Every word captured one part of it and lost another. Eventually, the writers involved in this project told me to stop translating the bloody thing.

Fair enough. Les Enfants Terribles du Cinéma it is.

Unfortunately, keeping the French title didn’t solve the more interesting problem.

What actually makes a filmmaker an enfant terrible?

I started asking everyone involved, and the answers took us in different directions.

went straight for power. For him, a troublemaker is someone willing to “piss off the powers that be,” showing society something it isn’t ready or willing to see. went after cinema itself. His troublemakers are “trying to break movies and make something new with the pieces.” found the trouble in stubbornness, in filmmakers who put their own artistic instincts ahead of audiences, investors and commercial expectations, and then asked the question that made the whole thing more complicated:

“Making trouble for who?”

Because causing trouble for an institution is different from causing trouble for an audience. Breaking cinematic conventions carries different consequences from confronting a social taboo. Pissing off conservatives is one thing. Making your supposedly open-minded audience discover the limits of its own tolerance is another. That’s where these conversations began taking us somewhere I hadn’t expected.

told me that real troublemaking plays with the limits of empathy. How far can a film make you care for somebody who has done something disgusting, immoral or unforgivable?

was interested in the gap between what she thinks she should feel and what she feels while watching. She can recognise something as disturbing and still enjoy looking at it. She can expect to hate someone and find herself sympathising with them. Watching Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, she even found herself envying the very image the film was asking her to question.

And then , while we were discussing David Cronenberg, gave me perhaps the simplest expression of the whole problem:

“He made it, it’s vile. And I didn’t look away? What’s that say about me?”

There it was.

An enfant terrible might attack religion, politics, sex, gender, good taste, cinematic form, bourgeois respectability, our patience or our bodies. The target changes with the filmmaker, the audience and the moment in history, but some of the most interesting ones do something else.

They leave the trouble with us.

The film ends and now we’re stuck with our reaction. Why did I laugh? Why did I enjoy that? Why did I care about this person? Why didn’t I look away? Why did something I believed become so much harder to believe after two hours in a cinema?

The essays that follow explore these questions through filmmakers from different countries, generations and artistic traditions. You’ll find admiration, criticism, disagreement and the occasional confession. Some of the contributors have spent years loving their chosen director. Others discovered their filmmaker through this project and came away with more questions than answers, and as you’ll discover, we couldn’t even agree on which directors deserved to be here.

I rather like that.

Perhaps trying to define an enfant terrible was always going to become harder the more people we invited into the conversation. After months of talking about these films, I’m beginning to think that’s a good sign.

So, let’s meet the troublemakers.

Read more

When a romantic relationship ends, there is a whole vocabulary waiting for you. You broke up, you need space, you are getting over someone. People ask what happened, friends take sides, somebody eventually tells you that you deserve better, which is often useless but at least everybody understands what kind of pain you are in.

Friendships are different. They tend to disappear in much quieter ways.

You stop talking every day, then you stop talking every week, then one day something happens and you realise they are no longer the first person you want to tell. There is no official ending, no anniversary that now becomes awkward, no clear moment where everybody agrees that this thing you had is now over.

Someone who once knew everything about your life can become someone who barely knows what you have been doing for the last year. I think that can hurt just as much as losing a romantic relationship, sometimes more, because nobody really prepares you for the possibility that friendships can have endings too.

These five films understand that in very different ways.

Found something to watch? Now get more from it.

Join The Long Take

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022)

There is something almost absurd about the beginning of The Banshees of Inisherin, and that’s because Pádraic does not understand what’s happening. He thinks he still has a friend but Colm has already decided otherwise.

That imbalance is what makes the film so painful, because one person is trying to understand a relationship the other person has already left, and there is nothing Pádraic can really do with that information except keep asking why.

We tend to imagine friendships ending because somebody did something wrong, because there was betrayal, cruelty, a fight, some moment we can point to and say, there, that was the problem, but sometimes the answer is much worse. Someone simply does not want the friendship anymore. There is no argument you can win against that, no apology that fixes it, no better version of yourself that guarantees the person will come back. And that is probably one of the hardest things to accept in any relationship, that affection can disappear unevenly.

One person can still be standing exactly where they were while the other has already moved on.

Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012)

Frances and Sophie have the kind of friendship that feels permanent because it has become part of how they understand themselves. They are not simply friends, they are a unit, a rhythm, a version of adulthood they assumed they would enter together. Then life starts moving.

Jobs change, apartments change, relationships change, ambitions become more serious, and suddenly the two people who once imagined themselves moving through life side by side are no longer keeping the same pace. That is what I love about Frances Ha, because nobody really has to be the villain.

Sophie is not wrong for wanting something different. Frances is not wrong for feeling hurt by it. They are simply discovering that loving someone does not guarantee your lives will continue making room for each other in the same way. I think that is one of the saddest forms of growing apart, because there is nothing obvious to forgive.

You can miss someone and still understand why the friendship changed. Sometimes life reorganises itself around you, and by the time you notice, somebody who used to be part of every plan has become part of your memory instead.

Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Julio and Tenoch begin Y Tu Mamá También with the kind of friendship that looks easy from the outside.

They joke, compete, talk about sex, move through the world with the confidence of people who assume the other person will always be there. Then the trip starts stripping that confidence away.

Jealousy, class differences, secrets, competition, all the little resentments that were easier to ignore when the friendship was running smoothly begin surfacing. The trip does not really destroy their friendship but It exposes it. Sometimes a friendship falls apart not because something new entered it, but because something old finally became impossible to ignore. Maybe one person always felt inferior. Maybe there was jealousy hiding underneath the jokes. Maybe both people had been quietly keeping score.

Friendship can survive a lot when nobody looks too closely at what is happening beneath it. Then one moment arrives and now all the things you were willing not to see become visible at once.

After that, it is difficult to return to the version of the friendship where neither of you knew.

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

Mark and Eduardo begin as friends trying to build something together, but The Social Network understands how quickly friendship can change once success introduces a scoreboard.

Money comes in, status comes in, other people start circling, and suddenly two people who once felt like partners are trying to work out who matters more. That is a dangerous moment in any friendship, and not because ambition automatically makes people selfish, but because friendship is often built on a kind of invisible equality.

You might have different jobs, different personalities, different amounts of money, but there is still some feeling that you are meeting each other on the same level. When that disappears, resentment can arrive surprisingly fast. One person starts feeling left behind, the other starts feeling held back, and suddenly every decision carries another meaning. The sad thing is that success does not necessarily destroy the friendship because somebody stops caring. Sometimes it destroys it because both people care about different things more, and once ambition becomes more important than loyalty, friendship starts looking less like a relationship and more like something that can be negotiated. That usually ends badly.

Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

Enid and Rebecca begin almost as one person.

They share the same boredom, the same jokes, the same suspicion toward the world around them, and there is comfort in having somebody beside you who seems to understand exactly why everything feels slightly ridiculous. Then Rebecca starts moving forward. She gets a job, thinks about an apartment, begins accepting parts of adulthood that Enid still wants to resist.

Nothing about that is especially dramatic, which is why it feels so true. Sometimes friendship ends because one person becomes connected to a version of yourself you are slowly leaving behind. You still care about them, you still recognise what you had together, but being around them begins reminding you of someone you are no longer sure you want to be, or maybe the opposite happens.

They move on, and you realise you were more attached to the shared version of your lives than you were prepared to admit. Losing a friend can also mean losing evidence of who you used to be. There are friendships that belong to a place, an age, a particular version of yourself, and no matter how important they were, they cannot always survive becoming something else.

Friendships do not always end because the love disappears. Sometimes the lives around that love change.

One person wants something different, one person moves faster, something buried finally comes to the surface, success changes the balance, or two people simply stop recognising themselves in the same future, and because friendship rarely comes with an official ending, you can carry it around for a long time without really knowing what happened.

You might still think about that person when you hear a song they loved, or see something you know would have made them laugh, or pass a place where the two of you wasted entire afternoons doing absolutely nothing. For a second, the old reflex comes back. You want to send it to them.

Then you remember you don’t do that anymore. Maybe that is the closest thing friendship has to a breakup scene.

Thank you for reading.

—

Raphaël, Your Friendly Take.

Want to get more from every film you watch?

Join The Long Take

Yes. You read it right. Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one of the best films ever made, and I’m not going to start and insult T2 by saying that it’s the best action movies. We don’t need that qualifier.

T2 is a film where pretty much every part of filmmaking is doing its job at an absurd high level. Direction, editing, sound, production design, performances, effects, music, action geography, character arcs, visual storytelling. Setup & payoff, and even exposition, and most importantly, it knows exactly what kind of film it is.

Subscribe now

That sounds obvious, isn’t it. There are plenty of “prestige” films with enormous thematic ambition that don’t control tone, pacing, character or image half as well as Terminator 2 controls them. Cameron knows the assignment down to the fucking millimetre.

The plot itself is so simple: Robot comes from future, protect kid. Other robot wants to kill kid and stop apocalypse, and there you go.

I have reduced one of greatest films ever made to something that sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon, and that’s exactly why you should read “plot is overrated” — everything applies here.

What makes T2 perfect is how Cameron makes us experience what happens, and the opening alone is a filmmaking lesson.

The opening

Read more

Most mornings, you wake up feeling more or less like the same person. You still like the same stupid things, and you still have the same insecurities. You still want things you probably should have figured out by now. Then something reminds you …

A younger person calls you “sir”. Your back makes a noise getting off the sofa. Someone you remember as a child now has a mortgage and two kids. Rude.

I think that’s what makes ageing interesting in films. It’s about the little moments when the person you feel yourself to be starts rubbin against the person the world now sees.

These five films all approach that gap differently.

Found something to watch? Now get more from it.

Members get practical film education every Wednesday, the Friday essays, the full member library, and How Films Work — my practical guide to cinematic language.

Join The Long Take

Read more

Nobody wakes up horny for a 35M$ production. What I miss is the kind of film that budget range used to make possible: adult dramas, thrillers, romances, courtroom films, start vehicles, weird genre pictures, comedies, erotic films, character pieces that could still look expensive and play to a broad audience.

Okay — I know mid-budget movies are not dead. I can already see someone in the comment with eleven examples. Chill out Wikipedia boy.

I know it still exists. It has just become harder to finance, harder to market, harder to position, and increasingly odd to see one treated like a major theatrical event.

I’m bothered that movies have become polarised between cheap and enormous.

Go deeper into cinema.

Members get the Friday essays on film culture and cinematic language, plus practical film education every Wednesday, the full member library, and How Films Work — my practical guide to cinematic language.

Unlock the full essay

On one side, relatively inexpensive films where limited budget becomes part of the identity and on the other, gigantic films carrying so much money that they need worldwide audiences, recognisable IP, spectacle and opening-weekend urgency. The missing middle used to have room for a film to succeed without conquering Earth.

If your film costs a fortune, everybody becomes frightened. Studios need broad appeal, marketing needs a simple hook, international audiences need to understand what they’re buying. You now have hundreds of million of dollars standing behind the director whispering: “ please don’t be too fucking weird. “

Mid-budget films could take another kind of risk, an adult risk. Not necessarily something too experimental, but just a complicated protagonist and an unhappy ending. And sex.

You know …

A movie constantly consisting of people talking. A thriller without a cinematic universe attached. A star playing someone deeply unpleasant. A story for people over 35 that doesn’t involve saving civilisation.

I don’t know — maybe what died wasn’t a budget category, maybe we lost a certain amount of ordinary cinematic adulthood.

Think about the kinds of films that once sat comfortably in mainstream culture: Michael Clayton, The Insider, A few Good Men, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Erin Bockovich, The Firm, Eyes Wide Shut, Basic Instinct, Jerry Maguire, The fugitive, Heat.

Very different movies, obviously, but many of them are recognisably made for adult without feeling embarrassed abot the fact. We could use more of that.

Also, mid-budget movie used to let movie starts simply carry movies. You came because Julia Roberts was in it. Denzel. Clooney. Sandra Bullock. Tom cruise outside a franchise. Michelle Pfeiffer. Harrison Ford investigating something…

The actor was the IP.

Now so much mainstream filmmaking sells the character, franchise, universe or brand before the performer. The star still matters, obviously, but the relationship has changed.

Mid-budget films had more room to be aesthetically ordinary. They didn’t always need every image to announce THIS COST MONEY. An office could simply look like an office, and a kitchen looked lived in. Somebody drove a shitty car. The cinematic universe was a conference room on some occasions. There’s texture in that.

Streaming supposedly gave many of these films somewhere to go, which sounds great until you notice what happens culturally when something goes directly into a giant menu beside 8k other rectangles.

A mid-budget theatrical movie once has a physical moment. A poster, a trailer, a cinema, reviews. People talking about it. It has to justify leaving the house.

On streaming, a similar film can arrive on Friday and by Monday already feel like something the algorithm has buried under Because You Watched The Accountant 2.

Read more

Something you did, or something you didn’t do, or a choice you would change if someone handed you a very inconvenient time machine and enough confidence to believe you wouldn’t immediately create three new problems, but I’m not sure regret actually lives in the past.

Memory tells us what happened, and regret keeps inventing what could have happened instead.

The conversation where you said the right thing, the relationship where you stayed, the job you took, the person you understood a little sooner. The version of yourself who made all the correct choices while still being recognisably you.

That’s probably why regret can stay alive for so long… The past is finished, the the imaginary version isn’t.

These five films all live somewhere inside that gap.

Found something to watch? Now get more from it.

Members get practical film education every Wednesday, the Friday essays, the full member library, and How Films Work — my practical guide to cinematic language.

