The Cult and Indie Film Recommendations Every Fresher Deserves

From philistine to culture From philistine to culture vulture: The cult and indie film vulture: The cult and indie film recommendations every Fresher recommendations every Fresher deserves deserves

Sharon Hsieh lists her three top film recommendations for Freshers keen to impress.

Good Time

Benny Safdie and John Safdie (2017)

Do you want to revisit the thrill and adrenaline rush you felt on reentering a buzzing city post incessant lockdowns? Good Time offers you the exclusive opportunity to pry into the underworld of New York City, with Robert Pattinson as Connie: a marginalized New Yorker who is struggling to take care of his neurodiverse brother. After a series of illplanned criminal activities ends with his brother in police custody, Connie decides to commit numerous criminal offenses across the city, all in one night. As the citythat-never-sleeps shines its intoxicating neon lights indiscriminately, Connie finds that the city denies bestowing even the slightest amount of mercy on him.

Good Time, as well as the director duo’s Uncut Gems (2019), uses the deliberately shaky close-up shots to explore the characters’ near-claustrophobic anxiety in an urban jungle. As Connie attempts to steer his various heists and fraudulences among other hustles, his mental instability and insecurity is exposed to the audience in front of the camera. The night-time neon lighting throughout the film also establishes the decadent underworld of New York City. Journeying with Connie’s misadventure through the city via the Sadfie Brothers’ melancholy, adrenergic and fatalist lens, we experience the lives and realities unimaginable to us.

Wuthering Heights

Andrea Arnold (2011)

Film adaptations of classical literature can easily fall prey to becoming overly stuffy, stagnant and emotionally predictable. The dilemma between historical accuracy, faithfulness to the original text, and originality can also impede the filmmakers from delivering freshness to the story. With all these challenges in the way, the 2011 version of Wuthering Heights manages to break free from these set limits by employing naturalistic Dogme 95 filming styles. With the style’s emphasis on capturing authenticity in the filming process, the costumes and styles in the movie go against our preconception of exquisite, delicate and heavy layers of clothing ensembles that are common in period dramas. Instead, we see Heathcliff and Catherine covered in muds and grass for the bulk of the first half of the movie, and the crude and thin fabrics under those stains can hardly be spotted by the audience. Frames and lenses are seldom artificially focused, either.

Set on the Yorkshire moors, we can see the playful fighting and bold sexual exploration between the pair being presented as a contrast to the primal rawness of the surrounding wasteland. Such a juxtaposition truly highlights the couple’s unapologetic and unfiltered love, guilt, grief and near-antagonistic tension. This version also opts for concentrating on the first-generation story of Wuthering Heights. Though Heathcliff’s mysterious success is still unaccounted for, the director certainly does more justice for the character by humanising him and his heritage, compared to the novel’s exoticisation. Unlike the original novel, which alienates Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship through different layers of narrators, such as the housemaid Nelly and renter Mr Lockwood, the film confronts the couple’s unacceptable love with an abundance of close-up, as if the moments of their intersected lives are captured and confined to those frames. In this regard, we live through the struggles of the couple in the interludes of intricate love and remorse they are trapped into. In this sense, this adaptation may well be the original novel’s most loyal recreation to date.

In the Mood for Love

Wong Kar Wai (2000)

In the Mood for Love, originally named (hua yang ne hua - the best of times), is set retrospectively in 1960s colonial Hong Kong. With Western-style mass urbanisation within the city, and political turmoil in adjacent Mainland China, Hong Kong is overshadowed by conflicting influences. Under this context, the protagonists Mo-wan Cho (played by Tony Leung) and Li-zhen Su (played by Maggie Cheung) are introduced. Both characters believe their lives in the newlydeveloping multicultural urban jungle will be uneventful. However, these polite yet detached neighbours, both living in a crowded apartment shared by several other families, discover their spouses are having affairs with one another. Following the discovery, the pair team up to navigate the confusion of city life and modern marital values. Unsurprisingly, a mutual yet unarticulated admiration is nurtured between the two.

Whilst many mainstream Hollywood films weaponize or fetishize Asian women with ‘ethnic’ costumes, it is refreshing to see In the Mood for Love presenting more progressive representations of women. The Cheongsam, or Quipao, dress Cheung wears encompasses the advantages of both Western and Manchu Chinese clothing. It was a symbol of cultural tolerance at its invention, which is a powerful and effective image in a film about destabilised values. The directors captured her character’s unspoken struggles, between the reservedness of traditional Chinese femininity and the urge to challenge conventional values, through her outfit, all whilst maintaining her unique elegance, as shaped by the garment’s silhouette.

We see the filmmakers’ tremendous affection for Hong Kong, in a time when the values it has upheld for almost a century are placed under threat due to recent events in the city. Through following the unfulfilled and elusive love between two people undergoing changing personal and family values, the director also manifests his tributes and nostalgia for a romanticized version of Hong Kong’s bygone past. The film also treats its audiences by manufacturing a sense of enclosure, with its preference for framing shots in narrow alleys and hallways, or disorienting the viewers entirely, through complex character movements.

By Sharon Hsieh Illustration by Gemma Cockrell Page Design by Chiara Crompton

Image courtesy of Agatha A. Nitecka, Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mirror_of_erised/9627560416/ image altered, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/