Editor’s Picks: Our Favourite Films

Issue 178 - Editor’s Pick: Our Favourite Films

Every passion begins somewhere, and for us, the following films were the source of our infatuation with cinema.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) - Wes Anderson

I don’t know what sort of cream they’ve put on you down at the morgue, but I want some.

I have a confession to make. The first time I watched The Grand Budapest Hotel, it was to impress this boy I admired in film class who was an encyclopaedic cinephile. I knew it was his favourite movie, and I just wanted him to think I was cool. I was sixteen, what can I say. I always loved cinema before this movie – the same way you love a dish without knowing how it’s cooked – but after that, I was provided with the tools to understand cinema’s recip

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a world that seems to be made of paper mâché; you can almost feel the pastel decors between your fingers. You know that if you push this pink wall, it will probably fall. And while you may think this artificiality is the dead giveaway of a bad movie, it’s actually the very thing that’ll disarm your critiques. It’s a world so strange it robs your ability to anticipate what’s next: instead, it makes you sit straight in your chair with nothing else to do but admire, analyze, try to comprehend. It’s like a puppet show: you see the puppets clearly, but as much as you focus, you have no idea where the puppeteer’s strings head next. Cinema has never been the same for me after The Grand Budapest Hotel. I’m constantly looking for the strings now.

L’Aile ou la Cuisse (1976) - Claude Zidi

Picking only one film starring Louis de Funès is a hard job. But I can’t stress how important it is, if you are interested in French cinema, to watch some of his movies. They are the foundations of French comedy, borderline grotesque, something only the charm of an old movie allows with elegance. One of the best for me is L’Aile ou la Cuisse.

The main character is a famous gastronomy critique faced with the mass industrialization of processed food he despises, and while he wants to prove the value of fresh-prepared cuisine, he suddenly suffers from ageusia – loss of taste. He has to teach the job in a hurry to his son, played by Coluche – a very famous French comedian – in order to defeat the owner of a processed food company in a TV feud. Ten years after watching it for the first time, and forty years after its release, my family and I still quote this movie every time we pretend to be wine experts – and we’re French, so we do that a lot.

By Laura Dazon

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) - Alan Resnais

Alain Resnais’ 1961 Last Year at Marienbad is a surrealist monochrome wet dream soaked in mystery and experimental visuals; in which the truth and fiction become intertwined in a seductive game of truth or false. We are guided through the maze of a palatial chateau filled with elite aristocrats in what feels like an eternal house party by one handsome man or rather subject ‘X - The man with the Italian accent’ (Giorgo Albertazzi). He approaches the beautiful ‘A - The brunette woman’ (Delphine Seyrig), alluding to a secret romantic relationship they had the previous year where they shared a mutual attraction in Marienbad. Yet, she claims she has never met him. However, as ‘M - The other man with a thin face’ (Sacha Pitoëff), who might or might not be A’s partner, confronts the enigmatic X to question his story; the truth becomes difficult to distinguish. The dangerous flirtation with the truth leads to a lot of important questions, but the ones that matter the most are: who is really telling the truth? What really happened last year? What are we to make of this ‘non-story’ story about a man and a woman arguing about a presumed romantic encounter? Why does it matter? Last Year at Marienbad is a shimmering, surrealist puzzle-box, presenting the seductive and glamorous lifestyle of people accustomed with high culture and civilization, yet are empty, superficial, and hollow. It is a film that makes the truth seemingly vanish in the glittering world of misleading perspectives.

Frances Ha (2012) - Noah Baumbach

Aloy sexy!

Following the story of a twenty-seven-year-old, apprentice dancer, Frances (Greta Gerwig) Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha is a film that can be best described as sincere and heartwarming. Meet Frances: she is codependent on her college best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner), becomes homeless for a while as she couldn’t afford rent, is in and out of employment, artistically insecure and “undateable”, leading to a downwardly mobile regression that sees her having to move back to her college dorm for a while. In a whimsical and desperate attempt to be more like her well-travelled, more grown-up friends, she takes a weekday break to Paris which only sets her back further, ending in failure and heart-breaking loneliness. Yet Frances never loses her spark. She wears an infectious smile and carries herself with a certain grace that contrasts sharply with the hardship of her life. She is always determined to make a difference; Frances is joyous and charming! Frances Ha is an open letter about a certain type of relatable loneliness, love, and determination, visualized with a monochrome finish like that of Woody Allen’s Manhattan. It is a New York bourgeois-comedy that celebrates the romance of friendship, the spirit of being young in a city that never sleeps, and the sudden downward cascades of life. Albeit in a raw and playful manner, a true millennial mindset.

By Cynthia Vera