Join The Long Take

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007)

Rewriting the past

Briony spends much of her life trying to live one decision made when she was too young to understand its consequences and old enough to make them permanent.

What gets me about Atonement is what she eventually does with all that guilt. She writes. She creates the ending Cecilia and Robbie never received. She puts them somewhere the real world refused to let them go. For a moment, writing gives her the power she didn’t have as a child. The power to control the story, but only the story.

It’s quite painful really. We all do smaller version of it all the time. We replay conversations and give ourselves better lines. We imagine what would have happened if we had arrived five minutes earlier or waited five minutes longer.

Regret makes writers of all of us. The problem is reality doesn’t accept revisions.

Manchester By The Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016)

Life sentence

Lee Chandler isn’t trying to change what happened. He has already decided what it means about him.

Sometimes regret begins as you admitting you did something terrible and it slowly becomes “I’m the person who did that terrible thing.” Once those ideas collapse into each other, moving forward can start to feel almost dishonest.

A better life can feel like something you have not earned. That’s what makes Manchester By The Sea so difficult for me. It does not turn pain into a neat story about healing, and Lee does not discover the correct lesson, forgive himself and walk toward a tasteful sunset.

Lee simply reaches the limit of what he can carry… “ I can’t beat it “

There are things we learn to live with without ever making peace with them. Not everything becomes wisdom. Sometimes survival is much less impressive than that.

Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)

Giving up your place

We usually imagine regret pointing us back toward repair. You know… Go back, apologise, fix it. Put everything where it belongs again.

Paris, Texas is a an example that this repair can be more complicated.

Travis returns to the people he hurt, but the film doesn’t reward him with the comforting fantasy that recognising your mistakes automatically gives you the right to reclaim what you lost. Sometimes you break something and the responsible thing isn’t getting it back but it’s accepting that it can continue without you, and I find that much harder than forgiveness.

Travis can help reunite a mother and a son, but he cannot simply walk into the picture afterwards and pretend understanding what he did has erased it. His regret eventually becomes an act of absence.

There’s love in that too. A painful kind, but still. Love.

Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)

The person you thought you’d become

Most regret probably looks more like Sideways than Atonement. No single catastrophic decision and no enormous tragedy hanging over everything. Just an accumulation.

Miles has a failed marriage behind him, a book nobody seems particularly interesting in publishing, and the uncomfortable suspicion that adulthood arrived without checking whether he was ready for it. He thought he wold be somewhere else by now.

Not wishing you had made one different choice, but looking around at your life and wondering when it became this version, might be one of the quietest form of regret. It’s very easy to imagine regret as something dramatic. Sometimes it’s Monday and you realise you’re still dealing with the same insecurity you had five years ago.

You thought you’d be more confident by now, more successful, less jealous, better at love. Better at being yourself, and there’s nobody obvious to blame. Not even yourself really. Life just kept happening.

Decision to Leave (Park Chan-Wook, 2022)

Understanding too late.

Some people become easier to understand once they’re gone. Terrible timing, obviously. Hae-jun spends the whole film trying to understand Seo-rae while she’s still in front of him, but there are things he only fully understands when understanding them can no longer change anything.

You finally understand what someone was trying to tell you, why they behaved the way they did. What you meant to them. What they meant to you, and now everything makes more sense at exactly the moment when that knowledge becomes useless.

Seo-rae leaves Hae-jun with something he can keep searching for forever. Maybe that’s why regret survives so well. There’s always another version available, another sentence you could have said, another choice you could have made. Another life sitting conveniently beyond reach, where everything turned out slightly better because imaginary people are very good at making decisions.

The past itself doesn’t change. We do, and then we look back with information the person we were never had. Quite unfair, really. We judge our old choices with our current understanding, then wonder why the person we used to be couldn’t see what now feels obvious.

—

These films don’t really tell us how to stop regretting things, and I’m not sure I’d trust a film that did, but they understand that sometimes the hardest thing about the past isn’t what happened but it’s everything we can still imagine happening instead.

—

Raphaël, The Long Regretted Take.

Want to get more from every film you watch?

Members get practical film education every Wednesday, the Friday essays, the full member library, and How Films Work — my practical guide to cinematic language.

€5/month or €50/year.

Join The Long Take

Kate Winslet is one of those actors whose excellence has become so consistent that people have almost stopped noticing how extraordinary it is, and that’s a strange thing to happen to an artist. We spend years celebrating actors who finally deliver one astonishing performance, who undergo some enormous physical transformation, who surprise us by revealing that they can actually act. Meanwhile, Winslet has been delivering performances of remarkable emotional complexity for three decades, across romantic dramas, period films, psychological thrillers, independent cinema and television. At some point, people seem to have decided that being brillant is simply what Kate Winslet does. So another remarkable performance arrives and the response is, well, that’s just Kate Winslet.

That being said, I don’t think she’s underappreciated in the traditional sense. I think she’s under-discussed. She has received major awards, critical recognition and plenty of prestigious roles. She’s hardly an undiscovered actress fighting for someone to notice her, but there’s a difference between acknowledging somebody's greatness and remaining curious about it. We recognise Winslet as a great actor without spending enough time examining why she’s great. And when people do discuss her, the conversation tends to return to Titanic, her accents, her willingness to look unglamorous or her ability to cry on command. There’s so much more happening in her performances.

What fascinates me is that she might be one of cinema’s greatest actors of emotional contradiction. She can show you a character experiencing two opposing feelings at the same time, and she rarely tidies them up for the audience. Confidence covering humiliation. Maternal love sitting beside exhaustion. She can make a person feel difficult, selfish, frightened, loving and completely recognisable within the same scene. That’s much more interesting talent than demonstrating that she can play ten different kinds of people.

Go deeper into cinema.

Members get the Friday essays on film culture and cinematic language, plus practical film education every Wednesday, the full member library, and How Films Work — my practical guide to cinematic language.

Unlock the full essay

Titanic

I think there’s a tendency to dismiss that performance because the film became such an enormous cultural phenomenon. People remember the romance, the ship, the music, and of course DiCaprio, and perhaps forget how how much emotional weight Winslet carries. Rose could have been a fairly conventional romantic heroine, but Winslet makes her frustration with her own social world feel physical. Watch her during the scenes with her mother, especially the corset scene. Her anger is trapped beneath manners and social expectations. She wants to fight, but she’s been raised in an environment where maintaining appearances takes priority over expressing herself.

Winslet gives Rose an inner life before the love story has even taken over. When she discovers freedom with Jack, the change has force because we’ve already seen what confinement does to her.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I think Clementine is one of her finest performances, and also one of the most misunderstood characters in 2000s cinema. She’s colourful, impulsive, funny, unpredictable. It would have been so easy to play her as the exciting woman who arrives to rescue a miserable man’s life from boredom, but Winslet keeps giving Clementine an existence beyond Joel’s fascination with her.

There’s insecurity beneath her confidence, selfishness alongside affection, and a need to be loved that sometimes makes her push people away. She can be exhausting. She can hurt people. She has moments when she seems exhausted by herself, and that’s fascinating because much of the film reaches us through Joel’s memories. Winslet has to create someone who feels like a person while the film explores how another person has remembered, idealised and misunderstood her.

Read more

Scream is genuinely one of the great American films of the 90s

and I don’t mean “ great horror film” with the little genre asterisk people often add because a masked murderer lowers the ceiling of artistic possibility.

It works as horror, comedy, whodunit, teen film and media satire at the same time, and none of those layers are pasted on. What impresses me most now is how much emotional seriousness Wes Craven hides underneath Kevin Williamson's cleverness. People remember the rules, Ghostface, the phone calls, the jokes about horror movies. the film underneath all that is about a teenage girl whose grief has been turned into public property.

Continue with the full method.

Members get the full framework, examples, viewing exercises, and How Films Work — my practical guide to cinematic language.

Unlock the full method

The Best Opening of All Time

The opening remains extraordinary. Everybody talks about Drew Barrymore and the shock of killing the apparent star, which is obviously part of it, but I think the real genius is how Craven turns knowledge into danger. Casey initially thinks she understands the situation. Right? she knows horror movies, and she knows the answers. She knows the conventions. The caller seems like an irritation, then a flirtation, then a game. Everytime she thinks she has figured out what kind of scene she’s in, the scene changes its rules. Horror knowledge cannot save her because the killer controls the game.

Cinematography

Craven shoots that opening with such classic discipline. That gets overlooked because Williamson’s screenplay is so quotable that people sometimes talk about Scream as if Craven merely pointed a camera at an ingenious script. Bullshit! Watch how clearly you learn Casey’s house. The doors, windows, patio, living room, driveway, where her parents will arrive from. Craven gives you the geography because suspense requires geography. Once Casey’s parents come home, you understand exactly how close safety is. She can see them. We know where they are, and they have no idea where she is. The distance is unbearable because the movie has taught us the space.

People rarely mention that Scream is an incredibly spatial film. Ghostface is frightening because Craven constantly makes you think about where somebody could be. Behind the door? Outside the window? Upstairs? In the school bathroom? Somewhere behind Sidney while she’s focused on something else? He makes suburbia porous. Houses should protect these kids, but windows becomes viewing devices, doors become threats, phone allow strangers into private space without entering it. Woodsboro looks safe and open, yet privacy barely exists!

Mise en scène & Sound design

The phone itself is such a brillant horror object! In 96, the landline is attached to the home. Somebody calling you means somebody has entered your domestic space without physically crossing the threshold. You cannot see them. You don’t know where they are. They might be mile away or looking through your window. Scream gets enormous tension out of that uncertainty. Modern Ghostface has smartphones, GPS, texts, video, all sorts of toys, but there is something uniquely horrible about that ringing phone inside an otherwise quiet house. The sound itself becomes an invasion.

Performances

Something I find richer everytime i revisit the film is Sidney. Neve Campbell is doing much more difficult work than the film’s reputation usually acknowledges. Sidney could have been written as Final Girl 2.0, the genre-savvy heroine who exists to prove how clever the screenplay is. Instead she’s bruised, defensive, angry, horny, suspicious, funny, embarrassed. She’s dealing with something far more complicated than Ghostface: everyone around her has an opinion about the worst thing that ever happened to her.

Her mother was murdered. Her father is the suspect. Cotton Weary was convicted partly because of Sidney’s testimony. Gale Weathers wrote about the case and doubts Sidney’s version. Kids at school turn the murders into entertainment almost instantly. Her boyfriend wants intimacy while Sidney is still wrestling with what she has learned about her mother. Then the killers reveal that they too have built a narrative around Maureen Prescott. Everybody wants to tell Sidney what her own life means. That, to me, is the film’s hidden spine, and it makes the meta stuff much more interesting. Scream is often described as a movie about characters who know they’re in a horror movie. Sure. But I think it’s even more about people trying to control stories.

Gale controls stories professionally. She takes private pain and turns it into television. Billy has constructed a story about Maureen, his mother, Sidney and himself which allows him to make his violence justified. Stu treats the murders pretty much like participation in somebody else’s production. He follows the script until the consequences are physical. Randy believes understanding genre narratives gives him predictive power. The killers want to stage reality so that everyone else receives the version they created.

Sidney spends the entire film trapped inside stories other people have written about her. Then she survives, and that makes the ending much more satisfying than “Final Girl kills slasher.” Sidney wrestles authorship back.

Billy Loomis is much better than he gets credit for. Skeet Ulrich has this slightly wrong quality from the beginning. He looks like a teenage fantasy of danger rather than a normal boyfriend, which becomes funny once you know where the film is heading. On a rewatch, Billy spends so much time performing Billy. Sensitive boyfriend. Wounded boyfriend. Suspicious boyfriend. Wrongly accused boyfriend. He keeps trying versions of himself on Sidney. That connects to another aspect of the film people don’t discuss enough: everybody in Scream is performing.

Gale performs Gale Weathers, Dewey performs being an authority figure even though he’s insecure and inexperienced. Stu performs stupidity so well that everyone treats him as harmless, Billy performs romantic sincerity, Randy performs cinephile superiority. The school kids perform their indifference to murder because caring would make them vulnerable.

Even Ghostface is literally a performance. The costume!! Because Ghostface isn’t a monster with a fixed identity. Somebody puts the costume on and becomes the role. That’s why Ghostface stumbling around has always worked for me. He gets kicked, hit with doors, falls over furniture. He isn’t Michael Myers. There’s a human body underneath there scrambling to keep the performance going. The costume creates mythology; but the body takes the beating.

Stu is maybe the most frightening character in the film because Matthew Lillard makes him so fucking funny. Billy has constructed grievances. They’re deranged grievances, obviously, but he has built himself an explanation. Stu seems much closer to violence as social participation. He wants to belong to the thing! He gets excited!! He follows Billy’s energy, then during the kitchen scene, when the physical reality of what they’ve done starts catching up with him, Lillard makes Stu look like a child who has finally realised this game hurts.

That kitchen scene is so incredible, by the way, because the killers stop being frightening in the traditional slasher sense and somehow become more disturbing. Ghostface has been this anonymous shape throughout the movie, then the masks come off and what do we get? Two fucking teenagers. Petty, theatrical, insecure teenagers who have consumes enough stories to imagine themselves as characters inside one. That’s far nastier than revealing some supernatural evil, and this is where the film’s relationship with horror fandom gets misunderstood.

Scream loves horror, and you can feel Craven’s affection for the genre everywhere, but the film also distrusts the idea that knowing genre automatically makes you wiser. Randy knows the rules and stull spends much of the film oblivious to danger. Casey knows horror trivia and dies. Billy and Stu have absorbed movies and turned them into part of their own mythology.

