Three movies showing a distorted reality free from restriction

If there’s anything that links this selection of films, it’s perhaps their concern with imaginations of characters living in their own slightly distorted version of reality without the restrictions of normal society and the pressure of its expectations. From immortal hipster vampires to vicious marooned schoolboys and teenage gangs battling for power in the margins of a neglected corner of New York; these films ponder the question of what we might do if we had the opportunity to live as we wanted and what the consequences of such unchecked freedom might be on our souls and psyche.

The arthouse essential: Only Lovers Left Alive – Mubi.com

Jim Jarmusch’s typically ultra-cool, deadpan take on the vampire genre is a lowkey love story set against the backdrop of immortality and the boredom that must surely come at some stage from being able to live forever.

Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton star as star-crossed, centuries old vampire lovers who have spent eternity satisfying their desires for collecting and appreciating objects of sophistication and good taste, while also having to occasionally meet the oh-so-messy but necessary demands for the blood that keeps them eternally youthful and alive.

Though times and tastes may change, they at least can rely on the comfort of each other until an unwelcome intrusion from an unreliable interloper threatens to disrupt their laid-back history watching hang-out. The disruption forces the languid bohemian hipsters to face up to some stark choices and realise that nothing, not even forever, really lasts forever.

Elegantly performed, typically artfully filmed and soundtracked, it’s ultimately a quietly profound and bittersweet film and one that reminds us that although Jarmusch is always going to be so much cooler than the rest of us, there’s the subtle humanist heart of a poet that flows strongly beneath his effortlessly laid-back surfaces.

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The stone-cold classic: Lord of the Flies – YouTube

Legendary theatre director Peter Brook’s 1963 film adaptation of the seminal novel by William Golding remains the greatest onscreen version of this much studied tale of the breakdown of civilisation that occurs when a group of stranded schoolboys try to remake society on a remote island in the wake of a nuclear explosion; only to reveal their basest and most dangerous animal instincts.

Shot through with a cold and cruel pessimism that’s hammered home by the raw performances of its mostly nonprofessional young actors, Brooks’s adaptation still chills and moves you, even as it relies heavily on its Cold-War peak era origins for much of its broader terror.  While its class-divided battles may have seemed to be a thing of the past, it’s hard not to see their reflection in the recent political scandals surrounding Boris Johnson and his public school, Oxbridge-educated Tory chums in the UK, and that’s a depressing testament to the prescience of Golding’s dissection of an ill that continues to plague British society.

Long before Survivor and I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here made gouache spectacle out of the idea of watching disparate strangers fighting it out on a remote location for the ultimate prize of money and infamy;  Brook made the bold stylistic and creative choice to film his version of the story using documentary techniques that give the action an urgency and immediacy that give aesthetic force to its survival of the fittest high-stakes drama.

It all makes for an intelligent reimagination of Golding’s story that uses the strengths of film as a storytelling medium in the greater service of keeping his preoccupations energetically alive and relevant for a non-literary audience.

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The diamond in the rough: The Warriors – Rent or buy from Apple TV +

Few directors have been able to effectively obey the golden film rule of “showing not telling” as well as the veteran workhorse action drama master Walter Hill. This cult classic from 1979, made in a time when the streets of New York were famed for their danger and seediness, plays up the surreal potential of the fears of conservative society about youth gangs, to full, effective and provocative advantage.

On the apocalyptic streets of NYC, young poor boys find their identity in the wild underground world of the city’s nighttime prowling street gangs, whose outfits, warpaint and rituals give them the air of medieval knights battling brutally with flick-knives and whatever they can wield, for supremacy.

Hill’s skills as a visual storyteller are brilliantly demonstrated as he takes the more imaginative road less travelled — away from gritty kitchen sink social realism, and towards the embracing of the dark, surreal potential of the gangs — to create a unique and memorably rousing adventure that doesn’t judge its characters but rather celebrates their unique forms of self-expression in what ultimately is a singular visual ballet of baroque violence and masculinity run amok. Pulpy, punchy and brassy, it’s also a truly cinematic experience that’s not quite as silly, ignorant or socially irrelevant as it seems.

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