Perhaps the mass media didn’t directly create mass murderers Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers, but Oliver Stone certainly exposes its complicity in their myth-making, screaming a brazen, self-flagellating indictment of pop-cultural cannibalism in neon, blood, and hyper-kinetic chaos.
The dramatic interactions between a lonely hitman and an orphaned girl in Léon: The Professional are equal parts thrilling, heartfelt, and thorny, as in her bitter pursuit of vengeance Luc Besson also seeks to resolve the question – what does it take for a man who surrounds him with death to develop a taste for life?
Krzysztof Kieslowski lays heavily into the dramatic irony of his characters’ hidden interconnections in Three Colours: Red, saturating his beautiful mise-en-scene with a fiery warmth that unites neighbouring strangers in an invisible fraternity, their intertwining paths governed only by the irrational whims of chance.
Krzysztof Kieslowski’s dazzlingly light tones seek to visually restore neutrality and balance where neither can be found in Three Colours: White, lending a soft edge to the vaguely comical sensibilities of one man’s attempt to claw his way back up the ranks of society and pursue justice against his ex-wife.
In Sátántangó’s destitute Hungarian village of dilapidated buildings and free-roaming farm animals, a Messiah figure seemingly returns from the dead, and Béla Tarr crafts a devastatingly bleak, suffocatingly drab, and completely mesmerising landscape of spiritual deficiency.