Film knowledge gives these characters a vocabulary but it doesn’t give them moral intelligence, and to be honest, I think it applied to cinephilia outside Scream too. You can watch 10k films and remain an idiot. Cinema is generous like that.

I also think the film is much sadden that people remember. I don’t know, there’s something rotten running through Woodsboro before Ghostface even appears. Sidney’s mother’s sex life has become gossip. Her murder has become mythology. Kids joke about Casey’s death almost immediately. The principal seems more interested in discipline than grief. Television crews swarm the school. Violence gets converted into narrative with astonishing speed. The morning after Casey dies, she is already becoming content. That’s so horribly contemporary.

That’s where Gale becomes fascinating because the film could easily have made her the shallow media villain. Courteney Cox and Craven give her enough intelligence and courage to complicate that. Gale is exploitative and she is also often correct. She believes Cotton may have been wrongly convicted, and Sidney eventually has to confront the possibility that her certainty was incomplete. Gale’s ambition is ugly in places, but her scepticism has value.

Scream refuses to let the comforting character have all the truth and the unpleasant character have none of it. That’s good writing 101.

I love Dewey for a similar reason. He’s ridiculous, but Craven never despises him. That key because the film makes fun of nearly everybody without becoming contemptuous of people. Later self-aware movies often seem terrified of sincerity, as though demonstrating that you know something is stupid absolves you from having to care about it. Scream is wayya smarter than that. It can joke about horror conventions and then scare the shit out of you using those exact conventions. That’s the difference between parodying a form and mastering it ;)

Craven can have Randy explain how horror works, then still make you tense when somebody opens a door. Knowledge doesn’t break the spell. That might be Scream’s greatest achievement because most movies would have failed at doing so. The movie tells you how the trick works and then performs it anyway!!

This is why the opening is so key beyond being an amazing standalone sequence. Casey’s death establishes the film’s entire philosophy. You know Drew Barrymore is a star and you know horror conventions. She sure does know horror conventions too. The caller knows these conventions too. Everyone thinks knowledge provides some control, then Craven says good luck with that mates.

For me, the rarely discussed heart of Scream is therefore not its self-awareness but its obsession with who gets to control a narrative. That’s why I prefer Sidney so much more than Ghostface. Ghostface keeps trying to turn her into a character. Victim, grieving daughter, sexual prude, final girl, target, while Sidney keeps remaining a person, and I think that’s why the movie has survived the mountain of imitators that followed it. The cleverness is excellent, the scares are excellent, the opening is immortal, but underneath the machinery there is an actual human being whose pain the film takes seriously.

Without Sidney, Scream would be brillant trivia. With her, it has a soul.

—

Raphaël, The Spooky Take.

Thank you for reading!

Want to become a more confident film viewer?

Members get practical film education on Wednesdays to help you build your taste, learn cinematic language, and get more from every film you watch. You’ll also get the Friday essays, the full member library, and How Films Work — my practical guide to cinematic language.

€5/month or €50/year.

Join The Long Take

The Journal is normally for paid members. Once a month I take one human theme and follow it through films, art, books, music and whatever else helps me understand it.

I wanted you to see what I’m building! Enjoy :)

A NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN

I need coffee in the morning.

Well, I say need, but I probably don’t. What I need might be ten quiet minutes before the day starts asking thing from me, and coffee just happens to be the little ceremony I built around this.

We say I need all the time anyway.

I need a drink. I need to get laid. I need a holiday. I need you to answer me. I need this job. I need to know why. I need one more cigarette. I need them back. I need them to regret losing me.

Some of those needs are small. Some can ruine your life. Some are actual needs: food, sleep, safety, touch, other people. And some are things we’ve promoted to the position because they do a decent job of filling for something else.

Maybe you don’t need the drink. Maybe you need your brain to shut up for an hour.

Maybe you don’t need that person back. Maybe you need to stop feeling like you weren’t enough.

Maybe you don’t need to win. Maybe you need proof that you matter.

Maybe you don’t need revenge. Maybe you just need her to them to finally understand what they did to you.

For a little while, the substitute can work. That drink make you feel different. That person does make the hole smaller. Someone wanting you does make you feel wanted. Winning does feel fucking good. Revenge probably does too, at least for five minutes. We humans wouldn’t keep doing these things if they gave us nothing.

So we reach again, and again. Then at some point the thing that was supposed to help starts asking things from us too.

I’ve been thinking about this because of Placebo. There’s an idea in their music I can’t stop coming back to: wanting something so much that you need somebody else to protect you from wanting it.

I need this. I need you to stop me from having this. Now I need you.

Lovely. Problem solved, right? Except now who protects me from needing you? That little loop feel very human to me. We like to think we know what we want. I’m not even convinced we always know what we need.

Sometimes all we know is what we reach for. We reach for a person, a bottle. For Food. Sex. Work. Attention, control, a screen lighting up with somebody’s name. Someone telling us we did well. Someone telling us they can’t do this without us.

That last one can feel pretty good eh? Being needed is lovely. There’s warmth in it. Purpose even. You matter to somebody. You’re the person they call when things go wrong, but what happens when they stop calling? They’re doing better now. That’s what you wanted… Right?

I want you healthy, but I also liked taking care of you.

I want you free, but I also liked knowing you’d come back.

I want you happy, but I would prefer if you were happy with me.

Both things can be true. That’s annoying.

So this issue like you see, isn’t really about addiction, although addiction will be in here. It isn’t only about relationships either. I want to look at need in the widest, messiest way I can.

It’s about the things we reach for. The people we turn into medicine. The habits we swear are harmless. The need to be seen. The need to disappear. The need to win, to save somebody, to be saved.

Maybe also the little tragedy of finally getting exactly what you thought you needed and discovering that something is still missing. I don’t think the answer is learning to need nothing. That sounds miserable.

We need people, we need help, we need touch and food and rest and somewhere to belong. Independence has been oversold a bit, if you ask me.

The harder thing is figuring out what you’re actually hungry for. Because a lot of things can fill a hole, but not all of them make you whole.

Subscribe now

INSIDE THE FEELING

The Master — What if the person saving you needs you too?

Freddie Quell looks like a man who needs something. Anything really. He drinks chemicals he probably shouldn’t even be standing next to. He fight people, fucks up jobs, wanders from one place to another without much idea of where he’s going. Then he sneaks onto a boat and meets Lancaster Dodd, a man who seems to have everything Freddie does not.

Dodd has answers. Lots of them.

He has a family, followers, nice clothes, confidence, rules, language for things Freddie has never been able to explain. He calls himself a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher. Bit greed but alright.

Freddie, meanwhile, can barely sit still.

So at first the relationship seems easy enough to understand. Freddie needs Dodd. Dodd gives him structure. Somewhere to sleep, people around him, a reason to stay in one place for five minutes. During the processing scene, Dodd keeps asking questions and Freddie has to answer without blinking. Sex. His father. His mother. The girl left behind. All these things Freddie normally keeps buried start coming out because somebody finally refuses to let him run away from the question.

And Freddie love him for it. I think he does, anyway. But the more time they spend together, the more I start wondering whether we’ve got the direction of need completely wrong, because Dodd could let Freddie go, and honestly, he probably should. Freddie is violent and un predictable. He gets Dodd into trouble. When somebody questions The Cause, Freddie is often the whole who ends up attacking them. He does not become the calm, enlightened proof that Dodd’s methods work. If anything, he keeps exposing the limits of everything Dodd claims to understand, and still, Dodd wants him close.

Why?! Maybe because Freddie needs him, and maybe because Dodd needs to be needed.

There’s a kind of power in being the person with the answers. You are useful, important. Somebody arrives broken and you get to believe that you might be the one who puts them back together.

We tend to look suspiciously at the person being saved. Why can’t they leave? Why do they keep going back? Why do they need this person so much? I’m not sure we ask enough about the person doing the saving.

What are they getting out of it?! Dodd seems fascinated by Freddie because he’s almost impossible to control. He’s all appetite. Appetite for sex, alcohol, violence, anger, and Dodd has built an entire philosophy around the idea that humans can overcome their animal impulses, and then this absolute animal climbs onto his boat.

Freddie is a challenge personally designed for him, and if Dodd can fix Freddie, then maybe Dodd is right about Freddie. Right about The Cause, about himself.

That makes their relationship much more odd than master and follower. Freddie needs somewhere to belong, but Dodd might need somebody difficult enough to prove that he deserves to be followed. You see it whenever Freddie starts slipping away from him. Dodd doesn’t react like a man losing an annoying student. You can see there’s hurt there. You can feel jealousy, possessiveness maybe, and affection too. Their relationship keeps jumping between father and son, teacher and pupil, friends, brothers, something almost romantic without ever quite becoming any of those things.

I don’t really want to name it, and that’s partly why I love the film. At one point Dodd tells Freddie that if they meet again in another life, Freddie will be his sworn enemy. Then he sings to him — normal mentor stuff — and Freddie cries…

Whatever these men are to each other, it matters far beyond whatever The Cause is supposed to be doing.

That gets me back to need. We often imagine need as something belonging to the weaker person. The addict needs the substance. The lonely person needs company. The lost person needs guidance, but relationship can create needs on both sides without those needs looking remotely the same.

Freddie needs somewhere to go and Dodd needs somebody to follow him there.

Freddie needs somebody who can tolerate him and Dodd may need somebody whose dependence proves his importance.

Both of them probably get something real from the arrangement. That’s the difficult bit really. Dodd does give Freddie things like patience, attention, affection. Somewhere to belong for a while. Freddie gives Dodd something too: loyalty, excitement. A challenge, and maybe even love.

It would be much easier if one were simply using the other. I don’t think they are. I think they need each other for different reasons, and neither one can quite give the other what he actually needs, and that’s why their goodbye hurts.

Dodd basically gives Freddie the option to stay. To work with him and to belong to this thing, but Freddie leaves anyway, and I don’t know, I find that quite sad because clearly Dodd mattered to him. Maybe Freddie still needed him, but he needed something else more.

Subscribe now

THE INVISIBLE LANGUAGE

Why Uncut Gems never lets you have enough

A cruel thing about Uncut Gems is how Howard Ratner spends the whole film wanting one more thing. Like one more deal, one more bet, one more chance to fix the problem created by the previous chance he took to fix another problem. You watch him and think, mate, please just stop.

But then the film does something annoying … It makes you want the next thing too. I know Howard should stop gambling. You know it too. We’ve spent two hours watching every persuasive evidence that this man should perhaps never be allowed near money again, and still, when that final bet starts going his way, I want it to hit.

So how the fuck did that happen?

That’s where cinematic language becomes interesting to me. Uncut Gems doesn’t simply tell us Howard is addicted to the chase. The mise en scène, cinematography, editing, sound design, and performances all keep putting us inside the same rhythm. There’s almost always another thing demanding our attention, another possibility opening up, another bit of pressure coming from somewhere.

Howard needs more. The film acts like it does too.

—

MISE EN SCÈNE — There’s nowhere to fucking stand

Howard sells luxury for a living, but his world is incredibly cramped. His jewellery shop is full of expensive watches, diamonds, gold, glass displays, bright lights. It should look like success. Instead, half the time it feels like everybody has been shoved into th e same cupboard.

People are constantly standing too close to each other. Customers wait by the counter, employees move behind Howard. Somebody is banging on the glass. somebody else wants to the through the security door. Howard is trying to deal with one person while very deliberately avoiding another. And then there are the doors.

I love those fucking doors. People have to be buzzed in. Buzzed out. Sometimes they get stuck between the two. Howard can see somebody but cannot reach them. Or, more importantly, somebody angry can see Howard and Howard now becomes very interested in keeping a piece of reinforced glass between them.

For a man whose entire life is about movement, the film keeps putting him behind barriers: glass, doors, counters, cars, little rooms.

Even objects become part of the pressure. Money is everywhere. Jewellery, watches. The opal. Betting slips, phones, and things Howard wants, and things other people want from Howard, and things that could be sold, pawned, traded, borrowed, stolen.

His environment never really lets an object simply be an object. Everything has potential. That might be the problem because Howard looks at something and immediately sees what it could become next.

And the more he reaches for, the smaller his world seems to get. That’s such a lovely contradiction to me because he wants expansion, more money, bigger best, bigger wins, but physically, he spends much of the film getting squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces.

—

CINEMATOGRAPHY — Can you back up a little?

The camera doesnt give us much space either really.

Howard is constantly surrounded by faces, bodies, and objects, and the camera often stays close enough that I start wanting to lean backwards in my seat.

There are lots of tight shorts. Faces fill the frame. Someone enters from the side. Howard turns around and there’s another person there. Even when the camera follows him through NY, we rarely get the feelign that he has escaped anything. The city just gives him more placed to run toward.

That proximity is key because if we watched Howard form far away, we could probably judge him more comfortably.

There goes Howard making another terrible decision. What an absolute idiot.

But the camera keeps us close to him while he makes it. We’re looking at this face while he calculates. Watching his eyes when something becomes possible. Seeing that little spark when a plan starts forming that should absolutely not be forming. You understand why he does it before you have time to tell him not to.

The camera also loves reflective surfaces like windows, glass, jewellery, displays, all these things that separate people while still keeping them visible to each other. Howard is constantly looking through something or being looked at through something.

He’s exposed and trapped at the same time. There’s one thing I find especially funny about that: Howard spends his life trying to control what everybody sees. He’s always selling something. It can be a stone, a watch, a story. Himself.

“Everything is going to be fine, the money is coming” “ the deal is happening.”

Meanwhile, the camera stays close for us to see how badly everything is going.

Poor bastard can’t even lie in peace.

—

EDITING — Okay, but what happens next?

I think editing might be where Uncut Gems gets closest to Howard’s brain. Nothing gets to finish properly.

