Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [28]
Firelight offers the same kind of satisfaction one derives from reading a good novel where you get lost in the story and don’t want it to end.
38. FOLLOWING
(1999)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Screenplay by Christopher Nolan
Actors:
JEREMY THEOBALD
ALEX HAW
LUCY RUSSELL
JOHN NOLAN
In the year 2001 an audacious independent film called Memento became a sensation, inspiring rave reviews and tremendous word of mouth. It launched the career of director Christopher Nolan, who adapted the screenplay from a story by his brother Jonathan. They have gone on to make box-office history with their reinvention of the Batman saga in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.
I saw Memento several months before its release (and attendant hoopla) at a press screening and utterly dismissed it, finding it pretentious and unappealing. No one was more surprised by its success than I.
Then I saw Nolan’s first feature film, made two years earlier, and wondered why it hadn’t earned the full-fledged American release, and acclaim, it warranted.
Following shows how a talented filmmaker with a great idea can realize his ambitions without a multimillion-dollar budget. Nolan spent six months working with his cast, and another year’s worth of Saturdays shooting the black-and-white feature. (He served as his own cinematographer.) It runs a scant seventy minutes and offers more satisfaction than most bloated two-hour Hollywood movies.
The premise is immediately intriguing: a man named Bill (played by Jeremy Theobald) gets his kicks by following strangers on the street. This amusing, seemingly harmless pastime turns dangerous when one of his victims, named Cobb (Alex Haw), confronts him. It turns out that Cobb has his own idea of fun, stealing people’s identities, and persuades Bill to become a partner in crime.
The story would be strong enough to support a film, but Following messes with our minds by injecting flashbacks and flash forwards, without warning or explanation. As Nolan explained at the time, “I decided to structure my story in such a way as to emphasize the audience’s incomplete understanding of each new scene as it is first presented.”
Indeed. This is what takes Following to a higher level, beyond film noir homage.
Best of all, it never betrays its microbudget origins. You couldn’t ask for more appropriate settings or moody camerawork, and you wouldn’t want to see anyone else playing these parts. Following is a genuine sleeper, and though I’m apparently alone on this one, I like it better than Memento.
39. GILLES’ WIFE
(2004)
Directed by Frédéric Fonteyne
Screenplay by Philippe Blasband, Marion Hänsel
and Frédéric Fonteyne
Based on the novel by Madeleine Bourdouxhe
Actors:
EMMANUELLE DEVOS
CLOVIS CORNILLAC
LAURA SMET
COLETTE EMMANUELLE
GIL LAGAY
Many big Hollywood movies these days make almost continual use of tight close-ups. Three recent examples come to mind (Star Trek, Terminator Salvation, and Watchmen) in which we become eerily familiar with every nook, cranny, and blemish on the leading actors’ faces. That may eventually pay off when people watch those movies on their iPhones, but it can be disconcerting when you’re sitting in a theater and the faces are twenty feet high. D. W. Griffith and his cameraman Billy Bitzer, who developed the idea of the close-up, meant it to be used for emphasis, or punctuation, in a scene. In the decades that followed, smart directors adhered to that idea. Think of the frequently excerpted scene from George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun where Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor get lost in each other’s faces. (“Tell Mama…tell Mama all.”) The impact of that moment would be diminished—or lost altogether—if the rest of the film had been shot the same way.
Silent films had more occasion to rely on close-ups because the actors’ faces had to tell