Historic Centre (2012)

If there’s a reason for omnibus films to exist, it’s for their audiences to detect each film’s key concern and examine how the different directors involved approach that concern. Historic Centre (Centro Histórico)—consisting of Aki Kaurismäki’s “The Tavern Man” (“Guimarães”), Pedro Costa’s “Sweet Exorcism,” Victor Erice’s “Broken Windows: Tests for a Film in Portugal” (“Vidros Partidos”), and Manoel de Oliviera’s “The Conquered Conqueror” (“O Conquistador Conquistado”), in that order—more or less has this key concern in its title: an inquiry into modern-day Portugal that is centered around history.

“The Tavern Man” keeps this history strictly personal, focusing on a clueless barkeep waiting forlornly for a lost love (who presumably knew how to cook much better than he does). “The Conquered Conqueror” rather lazily pokes fun at picture-taking tourists and loosely critiques the transformation of history into tour-bus fodder (even while the statues don’t seem much to care). “Sweet Exorcism” carries over the character of Ventura from other Costa films, which allows for the intersection of personal with national history: Ventura converses with the ghost of a colonial army in which Ventura himself once fought—on an elevator of steel, endlessly ascending. But the strongest film here is “Broken Windows,” in which former workers at the Vizela River Textile Mill (1845-2002) reflect on their work and the lives of workers past. It’s a film haunted by history, in which every life—lost or disappearing—becomes the camera’s raison d'être: neither we nor they can look away.

Becket (1964)

To see Becket’s weaknesses most clearly, it’s useful to place it next to Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane, released a mere twelve years later. Both are British films about religious martyrdom; both are quite gay, wrapped up in the affection of men for one another. Sebastiane is more overtly gay, as it shows men—is there a single woman in the film?—in the throes of passion and glories quite unabashedly in their naked bodies. But Becket doesn’t shy away from Henry’s desire for Thomas, as is strikingly clear in the scene where Henry compares Thomas to his wife and his mother and finds that both fall short of the affection Thomas has given him.

Yet Becket places “gay” and “religious” on opposite ends of the spectrum: when Thomas becomes archbishop, he gives himself to God, an action that involves the sacrifice of all carnal pleasures—he goes straight. Sebastiane, on the other hand, demonstrates that religious devotion is in fact the gayest thing of all. When Sebastiane refuses Severus’ advances, it’s not because he’s chosen God over flesh; it’s because he’s already sexually devoted to another—no matter that this other is God Himself.

Becket is blind to the fact that religious devotion, at its strongest, manifests itself in great sexual energy and the fulfillment of flesh, not the denial of it. It’s a film with too comfortable an idea of a martyr, fighting for God and his persecuted people instead of giving himself over to some mysterious and holy pleasure.

French Blood (2015)

If there’s an argument to be made about the following shot being an essentially masculine device, French Blood is the film to support it. This is a film that glories in tour-de-force long takes from the back and shoulder muscles of our protagonist, Marco, as well as the violence these muscles threaten. The epitome of this tendency is the shot that sees Marco go into a club, up the stairs, and into the bathroom; wash off his bleeding head wound; get a beer; take in the music of a fascist rock band; and then go back down the stairs to fight off some punks with his friends, only to witness two of his closest friends get brutally and suddenly shot.

Part of the film’s brilliance is to allow such takes to peter out into suffocating stillness as Marco gets older and less obviously fascist. In other words, the shots transform as the film’s definition of Marco’s masculinity transforms from an active, violent one into something non-confrontational yet seething. The film doesn’t trust Marco’s shift to peaceful adulthood and neither should we: when he wields a knife in the film’s final moments, we’re not sure if he’s going to stab one of his former friends, slit an Arab’s throat, or just the dice the carrots sitting rather numbly on the cutting board before him. This is the unpredictability of the present tense in a world that seems so far to have only realized some shining heads and an inked-through patriarchal brutality.

Nana (2011)

Saying that children are innocent is the same as saying that animals are innocent. It’s a generous assessment but ignores that, regardless of environmental influence, both animals and children exist—rightly—in their own blunt, half-formed reveries. Nana confirms this in a rather surprising way: a mother takes her young child out to a cabin in the woods under the pretense of starting a new life there but then promptly commits suicide. The mother is portrayed as unstable from the start (there’s something unsettling in the way she scrawls a note to her father in crayon), but her daughter has an existence that remains strangely separate from her mother’s actions. While most films would see this sort of existence merely as a consequence of her abandonment, Nana suggests that the intense and particular life of the daughter’s mind is not so simply explained away.

This suggestion is largely stylistic, for the film’s favored setup is to have an immobile camera unobtrusively watch the daughter from a distance while she is left to her own devices. Immersed fully in her environment, she seems entirely unaware of the camera’s presence, talking and playing as if the whole world were her self. So when she is left almost entirely alone by her mother’s death (for a time—days? weeks?), it comes not as a shock but as a rather comfortable confirmation that the profane voices in her head are much more real than the insubstantial bodies passing through her line of vision.