Howard solves one problem and another one is already waiting. He gets money and immediately has somewhere else to put it. Something goes right and before I can even enjoy that tiny victory, he has converted it into another risk.

The film keep asking the same question Howard does: Okay, but what can we do next?

That’s quite important because satisfaction requires time. You get something you wanted. You sit there. You enjoy it. Maybe you even realise you have enough.

Well, Howard never seems to get that second part, and the film rarely gives it to us either.

Scenes move into each other before the feeling has settled. We’re constantly being pushed forward, and because so many things are happening at once, sometimes I’m still processing one problem when the next one arrives.

That starts doing something to you as a viewer. First you stop for peace, then you start waiting for the next development. Okay what’s the best? Where’s the opal? Who has the money?! Who is outside??!! Will Kevin Garnett buy ?!

OKAY NOW WHAT? NOW WHAT?!

IT becomes its own little addiction. You’re hooked.

That’s one reason the final bet works so well. Because by then, the film has spent like two hours teaching us to think forward. We don’t want Howard to sit and reflect on his choices because, horrifyingly, that would feel like the film has stopped working.

So we want the next thing. Which is exactly Howard’s problem.

—

SOUND — Everyone please SHUT THE FUCK UP.

If editing keeps us moving, sound makes sure we never get comfortable while doing it. There are scenes in Uncut Gems where I don’t know who I’m supposed to listen to.

Howard is talking and somebody else is talking over him, and his phone rings, and another person starts shouting. Plus, the door is now buzzing, and the music is playing, and somebody wants to get into the shop, AND SOMEBODY ALREADY INSIDE WANTS TO LEAVE!!

EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP.

It’s horrible — I LOVE IT.

Usually, films help us. If two characters are having the important conversation, the sound generally makes sure we can hear that conversation. The rest of the world politely behaves itself for a quick minute.

Uncut Gems does not have those manners. Everything feels important at the same time, and that gives us a particular relationship with Howard because this is apparently how he lives. Every problem is urgent. Every person wants something. Every phone call could change the situation. Every interruption might contain either disaster or opportunity.

You start then to listen like him. What matters right now? who can help me? Who do I need to avoid? Which noise is the dangerous one?

Even Daniel Lopatin’s score can feel against what you’re watching. It does not always underline anxiety in the obvious way. Sometimes the music feels huge, dreamy, even cosmic while Howard is doing something incredibly stupid in his shop.

I like that because Howard probably doesn’t experience his life as some pathetic little series of bad decisions. To him, this is enormous. This could be the one!! This could change everything.

The sound gives his hunger scale and when the film finally does give us quiet moments, you notice it because you’ve been trained to expect interruption. That’s another thing need can do, I suppose.

When you’re always waiting for the next thing, quiet starts can feel suspicious.

—

PERFORMANCE — Howard really believes Howard

Adam Sandler has probably the hardest job in the film because Howard needs to be exhausting without becoming someone we stop caring about. And he never switches off!

He’s constantly performing for somebody. He performs for a customer, for his wife, for his girlfriend, for the men he owes money to; Kevin Garnett, his employees. He probably performs for himself too.

But what makes the performance so good is that I’m not always sure he experiences himself as lying. You see, when he tells someone the money is coming, I think a part of him believes it. When he says he has a plan, he believes that too. When he tells somebody to trust him, there’s this incredible confidence that makes you understand how he has survived for this long.

Howard is good at talking his way through the consequences of being Howard. Which unfortunately allows him to continue being Howard.

Sandler gives him this constant forward energy. His voice too keeps moving. His hands move, his face changes the second he sees an opportunity. You can almost watch a bad idea become a brillant idea in his head.

That distinction really is important because Howard doesn’t behave like somebody who things he has lost control. If anything, he behaves like somebody who thinks control is about five minutes away.

That’s much sadder, yes. If he knew everything was hopeless, perhaps he could stop, but he always has another idea. Another bigger idea, and Sandler makes us believe that he believes it.

Sometimes we almost believe it too.

Subscribe now

LONG NOTES

Do we actually know what we need?

My experience says no, not always. I’m much better at knowing what I want right now than what would actually make me feel more whole over time.

Wanting is immediate, right? It has an object, like a person, a job, an apartment, a body shape, an escape. Need is a bit murkier. Sometimes the thing I want is only the shape my need has taken because it’s easier to name.

If I want constant attention … Maybe I need reassurance.

If I want to leave everything behind. Maybe I need rest, agency, or a life that is more like mine, or at least feels more like mine.

If I want success. Maybe I need to feel valuable.

What’s annoying is that I can get exactly what I wanted and discover the hunger is still there. Howard in Uncut Gems gets wins and immediately needs another. Branding in Shame satisfies desire constantly and stays empty. Freddie in The Master keeps finding things to attach himself to because he cant quite name what he’s actually searching for.

I also think needs change. Something that genuinely saved me at 22 can imprison me at 38. Independence can be necessary after a controlling relationship, then later become a defence against closeness. Ambition can build a life, then eventually stop feeding it.

I suppose adulthood isnt finally figuring out “what i need” and filling the answer away forever. It’s more like getting better at noticing the difference between the thing that gives me relief and the thing that give me pleasure. What makes me feel wanted vs. what actually nourishes me. Those overlap less than we’d like. I know.

Oh yeah, and sometimes we only recognise a need backwards. Let’s say you meet someone who listens properly and now realise you felt heard. Or You stop doing something for a month and then you realise how exhausted it made you. You lose a routine and discover it was holding you together.

So no, i’m not convinced we always know what we need. I know we often discover it through what repeatedly fails to satisfy us.

Why does being needed feel so good?

Does it make me feel useful? Chosen? Important, and so, it makes me harder to abandon all at once?

There’s a very basic pleasure in knowing your presence changes someone else’s life. You’re not interchangeable anymore. Someone depends on your attention, your care, your knowledge, your body, your stability, whatever it is. That can feel incredibly intimate.
Being needed also feels safer I find than simply being loved. Love is frighteningly voluntary. Someone can love you and stll leave. Need feels more concrete. It gives the relationship infrastructure. If they need me, maybe they won’t disappear.

And… Yeah, that’s where it gets complicated.

Caring for someone can be beautiful, but we can also start needing their need for us. Their dependence becomes part of our identity. Then if they heal, become independent, find other people, or simply stop requiring what we provide, we can feel rejected in some ways, even tough something good has happened.

That’s why Phantom Thread is such a fascinating film for this question. Reynolds spends his life presenting himself as the powerful one, the person everybody else accommodates, and yet, Alma, eventually discovers that there’s a part of him that wants to become helpless enough to be cared for. And she wants to be the person wh o can give him that care.

They both get something from being needed.

There’s a darker version in The Master too. Lancaster doesnt merely want to help Freddie. Freddie gives Lancaster something: someone to save, study, control, believe in. If Freddie became completely fine tomorrow, part of Lancaster’s purpose would disappear.

so, Why does being needed feel so good? I guess being need can feel like proof that we matter.

Do we need the thing, or the person we become when we have it?

Well, I know a job can matter because of the person you become when you have it: competent, respected, busy, someone with somewhere to go in the morning.

A relationship can matter because around that person you become funnier, softer, more adventurous, more sexual, less afraid. Then we the relationship ends, part of what you mourn is not only them. You miss yourself with them.

Money, I find, can work the same way. I know I don’t actually need the expensive clothes. What I need is the version of myself they seem to confirm: desirable, no longer the person i used to be.

Even addiction can get tangled up in this. The substance (not the film, silly!) gives you a state, but that state also gives you an identity. Confident me. Social me. Calm me. The person i can’t seem to access sober.

That’s why losing something can feel like losing a piece of yourself. The obvious question is “ do I still want this person/job/life?” but the harder question is actually “ who did i get to be when i had it, and is that actually what I’m trying to get back?”

Cinema, as we all know, is full of this.

Again, in Phantom Thread, Almost does not simply want Reynolds. Being necessary to him gives her power and a place inside a world that initially treats her as replaceable.

In Sound of Metal, Ruben desperately wants his hearing back, but underneath that he wants Ruben the drummer, Ruben with Lou, Ruben whose life still makes sense.

Past of Lives also, but in a quieter way, has a version of this. Hae Sung isn’t only a person Nora could have chosen. He carries a version of Nora herself, the girl she was before America, before Arthur.

Very often, we, confuse the thing with the self it allows us to inhabit.

If you still need them to suffer, have you actually let them go?

Revenge can keep someone emotionally present just as effectively as longing can.

If you need someone to suffer, some part of the relationship is obviously still alive in you as a moral account that has not been settled. You may no longer want the person back, but you still want the universe to confirm that what happened mattered and they they were wrong.

The desire for vengeance can come from anger, obviously, but also from wounded pride. If they move on happily, it can feel like they escaped the consequence while you were left carrying them. Their suffering becomes imagined proof that you weren’t disposable, that' the lost cost them too.

So letting go isn’t necessarily reaching some saintly state where you wish them perfect happiness. We’re not obliged to become Buddhist monks after every breakup, but there’s probably a difference between wanting to humble this person a little and wanting them to regret losing you. One make your peace dependant on their future.

Revenge is perhaps the least flattering form of attachment. But fuck, it feels good. And to finish I think I want to say that really letting go begins when their happiness or misery stops feeling like information about your worth.

Subscribe now

AFTER THE CREDITS

ARTWORK

Félix González-Torres, Untitled. (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)

A pile of sweets representing the weight of his dying partner, which visitors are allowed to take from. Love, consumption, disappearance, replenishment, needing someone while watching them vanish.

ONE BOOK

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion.

Obsession stripped of romance. A life reorganised around waiting for another person. It treats with the question of when desire becomes something that starts running your life.

THE PLAYLIST

READER QUESTION

What’s something you once thought you needed that you eventually learned to live without?

Raphaël, The Long Take.

We tend to imagine jealousy like this ugly little emotion we should have grown out of somewhere around secondary school. Someone you know gets the perfect job, the ‘perfect partner’, he has the talent and so many things you wanted, and you’re supposed to smile politely and feel happy for them like a well-adjusted adult.

Jealousy is interesting to me because it’s rarely just about wanting what another person has. Their existence starts poking at something inside you. They’re more talented, more attractive, more relaxed, more successful, more desire, more whatever, and now the annoying question isn’t really about why do they have that, but really about what does them having it say about me.

The person you envy becomes a mirror you didn’t ask for. They remind you of the thing you think you’re missing, the thing you thought you deserved, the part of yourself you don’t quite trust.

These five films take jealousy in completely different directions. One man watches someone receive the greatness he thought he has earned. One woman becomes obsessed with somebody who seems to possess everything she lacks. Another man wants somebody else’s entire life. A husband discovers that his wife has an inner world he cannot control. Two women fight desperately to remain the person someone else chooses.

Jealousy tells us little about the person we envy, but it tells us loads about what we’re afraid we lack.

Subscribe now

Amadeus (Miloš Forman, 1984)

Salieri has done everything correctly. At least according to Salieri.

He devoted himself to music. He worked and he behaved! He took this talent seriously. He eve believes he has some kind of arrangement with God: give me greatness and I’ll dedicate that greatness back to you.

Then Mozart shows up and he’s childish, vulgar, irritating and, worst of all, completely fucking brillant. That’s what destroys Salieri. Mozart’s talent doesn’t only make him jealous. It makes his entire understanding of the world feel ridiculous.

Salieri thought greatness would be a reward. Mozart makes greatness look like luck.

You can hear how painful that is everytime Salieri talks about the music. He genuinely understands how extraordianry Mozart is, probably better than almost anyone around him. His jealousy is mixed with admiration, which makes the whole thing worse. It would be easier if Mozart were simply overrated. Salieri could then dismiss him, complain about standards declining and go home. He can’t. He knows.

That kind of jealousy is very human. You work hard at something, build part of your identity around being good at it, then somebody appears who seems to possess naturally what you’ve spent years trying to earn.

Their success starts feeling like an insult. We tell ourselves we want things because we love them, yet a lot of our self-worth gets tangled up in being good at them too. Salieri doesn’t only want to make beautiful music, he also wants being a great composer to prove something about who he is.

Mozart threatens that proof simply by existing. Brutal isn’t it?

The person you envy doesn’t even need to take anything from you. They can just make you wonder whether the thing you thought made you special was ever yours in the first place.

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

Nina looks at Lily and sees basically everything she has spent her life trying not to be. Lily is loose, sexual, instinctive, relaxed. She seems comfortable in her body in a way Nina absolutely isn’t. Nina has discipline, technique, control. She can do the White Swan perfectly because perfection is the language she understands.

The Black Swan needs something else. Then Lily walks in looking like she hasn’t spent her entire life being terrified of doing something incorrectly. OF COURSE NINA HATES HER. She’s also fascinated by her. Seeing a pattern?

That combination is what makes jealousy so interesting in Black Swan. Lily isn’t merely a rival for the role. She becomes this walking collection of qualities Nina thinks she needs in order to become complete.

Everytime Lily appears comfortable, Nina feels more rigid, and everytime Lily is spontaneous, Nina becomes more aware of how controlled she is. AND, everytime Lily seems sexual without trying, Nina sees another part of herself she doesn’t how how to access.

We often get most jealous of people who represent something we secretly want permission to become. That’s different from simply wanting their success. Nina doesn’t want Lily exact life, obviously. What she wants is whatever quality Lily seems to possess that allows her to move through hat life so easily.

Anyone who has ever become weirdly irritated by someone who is very confident, very social, very attractive, very relaxed, very successful or extremely good at parallel parking probably understands the mechanism. They’re just making too aware of yourself without doing anything directly to you.

