ICYMI: Five cracking Christmas films
Darkness and fairy lights, here are a few different suggestions for your festive viewing.
1. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
‘Someone died. It happens all the time. But life goes on. It always does, until it doesn’t…’
Think of this film as an exercise in hypnogogia, something on the edge of a dream. Embrace the ambiguity. EWS was never meant to be erotic, but about eroticism, about the power of fantasy. But most of all: about what it might mean to be faithful. Fidelio.
2. Scandal (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
‘We mortals can’t imagine how generous the gods might be…’
Here’s a film about the promises we make to ourselves to be better, and the forces ranged against that attempt. Christmas provides the catalyst for such thoughts of self-improvement. Next year I’ll be better. This wonderful picture shows us how.
3. Fanny And Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
‘The happy, splendid life is over, and the horrible dirty life engulfs us…’
Merry-making, melancholy, metaphysics. It’s all here. A film full of joy and sorrow. It captures the numinosity of childhood like no other, the tragicomedy of family life, of growing up, and our reckoning with aging, death and divine inscrutability.
4. Wake In Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971)
‘All the little devils are proud of hell…’
If you haven’t seen it, the less you know about this film the better. A nightmare of machismo and enforced hospitality, drenched in booze and horror. Christmas in the Outback.
5. The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
‘That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise…’
Wise and funny. A film that pitches misogyny, mendacity and the need to climb the ladder against love, loyalty and doing the right thing. Perfect Christmas viewing. And, oh, Jack Lemmon! Just to watch him work feels like a present to cherish forever.