Jealousy can be admiration after it’s gone slightly rotten.

The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999)

Tom Ripley look at Dickie Greenleaf and sees an entire life he wants access to. Money is part of is, obviously. The clothes, the beautiful places, the freedom to travel around Italy while apparently doing very little except being handsome near water.

Dickie has something even more important though. He belongs. People want him around. He moves through wealthy social circles without looking like he’s memorising the rules. He seems comfortable being Dickie Greenleaf in a way Tom has never really felt comfortable being Tom Ripley.

Tom wants Dickie’s life so badly that eventually wanting what Dickie has and waiting to be Dickie start becoming the same thing. I find that particularly dark bcause jealousy usually still assumes there’s a stable “you” doing the envying. You want their partner, their success, their confidence their apartment, but Tom goes further. The problem becomes Tom himself. He doesn’t only think Dickie has better things. Dickie appears to be a better person to be.

That feeling can exist in much smaller, less murderous forms too. Let’s say you meet someone who seems effortlessly comfortable inside a life you’d love and start wondering what it would feel like to wake up as them for a week. They know the right people, they say the right thing, their clothes somehow always fit properly. Nobody has ever watched them panic while ordering wine. Their life looks coherent from the outside.

Jealousy can turn another person into a fantasy, and fantasies are incredibly unfair competition. You get access to every insecure thought inside your own head while seeing only the version of their life they happen to show you. Tom eventually tries to erase that distance completely.

If being myself feels unbearable, perhaps becoming you will fix it. Surely. And that’s where admiration becomes terrifying.

Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

Alice tells Bill about a man she once desire. Nothing happened, and that almost makes it worse.

Bill can deal with actions. Actions are concrete. If someone cheats, if someone lies, or leaves, there’s a thing you can point at and say “there, that’s what happened.” But Alice gives him a fantasy. She tells him there was once another man she wanted so badly that, at least in that moment, she could imagine throwing away their life together.

Bill completely loses his shit internally, and that’s what I love about the jealousy in Eyes Wide Shut. Alice hasn’t betrayed him. She has simply revealed that there are parts of her that do not belong to him. Her desires and her imagination exist independently. She can love Bill and still have thoughts Bill isn’t at the centre of.

Marriage has failed to maker her inner life a jointly owned asset. Bill spends the rest of the film spiralling around that discovery. The thought of Alice desiring somebody else becomes more threatening than an actual affair because imagination has no neat boundaries. He can’t control what happened inside her head. He can’t compete with it properly either.

Jealousy often carries this fear of replaceability. You want to believe you occupy some unique position in another person’s life. Their attraction to someone else reminds you that being loved doesn’t make you the only person they could ever want.

We love people who continue to have private thoughts, fantasies, memories and desires that exist without our supervision.

How considerate of them.

Eyes Wide Shut takes Bill’s jealousy and turns it into this long confrontation with the fact that intimacy does not mean ownership. You can know somebody incredibly well and still never possess their entire inner world. It’s probably for the best really.

The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018)

Sarah and Abigail want Anne’s affection, although affection in The Favourite comes with with quite a few additional benefits. Love means access, and it means status, influence, security, and it might even mean survival. That makes every little shift in Anne’s attention feel enormous.

Sarah already has a place beside Anne when Abigail arrives. She knows her and loves her in her own complicated way and holds real political power through that closeness. Abigail understands very quickly that being liked by Anne can transform her entire position in the world.

Affection is a ressource, and I know it sounds incredibly cynical until you think about how often being chosen affects the way we feel about ourselves. Someone picks you instead of somebody else, and now you feel desirable, important, interesting. Then they turn their attention toward someone new and all those lovely feelings wobble.

Sarah and Abigail aren’t only fighting over Anne as a person. Each is fighting for hat being Anne’s chosen person allows her to be. That’s what makes jealousy so intense when our identity becomes dependant on another person’s attention. Every rival starts feeling like evidence that our place is temporary.

You see this everywhere outside royal courts too, thankfully with fewer poisoned cups. You see this in friendships, in relationships, in families, and in workplaces. Someone else becomes the favourite and now you’re doing emotional math you’d be deeply embarrassed to admit out loud. Why did they invite her? Why did he laugh harder at his joke? Why does she text them first? Why am I even noticing this? The answer is usually less flattering than we’d like. Being chosen feels good, and we want to keep feeling chosen.

Jealousy is embarrassing

That’s why we hide jealousy so much. Admitting you’re jealous means admitting someone else has managed to disturb the story you tell yourself about who you are.

Mozart makes Salieri question his talent and his relationship with God. Lily makes Nina confront everything she has supressed in herself. Dickie makes Tom ashamed of being Tom. Alice forces Bill to confront the limites of his importance inside her inner life. Abigail threatens Sarah’s place beside Anne, while Sarah threatens the life Abigail is desperately trying to secure.

The other person becomes important because they touch an insecurity that was already there. Removing them does not necessarily remove the insecurity. You can defeat the rival, get the promotion, win the person, receive the applause, become the favourite again and still have that little voice waiting for the next person who makes you feel threatened.

Jealousy wants us to stare at them. Who are they? What do they have? Who does everyone love them? What makes them better?

Why does this person make me feel like I’m not enough?

That answer is probably going to be less fun. Still, it might actually tell you something.

—

Raphaël, The Jealous Take.

Subscribe now

First of all, let me say this before I murder your favourite child.

Plot is useful. Plot gives you movement, causality, anticipation, consequence. Hitchcock cared about plot. Fincher cares about plot. Bong Joon-ho cares about plot. Plenty of extraordinary filmmakers build incredibly precise narrative machines. But plot is only one of cinema’s language, and somehow it has become the language we treat as the film itself.

Ask someone what In the Mood for Love is about and they can tell you in 20 seconds. Two neighbours discover their spouses are having an affair, and they grow close, but they don’t quite becomes lovers themselves.

OKAY. Congrats, we have successfully murdered In the Mood for Love.

Because what the fuck happened to the corridors? The repetition? the dresses?? Nat King Cole?? Those slow walks to buy noodles??!! Maggie Cheung entering aroom and Tony Leung looking at her half a second too long? The cramped interiors?! The bodies constantly passing without touching? The fucking red?!

Paid members get the deeper essays and the louder Friday pieces — €5/month or €50/year. If The Long Take has become part of your week, this is how you keep it coming.

Subscribe now

That stuff isn’t decoration around the story — It’s the bloody story. Or at least, that’s where the emotional story lives, and this is where I think “vibe” gets unfairly treated as an unserious word. People hear vibe and think pretty cinematography, nice soundtrack, wallpaper. But Vibe to me, is often just the casual word I use for an incredibly complicated combination of cinematic choices.

Framing + duration + light + sound + space + editing + faces + movements + texture + music + silence+ performance. Put all of those together and you get a feeling that cannot really be translated into plot. That feeling is cinema.

Take Aftersun. The plot is insultingly small. Father and daughter on on holiday. But Charlotte Wells isn’t really communicating through events, you see. She’s communicating through fragments, distance, DV footage, what Sophie sees, what she does not see, Calum disappearing into himself while remaining physically beside her, the strange gaps between memory and understanding. You could preserve every single plot point and shoot the film differently and completly destroy Aftersun.

Same with Sound of Metal, actually. A drummer loses his hearing. Joins deaf community, gets implants, relationship changes. That’s the Wikipedia skeleton. But what makes Sound of Metal such an extraordinary film is that Darius MArder makes us inhabit Ruben’s changing relationship with the world. Sound disappears and when it returns it’s distorded. Silence changes meaning. Ahmed’s body is restless before the film gradually begins asking him to sit still. The cinematic language isn’t illustrating Ruben’s experience. IT IS GIVING US RUBEN’S EXPERIENCE.

Perhaps this is where the modern obsession with plot becomes irritating: we’ve started evaluating films according to how efficiently they deliver information.

I fucking hate when reviewers say “nothing happened.”

NOTHING HAPPENED?!

Two people sat in a room for ten minutes and altered how they understood one another, but nobody got murdered so apparently the projector broke.

Before Sunset is basically two people walking around Paris talking. Jeanne Dielman contains domestic routine. Perfect Days repeatedly watches a man clean toilets, listen to music and photograph trees. Beau Travail could probably be reduced to a paragraph. Lost in Translation has barely enough conventional plot to survive contact with somebody demanding Act III escalation. And yet these films are full of movement, and just not necessarily plot movement.

Emotional movement, spatial movement, changes in attention. Power moving between people. A face becoming different because we know something now that we didnt 30 minutes ago. That’s the stuff I think plot obsession makes us miss.

Plot is the easiest part of cinema to talk about.

That might be why we overvalue it. We can describe events. You can debate whether something makes sense. You can identify plot holes. You can explain endings. you can make a 30 minute youtube video titled THE ENDING OF [FILM] EXPLAINED and finally rescue civilisation from the terrible burden of having to interpret an image.

Cinematic language is harder. Try explaining why a cut made you uncomfortable. Why having someone positioned at the edge of a frame changed the scene or why a room feels hostile, or even why an actor almost doing nothing with their face destroys you.

Try explaining why Beau Travail ends the way it does and why that body moving through that space means more than another five pages of dialogue explaining Galoup’s internal state ever could.

You have to pay attention.

Plot can be remembered, but cinema has to be noticed, and I think there’s a lovely provocative argument around adaptations too, because if plot were the most thing, every faithful adaptation should be roughly as good as the novel it came from.

Clearly fucking not.

You can give two directors the same screenplay and get two different films. Same characters, same dialogue, same sequence of events but different cinema. Because directing is largely the act of deciding how we experience what happens. Where do I put the camera? When do I cut? Whose face do I show when somebody speaks? How long do I stay after the dialogue ends? What can we hear? What can’t we see? How close are these bodies? Does this room feel enormous or claustrophobic? Do I explain emotion or make you search for it? That’s where the director lives.

Let me say this, so you can understand better: Plot tells you what happened. Cinematic language tells you what it meant to be there.

Wong Kar-wai without vibe isn’t Wong Kar-wai. Lynch without atmosphere isn’t Lynch. Same goes for Sofia Coppola and how she plays around texture and distance. Malick without light, movement and voice isn’t Malick. Gaspar Noé without sensory aggression isn’t Noé.

You could preserve their plots and remove their cinematic language and almost nothing important would remain.

Read more

When we think about loneliness in films, there’s very specific image that comes to mind, like someone eating dinner alone, or someone staring through a window, or even someone walking through a city while everybody else appears to be having a much better time.

Cinema bloody loves a lonely person near a window.

The thing is, loneliness rarely works that neatly. You can be surrounded by people and still feel disconnected from them, and you can have friends, a partner, family members, coworkers, a phone vibrating every 12 sec, and still feel like nobody is quite reaching you.

That’s the kind of loneliness I’m interested in for this movie curation.

I think a lot of it comes down to being seen. Not literally noticed. Most of us are noticed plenty. I mean more the feeling of somebody recognising what is actually heappning inside you, or at least getting close enough that you don’t have to translate yourself every five mins.

Being loved and feeling known aren’t really the same thing, are they?

These five films below come at loneliness from different places. One is about feeling detached from your own life. One is about wanting intimacy so badly that you accept it in a form nobody around you understands. One is about protecting yourself until nobody can really reach you. One is about losing the specific person who made you ordinary life feel less lonely. The last one goes somewhere much darker, where loneliness starts changing the way you see everybody else.

Subscribe now

Lost In Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)

Bob and Charlotte are hardly alone. They’re in Tokyo, and they’re surrounded by people, surrounded by hotels, noise, strangers and work commitments. Bob has a wife and children back home and Charlotte is literally travelling with her husband.

Both of them feel slightly removed from their own lives. That’s what I love about Lost in Translation. Their loneliness doesn’t come from having nobody around but it comes from this feeling that everyone else is somewhere they can’t quite reach.

Bob’s marriage has turned into phone calls about carpet samples and family logistics and Charlotte is beside a husband who loves her, yet she spends huge part of the trip alone while he disappears into work and people she doesn’t connect with in any particular way. Neither relationship is presented as some monstrous disaster really, and it what makes the loneliness worse.

They meet almost by accident and they get this tiny relief from having to explain why they’re unhappy. Bob will not fix Charlotte’s life and Charlotte does not rescue Bob from his marriage. They just recognise something in each other.

I think there’s a specific comfort in meeting someone who seems to be standing in the same strange emotional place as you. You can know them for three days and somehow feel more understood than you have around people you’ve known you for years.

That doesn’t mean the people back home don’t love you but it just means love doesn’t automatically guarantee recognition.

Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

Theodore is lonely in a completely different way. He wants intimacy, he really really wants it. His marriage has ended and he’s struggling to move on. He spends his day writing beautiful personal letters for other people and then goes home to a life where there isn’t much closeness waiting for him.

Then Scarlett Johansson arrives again. As Samantha.

The ridiculous thing is that Theodores relationship with an operating system (OS) works because, emotionally, she gives him something very real. She listens, she asks questions, she remembers things. She’s curious about him. He can talk without worrying about being judged in the usual ways.

That starts sounding quite attractive once you think about it. Most human relationships come with friction. Another person has needs, has bad moods, or simply, they have their own history and their own interpretation of whatever you just said. Samantha initially feels like connection without a lot of the risk that makes connection difficult.

Theodore gets to be seen while remaining relatively safe. Loneliness can make us incredibly open to form of connection we might otherwise dismiss. When you’re lonely enough, being wanted can start feeling very close to being undetstood.

The relationship is real to Theodore and his feelings are also real, aswell as the comfort is getting. None of that means it can give him everything he needs.

It’s quite seductive to find connection in a form that seems built around you. Fragile but seductive. This kidn of intimacy becomes complicated the second the other person stops existing mainly for your emotional comfort.

Annoying feature of relationships really. The other perso also has to be a person.

Moonlight ( Barry Jenkins, 2016)

Okay — hold on. I’m going to cry. Let me grab some tissue.

Okay, I’m good. Let’s go.

Chiron’s loneliness hurts because he learns very young that showing too much of himself can be dangerous. People watch him, judge him, bully him. His mother is struggling with her own life. The world around him keeps teaching him that softness comes with consequences, so naturally, he protects himself.

That protection works, to a point. By adulthood, Chiron has built this hard exterior that gives other people much less access to him. He looks strong. Controlled, difficult to read. Safe, basically.

The problem with armour it that it makes hugging slightly complicated. What gets me about Moonlight is how loneliness grows out of survival. Chriron isn’t withdrawn because hes doesn’t want connection. He wants it desperately. You see that in the people he allows close to him, especially Juan, Teresa and Kevin. He just learns to hide the parts of himself most likely to get hurt.

Years later, that means people can be around him without really knowing him. They’re meeting the version he created to survive rather than the person underneath it.

Becoming good at needing nobody is terribly lonely. We praise independence all the time. Learn to enjoy your own company, protect your peace, don’t depend on anyone. All useful advice until self-sufficiency becomes part of your identity and now letting somebody care for you feels more frightening than being alone.

Chiron’s loneliness is the distance between himself and the people who might actually be able to reach him.

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022)

Pádraic’s loneliness is beautifully ordinary at first. He simply wants his friend back. That’s it.

Colm decides he doesnt want to spend time with him anymore, and now this little routine Pádraic probably never thought about becomes the centre of his entire life. That’s one kind of loneliness people don’t talk about enough I feel. You can have othe rpeople around you and still feel lonely for one specific person.

Pádraic has his sister and he knows everyone on the island. He can go to the pub. Technically, he isn’t isolated. Well, he lives on an island so he is, but you know what I mean.

He just wants Colm! Losing one friendship can expose how much of your life depended on it. The drink you always had together, the walk you took, the person you complained to, and the stupid conversation that never seemed important until you no longer had it.

Pádraic isn’t looking for any generic company to fill a specific absence, and that’s why he becomes so desperate. He wants the person who occupied that exact little space in his life.

Colm experienced the friendship differently, which make the whole thing even sadder. What felt necessary to Pádraic had started feeling like wasted time to Colm. Nobody has to be lying for that to hurt. Two people can live inside the same relationship and understand its importance in completely different ways.

That might be one of the loneliest things of all.

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

Travis Bickle is where loneliness gets dangerous. He’s isolated, disconnected, unable to sleep, driving around NY every night watching other people live lives he doesn’t really know how to enter.

At first, there’s something painfully recognisable about him; he wants connection. He goes to the cinema, tries to date Betsy, he watches people from a distance and seems convinced that everyone else has acces to some normal human world he’es been excluded from. Then the loneliness start rotting.

We tend to talk about loneliness as if it’s naturally makes people sad, vulnerable, deserving of sympathy. It can do that, sure. It can also make someone resentful. Travis begins interpreting the world through his isolation, and other people become disgusting, fake, corrupt, threatening. His inability to connect slowly turns into a belief that there’s something wrong with everybody else. Loneliness, in that case, becomes anger, then anger gives him something sadness never did: direction.

That’s what makes Taxi Driver such an uncomfortable film to put in a list like this. Travis does need connection, but simply giving him more people would not magically solvewhat’s happening inside him. His isolation has already started feeding a worldview.

You can see how the loop forms. He feels alienated, behaves in ways that push people away, experiences that rejecftion as proof hes does not belong, then becomes even more alienated.

Loneliness can make connection harder at exactly the moment you need it most.

That’s considerably darker than staring through a rainy window.

I don’t think loneliness means what we think it means

These five characters are lonely for different reasons.

Bob and Charlotte are surrounded by people but feel out of sync with their own lives. Theodore wants intimacy so badly that he finds it somwhere nobody expected. Chiron protect himself until protection becomes distance. Pádraic has people around him and still feels the absence of one particular friend. Travis becomes so disconnected that loneliness starts changing the way he understands the world.

That’s why “ just meet more people “ has always felt like such useless advice. You can meet 50 people and still miss the one person who knew how to make you feel understood. You can be loved and still hide most of yourself. You can become extremly good at being alone then discover you have no idea how to let somebody in. You can spend all day talking to people and realise, once everything goes quiet, that you have not actually felt close to anyone.

A lot of time, loneliness is just the absence of recognition. That doesn’t mean one magical person arrives, sees your soul and fixes everything. Cinema has already inflicted enough soulmates on us. I think it’s smaller than that.

Somebody listens and actually hears what you meant. Somebody notices you’re not quite yourself. Somebody knows which version of “I’m fine” means you’d rather not talk and which one means please ask me again. Someone sees a part of you that you’d started thinking nobody would ever notice.

The cure for loneliness probably isn’t more people, but that one person getting a little closer is already a lot.

—

Raphaël, The Lonely Take.

Paid members get the deeper essays and the louder Friday pieces — €5/month or €50/year. If The Long Take has become part of your week, this is how you keep it coming.

Subscribe now

Me included.

That sounds ridiculous because I do love Letterboxd. I love seeing what people are watching, clicking on an actor and somehow ending up three directors away with another twelve films added to a watchlist I’ll never finish. I like looking back at what I watched years ago and discovering that apparently I once thought some forgettable Netflix film deserved four stars. There are evenings where scrolling Letterboxd makes me want to watch films more than browsing Netflix does, which is probably both a compliment to LB and an indictment of whatever the fuck streaming platforms have become.

But Ive started noticing something about the ritual. A film ends, the credits appear, and before the lights have even come back on, phones start glowing around the room. I know what some of us are doing because I do the same thing at home. LETTERBOXD LOG TIME. 3.5 stars? Maybe 4? Heart button? Perhaps a little review if I have something clever to say?

DONE.

A director and an entire crew spent months making a film, thinking about every image, sound, cut, pause and silence, and within 30 seconds we’ve converted the whole experience into ★★★½.

Read more

A new city, a new job, a new relationship. Maybe a new haircut if things have really gone to shit. There’s comforting about imagining a clean line between the person you were yesterday and whoever you’re going to become next.

Real life is slightly less cooperative though. You bring stuff with you. The bad habits, the people you miss, the mistakes you thought you’d moved past, the version of yourself that still wants the old life back. You can move 8k kilometres away and your brain has the unbelievable audacity to come with you.

That’s probably why i find films about starting over more interesting when they don’t treat change like some inspirational montage. Starting again can be exciting, sure, I’ve done it a few times, but it can also be sad, embarrassing, lonely and incredibly inconvenient. If often begins with admitting that something is over, which means a new beginning is usually carying a little grief inside it.

These five films look at that from completely different places. One person has change forced on him. Another keeps improvising because nothing in her life stats still for very long. Someone else has to rebuild after helping destroy her own life. One tries to erase everything and become somebody new. The last one finds new beginning almost by accident, through making something with another person.

Subscribe now

Sound of Metal (Darius Marder, 2019)

Ruben never asked for a new life.

That’s what makes Sound of Metal such a brutal place to start. His hearing begins to disappear and then everything he built his life around becomes uncertain at once. Music, touring, his relationship with Lou, even the basic way he moves through the world. Nobody asked whether he fancied a bit of personal growth.

His first instinct is 100% understandable: fix it! Get the surgery, find the money, get back to the band, get back to Lou, get back to normal, and voila!

Ruben spends a huge part of the film treating his new life like a temporary inconvenience standing between him and the old one. I think most of us would do the exact same thing, wouldn’t we? Acceptance sounds lovely when the thing you’re accepting isn’t happening to you.

The painful part is that Ruben does begin building something else. He learns sign language and learn to connects with people in the deaf community. You can see another life becoming possible around him while he’s still looking over his shoulder at his previous one.

Change often begins before we’re emotionally ready for it. Ruben does not heal, reach some wise conclusion and then move forward. He moves forward while still fighting the fact that he has to.

Starting again begins with loss here, and the hard thing Ruben has to lose might be the belief that everything can go back to exactly how it was.

Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012)

Frances Ha gives us a much less dramatic kind of starting over, which is probably why it hurts in such a familiar way.

Frances doesn’t lose her hearing, nothing like an enormous catastrophe. Life just keeps moving faster than she does. Sophie movies out. Apartments change and jobs disappear. Plans don’t work, and people around her seem to be entering proper adulthood while Frances is still trying to work out where she’s sleeping next month.

She keeps restarting without ever getting the satisfying feeling of having officially restarted.

That’s adulthood far more often than we admit, really. There’s no big scene where the music swells and somebody announces that your new chapter has begun. You just realise the person you thought you’d live with for years has moved on, your career isn’t doing what you hoped, and you’re carrying your belongings into another temporary bedroom.

Starting again often means becoming a beginner at an age wher eyou thought you’d be good at things by now. Frances watches people become more settled while she keeps improvising, and you can feel that little humiliation of thinking everyone else has somehow received the instructions. They have not, obviously. Some of them are simply better at pretending.

What I love a lot about Frances is that she never becomes some radically improved version of herself. She remains awkward, funny, impulsive and very Frances. Her life starts taking shape because she keeps making small decisions, accepting small disappointments and moving anyway.

The film makes starting over feel less like reinvention and more like stubbornness. You keep going until all those temporary choices start resembling a life.

Wild (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2014)

Cheryl in Wild gives us the difficult version where the thing you’re trying to start over from includes your own behaviour.

Grief completely knocks her sideways after the mother dies. Her life unravels through drugs, sex, self-destruction and the collapse of her marriage. She knows other things happened to her, but she also knows the participated in some of the damage that followed.

That makes the Pacific Crest Trail interesting because she isn’t walking toward some shiny new identity. She’s trying to find a way to live with herself again.

She starts badly too, which I love. Her backpack is ridiculous. She’s inexperienced. She’s physically unprepared, she looks like somebody who had decided to transform her life before learning how the camping stove works.

We often imagine that you sort yourself out and then begin again. Cheryl does it the other way around. The beginning is part of sorting herself out. She walks while still greiving, still angry, still carrying shame, still remembering the people and the choices that her there.

What changes is Cheryl’s relationship with what happened. Her past gradually becomes something she can carry without letting it decided every next step.

Starting over after you've fucked is quite hard because there’s no clean villain to leave behind. You’re taking yourself with you. A second chance does not require pretending the first version never happened. You still get to keep walking.

Into the Wild (Sean Penn, 2007)

Christopher McCandless has a much more ambitious plan. He wants the clean state.

He gives away his money, leaves his old life, distances himself from his family, changes his name and heads toward Alaska. That fantasy sounds incredibly seductive. Plenty of us have looked at our lives at some point and thought it might be easier to simply disappear and become somebody else.

New place, new ppeople. Nobody knows the stupid thing you did in 2014. Lovely.

Into the Wild takes that fantasy quite seriously enough to understand why Christopher wants it, then starts poking holes in it. Changing your environment can change a huge amount about your life, but distance doesn’t turn you into a different human being.

Christopher can leave his family behind. His relationship with them still exists inside him. He can reject society, he still needs other people. He can change his name, but th e person carrying that name still has a history.

That’s where putting Wild and Into the Wild beside each other is interesting.

Cheryl walks partly to return to life. Christopher walks because he wants to escape the version of life he inherited. One is learning to live with her past, and the other seems convinced he an travel far enough to leave his behind.

That belief is romantic. It would be lovely if starting over meant reaching a place where none of the old stuff could find you. But unfortunately, your emotional baggage has excellent cardio.

Begin Again (John Carney, 2014)

I wanted to finish with Begin Again because after all that hearing loss, grief, drugs, and existential hiking, we deserve a pint. Or something alcohol-free in my case. Bloody migraines.

Gretta has been betrayed by the person she built part of her life around. Dan’s career has collapsed and his family life is a mess. Neither is approaching the other from a particularly glamorous point in life. Then they make something.

That’s basically it, and I mean that as a compliment.

Their new beginning doesn’t arrive as some grand transformation. They meet, start recording an album around NYC and gradually give each other enough momentum to move again.

This film could easily turn their connection into another romance and solve both their lives with a kiss. thankfully it understands that somebody can change your direction without becoming your destination, and i really like that!

A new beginning can be a friendship, a project, or a stupid idea you try becasuse you’ve got nothing better going on. Someone seeing something in you that you’d stopped seeing yourself.

Gretta doesn’t need to become a different person after her relationship ends. Dan does not become the successful version of himself again. They take what still works, including their talent, humour, experience and general emotional wreckage, and make something out of it.

That feels much closer to how starting over usually works. You rarely get an empty page. You get a page with coffee stains, crossed-out sentences and some embarrassing thing you wrote six months ago. And you continue from there.

Starting over, apparently

I used to think starting over meant becoming new. these films make think it’s much closer to accepting that the old version of your life has ended while understanding the old version of you has not disappeared with it like a magic trick.

Ruben still carries music. Frances still carries Sophie and all those years where she felt behind. Cheryl carries her mother, her grief and the things she did while falling apart. Christopher carries the family and world he’s trying so hard to reject. Gretta and Dan bring their failed relationships and careers straight into the thing they build together. None of them arrives at zero. Nobody does.

Starting over is probably just the nicer name we give to continuing after something has changed. That doesn’t make it less meaningful. I actually find it more comforting. You don’t need to erase the person you were, pretend the bad years never happened or wait until you feel ready to begin another life.

You can begin from there. Mess included.

—

Raphaël, The Long Take.

Paid members get the deeper essays and the louder Friday pieces — €5/month or €50/year. If The Long Take has become part of your week, this is how you keep it coming.

Subscribe now

The mistake is thinking taste means knowing which films are good, but really, taste is much more personal and messier. It’s the pattern underneath your reactions. Like for example, the films you admire but never want to see again (that’s Raw for me.) It’s the supposedly great directors who leave you cold and the trashy thing you love more than the respectable masterpiece. That’s where I think your taste starts showing itself.

Sorry. I don’t have a personality test to tell you that you’re a Bergman person, but I’m going to give you seven pointers, and hopefully it’ll help.

Watch wider, not just better.

Read more

We like to think toxic love is easy to recognise. Two people screaming at each other, breaking things, cheating, lying, making everyone around them uncomfortable. The kind of relation where your friends eventually stops asking questions because they already know you’re getting back together anyway.

Most toxic relationships, like most relationships begin with attraction, chemistry, feeling understood, feeling chosen. Sometimes they even begin with genuine love, which is precisely what makes the whole thing such a pain in the arse to understand later.

Toxicity isn’t always the absence of love. The love can absolutely be there. It just gets mixed with jealousy, dependency, control, obsession, resentment, fear, or that mad belief that suffering together proves the relationship means more. We’re quite good at romancing intensity, aren’t we? Two people who can’t stay away from each other sounds sexy. Someone willing to do absolutely anything for you sounds sexy. A relationship so passionate it could destroy both of you definitely sounds sexy in a movie.

Try living there for six months.

There five films aren’t really about bad couples. They’re about five different ways love can become something else.

If The Long Take has become part of your week, paid membership is the best way to support it.

You’ll get the deeper essays and the louder Friday pieces for €5 a month or €50 a year.

Subscribe now

Happy Together (Wong Kar Wai, 1997)

Happy Together begins with two people thinking a new country might fix their relationship, which is already not an encouraging sign.

Lai Yiu and Ho Po-wing go to Argentina together, break up, get back together, hurt each other, separate again, miss each other. They seem to understand perfectly well that the relationship does not work while also being completely unable to stop wanting it to work.

Wong Kar-wai never needs to convince us that these two people love each other. They clearly do. Lai looks after Ho-Po-wing when he gets hurt, they cook together, sleep beside each other, dance in that tiny kitchen. For a lil’ while, they can even look like the couple they probably imagine themselves being.

That’s what makes leaving difficult, isn’t it? If somebody treats you like shit every minute of every day, at least the evidence is fairly straightforward. Real relationships give you the god Sunday morning, the stupid joke nobody else understands, the night where everything feels normal again. Then three days alter you’re back in the argument you promised yourself you’d never have again.

Missing someone and being good with someone are two completely different things. You can love them, miss them terribly and still be better off without them.

Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017)

Reynolds Woodcock likes his life exactly how he designed it. His house, his work, his breakfast, his routines, the amount of noise somebody is allowed to make while spreading butter on toast. Then Alma turns up and, inconveniently for Reynolds, she has a personality.

Their romance becomes a negotiation over control. Reynolds has all the obvious power at first, but Alma eventually understands something important: she will never really have a place in his life until Reynolds needs her, and so she finds a way to make herself needed.

I’m obviously not recommending poisoning your partner with mushrooms because he’s being annoying at breakfast. Still, what happens underneath all that madness is fascinating. Reynolds becomes softer when he’s weak. He lets Alma care for him. She gets access to a version of him that doesn’t exist when he’s completely in control.

Alma wants a place in Reynolds’ life that only she can fill. She wants to be essential to him. That gets uncomfortable pretty quickly, doesn’t it? Most of us like being needed by the people we love. It gives us purpose, importance, a place. The dodgy bit begins when we need them to remain dependant on us so we can keep that place.

Phantom Thread just takes that very human impulse and adds poisonous mushrooms.

The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)

Erika Kohut lives a life built around control. She teaches piano, lives with her mother, keeps most of herself locked away, then expressed her sexuality through voyeurism, humiliation and fantasies she has no easy way of bringing into ordinary intimacy.

Walter arrives and wants her. Another film might use that as the beginning of some liberating romance where somebody finally sees the real Erika and all that repressesion disappears. Haneke, unsurprisingly, has other plans.

Erika finally tells Walter what she wants sexually, and then the film confront us with something that romantic stories often skip over. Telling somebody what you want does not mean they’re going to want it too.

Walter is attracted to one version of Erika, then discovers desires that don’t fit th e woman he imagined. Erika desperately wants intimacy but seems unable to separate intimacy from humiliation and control. Being desired does not fix her. Sex doesn’t free her. Finding somebody willing to get close doesn’t mean she now knows how to be close.

That’s what makes The Piano Teacher so brutal. You can spend years wanting somebody to see the hidden parts of you, then discover that actually being seen is fucking terrifying.

Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

Most relationships involve collecting information about another person. You learn their habits, you learn their insecurities, their ambitions, what makes them feel attractive, or also what makes them feel stupid.

In a perfect world, you use all this information to love them better. Ideally. Nick & Amy use it for psychological warfare.

Underneath all the muder plots and insanity, Gone Girl is partly about two people becoming disappointed by the version of themselves they created at the beginning of their relationship. Amy has the whole Cool Girl thing, obviously, but Nick performs too. We all do this a bit when we meet someone, don’t we? You’re more spontaneous, more interesting, incredibly relaxed about everything. Five years later you’d quite like to eat pasta in your underwear and be left alone for like twenty minutes.

The scary thing about Nick and Amy isn't simply that they eventually hate each other. They know each other really fucking well. Every insecurity has been catalogued. They understand which buttons to press because they helped install half of them.

We tend to treat being deeply known as one of the great romantic dreams. Here is the person who has seen everything and understands me completely. Gone Girl asks what happens when that person becomes your enemy.

Now, intimacy is terrifying.

Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)

I aspire to something as romantic as “us against the world”. Cinema has been selling that one forever. Nobody understands us, society wants to keep us apart, fuck everyone, it’s you and me.

Mickey and Mallory Knox take the concept rather literally. what interests me about Natural Born Killers isn’t whether they’re toxic toward each other in the usual sense. It’s what their love allows them to become together. They accept each other completely, including the parts that could probably benefit from a little judgement.

We normally treat unconditional acceptance as one of the purest forms of love. “You never have to change for me.” Lovely. Still, if your bf is murdering someone at a patrol station, perhaps a little constructive criticism wouldn’t hurt.

Mickey validates Mallory’s violence and she validates Mickey’s. Together they create a world where everybody outside the relation becomes an enemy, an obstacle or a victim.

Having one person who always takes your side feels incredible. Someone who understands why you did something, who protects you from everybody judging you. Most of the time, that’s probably lovely.

The person who loves you shouldn’t necessarily approve of every version of you though. Sometimes love probably means being the annoying bastard who tells you that you’re becoming someone they don’t recognise. Not quite as sexy as “ us against the world”, admittedly.

So, is love enough?

That’s the annoying thing these films keep coming back to. The love can be genuine and the relationship can still be awful.

Lai and Ho Po-wing can love each other while repeating the same cycle. Alma and Reynolds can find genuine intimacy inside a deeply fucked-up negotiation of power. Erika can want closeness without knowing how to experience it safely. Nick and Amy can understand each other better than anybody while using that understanding to destroy each other. Mickey and Mallory can be devoted while helping one another become much worse human beings.

None of that makes the love fake. That would actually make these films much less interesting.

Love can sit next to resentment. Care can become control. Wanting someone can become dependency. Knowing somebody intimately can give you an incredible ability to hurt them. Accepting someone for who they are can occasionally mean giving them persmission to never become anything better.

We spend a lot of tmie asking whether two people really love each other. I’m starting to think there’s another question that tells us a bit more.

What does loving each other allow these two people to become?

Loving someone and being good for each other are absolutely not the same thing.

—

Raph, The Toxic Take.

Paid members get the deeper essays and the louder Friday pieces — €5/month or €50/year. If The Long Take has become part of your week, this is how you keep it coming.

Subscribe now

I would not call Sound of Metal ignored in the usual sense.

It was critically acclaimed, nominated for Best Picture, Riz Ahmed got an Oscar nom’, and it won for sound and editing. So the industry noticed it. Hooray.

What It didn’t get was the cultural afterlife a film that good should have had.

Sound of Metal came out, people loved it, awards happened, everyone agreed Riz Ahmed was extraordinary, the sound design was brillant, and then … next film. Next festival. Next Oscar season. Next A24 thing. Next discourse. Cinema culture now seems incredibly good at discovering great films and bad at keeping them alive.

Sound of Metal is exactly the kind of film that should have grown. It’s not built around a twist people can endlessly explain or some meme-able character who keeps circulating online. It’s a quiet film —pun intended— about identity, resistance, grief, dependency, adaption and the possibility that the life you’re desperate to recover might simply be gone. Those ideas get richer when you live with the film. Ruben’s final decision means more to me the more I think about everything before it.

Even that ending. He takes the processors off and sits in silence. A lesser film would tell us that Ruben has accepted himself now, but Sound of Metal does not. Ruben just stops fighting for a moment. See the difference?

Oh, and Riz Ahmed is doing half the movie physically. His body is permanently trying to get somewhere else. Hands moving, eyes searching, muscles tense. Stillness feels almost unbearable to Ruben cause stillness wold mean confronting what has happened. Then Joe basically tells him that deafness isn’t the thing that needs fixing. Ruben’s obsession with returning to his previous self is the problem.

That’s such a difficult idea bcause most films about disability would naturally organise themselves around overcoming the obstacle, and i like how this film just fucks with that entire structure.

The implant doesn’t give Ruben his life back, Lou doesn’t give Ruben his life back. Music doesn’t give Ruben his life back. No magic restoration of the person he was. He has to exist after losing the version of himself he thought he needed to remain.

So when I say loudly that Sound of Metal deserved better, I’m not saying simply saying it’s an underrated masterpiece nobody appreciated. It’s not true. We recognised the masterpiece, but we abandoned it anyway. I guess that’s where is my problem.

It’s a broader modern problem. I know I know.

We spend an absurd amount of time asking what the next great film is while barely giving the last great film enough time to become part of us. A movie comes out, then you have reviews coming out, early reactions, then some rankings. Fucking rankings. Hate them. Oh, and then awards predictions, naturally. Then the awards! And then you know the routine by now, the calendar resets and now the film feels old because it came out three years ago, which is completely fucking insane.

Books get rediscovered for decades. Album become records people return to. With contemporary movies, there’s increasingly this feeling that their cultural relevance has an expiry date attached.

Sound of Metal being from 2020 makes thole whole thing even stranger to me. It’s 6 years old. That’s nothing. Yet talking about it already feels like rescuing something from an archive.

Read more

It’s a topic I always flirted with in my Substack Notes but never really got into it properly. I suppose I was struggling to find the right angle. Initially I wanted to talk how great conversations in cinema shows us who characters really are. Neat, right? Nope. It’s boring. True, but boring.

Okay — let’s go deeper. A conversation is two people trying to control what the other person understands about them (and failing a little.)

When having one conversation; you choose words. You leave things out. You filter your thoughts really. You make joke because saying the real thing would be embarrassing. You sometimes also pretend not to care. You ask a question you already know the answer to just to keep the flow going. You talk some irrelevant thing because what you actually want to ask is Do you like me?

And guess what. The other person is doing the exact same thing. Probably.

Subscribe now

So maybe the real question becomes → What happens in the gap between what we say, what we mean, and what the other person hearts? Ha!! Now we’re talking.

You see, because conversation can be all kinds of things without changing its basic form. You can have two people sitting across from each other and they can be flirting, lying, confessing, negotiating power, avoiding something, hurting each other, trying to repair something, or just trying to keep the other person in the room for five more minutes.

Cinema gives us something prose can’t quite give in the same way: we can watch the person who isn’t talking.

This is huge. If someone says: “ i’m happy for you.” okay fine. But what does the other person’s face do? What happens to their hands? How long before they answer? Do they look away? Do they interrupt? Do they start talking about something else?

To me, the most interesting part in acting, and in cinematic conversation is often the person listening. It’s a bit like my equivalent of discovering “being watched” in my dance essay.

Okay, now that I’m thinking about this whole conversation thing, there’s another idea I really like.

Conversation is intimacy with an escape route.

Let me explain — ey, you know when you do this thing? “I’m scared" → then laugh, or “I love you” → then change the subject. “You hurt me” → then say you’re joking.

People test each other constantly through conversation. We throw out a small piece of ourselves and watch what happens to it.

It’s why I always find Before Sunrise to be so incredibly interesting. It’s because Jesse and Céline aren’t merely having great conversations per se. They’re strangers. They can become almost anyone in front of each other because neither has a history to contradict the version they’re presenting. Maybe flirting is partly auditioning a version of yourself.

Then Before Sunset completely fucked with that because now they do have history. They can’t invent themselves as freely anymore. Every sentence carries the previous film inside it. And Before Midnight goes even nastier: the person who knows you best also knows exactly where to put the knife.

That trilogy alone could pretty much map the lifespan of conversation:

Tell me who you are.

Remember who we were.

Don’t tell me who I am.

— yeah, if you’re interested in the art of conversation, go watch that trilogy. Sure, Linklater writes good dialogue, but really, you should watch it because conversation itself changes as intimacy changes.

Let me think of some other films you should watch for some great conversations…

Sex, Lies, and Videotape is great! In that one talking becomes more intimate than sex. People can fuck and remain hidden; often saying the thing is harder.

Drive My Car because people confess sideways. Cars, rehearsed lines, other people’s words, long stretches before something finally gets spoken.

Anatomy of a Fall is fucking excellent. A private marital argument becomes public evidence. Now you have a conversation being analysed by strangers trying to determine what two people “ really meant” — but you can reconstruct a relation from one fight?

Mass gives you conversation when everybody has already run out of adequate language. Four people trying to discuss something that cannot be fixed by talking, yet talking is basically all they have.

Past Lives. Three people, multiple languages, no threesome, and an extraordinary amount happening because one person can understand a conversation another cannot. Conversation creates intimacy and exclusion simultaneously.

The Worst Person in the World. Two people can understand each other quite well and still want incompatible lives. Oh, and if you’re curious I got the worst essay on it.

Marriage Story gives you the moment a conversation stops being communication and becomes injury. They know each other too well. Intimate knowledge turns into ammunition.

Phantom Thread is hilarious and useful to understand conversation, because Reynolds and Alma can make a breakfast sound like psychological warfare. Ordinary sentences carry entire power struggles.

And let’s finish with Happy Together — I think it’s becoming the Wong kar wai I recommend the most and for good reasons. It was in my dance essay. You have two persons being better at dancing together than talking to each other. Lovely contrast.

I THINK YOU NEED UGLINESS TOO

I don’t want this piece to become a celebration of eloquent people having beautiful written conversations.

You need:

People taking over each other.

People misunderstanding.

Someone saying something stupid and immediately wanting it back.

Someone rehearsing a sentence in their head and completely fucking it up when they say it.

A conversation where one person is trying to leave and the other keeps inventing reason to continue talking.

Someone oversharing because silence is unbearable.

People having completely different conversations while technically discussion the same subject.

YOU NEED someone asking “ are you okay?” and accepting “ fine” because the truthful answer would be inconvenient.

Now that’s conversation!

Let me think of some films you should watch for some ugly conversations…

Rachel Getting Married — Huge one! Family conversations where everyone talks with years of history already loaded into every sentence. People interrupt, overshare, say the wrong thing, apologise badly, make someone else’s pain about themselves. Very human, and very ugly.

Shiva Baby — Conversation as suffocation! Everybody asking questions, interrupting, judging, pretending to be polite. Danielle barely gets to control how she’s perceived because everyone around her keeps defining her out loud.

Force Majeure — Excellent for the conversation that keeps returning because one person needs the other to admit what happened. Tomas tries to control the story of his own behavior; Ebba keeps dragging reality back into the room. Yep, very uncomfortable.

Let’s finish with Carnage — Basically it’s conversation deteriorating in real time. Four adults begin with civility and gradually reveal how thin the civility was. Slightly theatrical by design, but useful if you want talking as social performance breaking down.

With dance, we eventually discovered that the body gives things away, just never everything. For conversation, and with those films, I suspect that you might eventually discover something like: talking gives us the illusion that understanding another person should be possible. Because surely if we just talk enough with someone, and explain ourselves properly, and ask the right questions … Then we’ll finally understand each other. Surely.

Except sometimes two people can talk all night and still leave carrying completely different versions of what just happened. Maybe conversation does not eliminate the distance between people. Maybe it’s just one of the ways we try to cross it, and occasionally we do.

Strangers talk because they want to become closer. Then people who love each other talk because they want to be understood. Then people who know each other too well use that knowledge against each other. Then people who have hurt other try to find words capable of repairing something.

And finally perhaps two people discover that talking cannot solve everything, but sitting there and continuing to listen still means something.

That’s my conclusion. Fuck all that “communication is key ❤️” bs.

Now you can investigate why talking to each other is such a complicated, intimate, ridiculous thing to do in the first place.

When we call something a romance, we usually it’s about love. Okay — fair enough.

But cinematically, love is not a kiss, a confession, or two attractive people finally getting on with it. Romance is also about how a film make closeness feel. How much space there is between two people, whether the camera lets us get near them. Whether silence feels uncomfortable or unbearable, whether love arrives slowly or completely fucked up the shape of the film.

This is what is interesting to me.

Think of Carol and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. They are both romances, but they don’t feel remotely alike. In one, pretty much everything is held back, and in the other, everything is falling apart.

So let’s put them next to each other and see what cinematic language actually does to love.

If you’ve been enjoying the free side of The Long Take, this is where the paid side gets a little different.

The weekly recommendations will stay free. Paid is where I want to go further into the films themselves: performances, filmmakers and their craft, individual films I want to spend more time with, and occasionally some stronger opinions about where cinema is going.

Paid membership is €5 a month or €50 a year, and it also helps me keep building The Long Take into an independent cinema publication.

Anyway. Let’s get into it.

Subscribe now

Mise en scène — Where does love get to exist?

In Carol, love appears inside a world that is already organised against it. Everything looks beautiful, but there are boundaries everywhere like tables between people, windows, door frames, reflections, or also other people sitting nearby.

Therese and Carol can be close without ever feeling completely free, and you see, that’s quite important because their relationship has to exist inside rules they didn’t create. The spaces are elegant, but they’re also constantly reminding us that someone could be looking.

You can almost feel them measuring the room before they measure each other.

Eternal Sunshine has no interest in keep the room intact.

Once Joel’s memories start disappearing, places stop behaving properly: you have rooms changing while he’s standing inside them. Light going out and people disappearing. A house ends up surrounded by sand. It’s as if memory does not care at all about architecture.

I love that contrast really.

In Carol, the world stays stable while the people inside it cannot do what they want.

In Eternal Sunshine, the feelings become so unstable that the world itself starts breaking with them.

Same genre but completely different use of space.

Read more

Some families teach you how to speak. Others will teach you when to stay quiet. Some will give you a sense of safety that follows you into your adult life. Others leave you trying to build that safety for yourself, without ever being quite sure what it is supposed to look like.

Then life kind of throws other people your way. A friend learns when you need company and when you need to be left alone. Someone makes you dinner, gives you a place to sleep, remembers what frightens you, or stays close when you have become difficult to be around. They’ll never share your name... but after a while you almost forget they don’t.

I don't know.. that's probably why I've always struggled with the word family. We know It can come through blood, marriage, friendship, work, accident, or years of simply being there. Love can share a room with resentment. It can also give someone a home while also becoming the place where the damage began.

The films in this list look at how we show up for each other. They feed each other, put pressure on each other, keep rooms open, say the wrong thing, forgive what they can, and sometimes they just leave because staying only cause more harm. Sometimes their love is enough to hold someone together. Sometimes it arrives mixed with selfishness, fear or control.

We begin with two friends making a home from almost nothing, then move through families shaped by violence, grief, class, illness, memory and the roles people cannot quite escape. Which got me thinking, actually; what makes a family?

Subscribe now

First Cow, directed by Kelly Reichardt - 2019

Cookie and King-Lu meet in a world where most relationship is shaped by ownership, money or the threat of violence. Neither man has much to offer the other one. Mind you, that's probably why the little things matter so much.

Cookie just gets on with it. Sweeps the floor. Cooks. Gathers ingredients. King-Lu makes plans and looks for a way forward. They share food, work beside each other and turn a temporary shelter into something that feels lived in.

Their little business is risky as hell, and their hopes are larger than the life available to them. And for a while, they have biscuits, conversations in the dark and the comfort of another person expecting them to come back.

Manchester by the Sea, directed by Kenneth Lonergan - 2016

Lee comes back to Manchester after his brother dies. And now, everyone expects him to step back into a life he left years ago. There’s Patrick who needs someone. The house that needs sorting out. Everywhere he goes, somebody remembers teh old Lee. Lee doesnt.

Casey Affleck barely says a word, but you dont really need him to. The way he walks, the way he stands there, even the way he looks at people... you can tell he's carrying something he doesn't think he'll ever put down.

The thing is, Lee loves Patrick. He really does,bBut love doesn't undo what happened. It doesn't suddenly make him the person everyone hopes he'll become. He just can't stay.

Near the end, Lee says he's looking for a bigger flat so Patrick can come and stay in Boston. It’s such a small thing.

Mind you... it’s everything Lee can give.

Still Walking, directed by Kore eda - 2008

Every year, Ryota goes back to his parents house with his wife and stepson. There, the family gets together to remember Junpei, the eldest son who dies saving a boy from drowning.

The table is full of food, and they have probably the same conversations they’ve had for yearsss, and a fair bit of resentment that’s never really gone anywhere. Sounds familiar?

Ryota on his side, has spent most of his short life feeling like the son who was left behind rather than the one his parents really wanted. His father isn't exactly the kind to hide how he feels. His mother remembers everything and even the little details she can use against you while still sounding perfectly nice.

Funny enough, Kore-eda barely needs big dramatic scenes. He just lets you watch people spend time together. He lets you watch a room full of people who dont really say what they mean. They come back to the same house, eat the same food, slip again and again in to the same old arguments.

I suppose that’s what families do — right? Right? Love and resentment end up sharing the same table more often than we’d like to admit.

Ryota left home years ago but the second he has one step through the front door, he knows exactly who everyone expects him to be.

Roma, directed by Alfonso Cuarón - 2018

Cleo is awake before most of the family. She wakes the children, cleans the courtyard, serves meals, washes clothes, and keeps the house moving from one day to the next. She is there for the ordinary moments that will eventually become the children’s memories of home.

The family tells Cleo they love her, and they do. But that affection exists inside a house where she sleeps in a smaller room, works while everyone else rests, and takes care of problems that are only noticed when she can no longer handle them.

Alfonso Cuarón often keeps several parts of family life inside the same frame. A child crosses one room while an adult speaks in another. Cleo works in the background while everyone else carries on around her. The house is always busy and they pass each other more than they meet.

When the family begins to fall apart, Cleo continues holding their days together while going through a crisis of her own. Funny enough, they clearly need Cleo far more than they realise.

Roma never gives us a simple answer about whether Cleo belongs to the family. She loves them, and they love her. She is also their employee. Both things remain true, however uncomfortable that makes the word family.

Amour, directed by Michael Haneke -2012

I genuinely don’t know how anyone watches this film twice.

Georges and Anne have spent most of their lives together. Then Anne gets sick.

From that moment on, life is mostly the flat. Cooking. Eating. Helping Anne move around. Looking after her. The outside world slowly disappears really.

Michael Haneke keeps the camera still while Georges helps Anne eat, move, wash, and rest. There is no music telling us how tender any of this is. We remain in the room long enough to see the tiredness, repetition, and frustration that come with looking after someone every day.

Georges just wants Anne to keep hers, but the choices become harder as her condition worsens. Their long history together gives him no special wisdom about what to do. It only leaves him responsible for decisions nobody should have to make alone.

Their love is now found in the ordinary jobs that have to be done every day. Their photographs are still on the walls. Their books are still on the shelves. The flat hasn't forgotten the life they shared, even as Anne loses pieces of it.

Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins - 2016

Chiron grows up surrounded by people telling him who he should be. At school, he makes himself smaller, and at home he watches his mother disappear into addiction. Poor kid barely says a word cause he already knows people can use the truth against him.

We meet him 3 times. Once as a kid. Once as a teenager. Then as a man. It’s the missing years that make you notice what’s changed. He gets bigger, quieter, and way harder to read, and yet, when I think about Moonlight, I never really think about those missing years.

I think about Juan teaching him to float (Gets me every single time.) Teresa giving him food and somewhere to sleep. Kevin touching him without asking him to be someone else.

If this publication has given you a film you loved, or a sentence that helped you understand something you had in you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Paid subscriptions start at €5/month. That support gives me the time and stability to keep writing this with the care it deserves. I’ll keep making free work here, because discovery is part of the soul of The Long Take. Paid support is what helps the whole thing continue.

Thank you for reading.

Subscribe now

Shoplifters, directed by Kore-eda · 2018

The people living together in Shoplifters don't really fit the usual idea of a family. They share a tiny home, very little money, and more than a few secrets. They steal what they need, eat together, sleep side by side, and one day take in a little girl who's been left outside in the cold.

Funny enough, Kore-eda barely needs big moments. He just watches people live together. Someone cuts a child's hair. Food gets passed around the table. Clothes hang wherever there's space. They go to the beach, laugh at jokes nobody else would understand, and listen to fireworks they can't even see.

The thing is... there is real love there. I don't really doubt that for a second. Mind you, the adults aren't innocent either. They lie. They steal. They make choices children should never have to live with. They end up convincing themselves that loving someone gives them the right to keep them.

And I don't know... that's where the film gets me.

Because the law doesn't explain everything. Those children were fed. Held. Listened to. Wanted. They were also taught things they should never have had to learn. Those things dont cancel each other out. Someone can hurt you and still have given you something you desperately needed. A home can be unsafe and still be the only place that ever felt like home. Someone notices when you're hungry. Someone remembers where you sleep.

Someone reaches for your hand and somehow makes room for you... even when there wasn't much room to begin with.

Closing

The people in these films don’t always know how to love each other.

They put too much pressure on the people they’re trying to protect. They miss what a child never says out loud. Before they know it, they’re playing the same old roles all over again, but they also make food. They keep a room open. They sit beside a hospital bed long after they’ve run out of useful things to say.

Funny enough, I think we inherit those little things too. The good ones. The missing ones. Somehow they all end up in the way we speak, who we trust, who we let close, and who we keep at arm’s length.

What stayed with me wasn’t some big speech or dramatic ending. It was Cookie making biscuits. Juan teaching Chiron to float. Cleo holding a family together. Lee looking for a bigger flat.

Years later, without really thinking about it, you catch yourself doing one of those things for somebody else.

I don’t know.

Maybe that’s family.

—

Raphaël — The Long Take.