5 things to watch this weekend – 24 to 26 July

Dystopias, dancing plagues and an irresistible spaghetti western – what are you watching this weekend?

24 July 2020

By Sam Wigley

Alphaville (1965)

Where’s it on? BFI Player

Alphaville (1965)

Sci-fi might not be the first thing you think of when you think of the French New Wave, but many of the movement’s thoroughbreds tried their hand in the genre: François Truffaut with Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Chris Marker with La Jetée (1962), Agnès Varda with Les Créatures (1966) and Alain Resnais with the Eternal Sunshine-inspiring Je t’aime je t’aime (1968). First among equals was Jean-Luc Godard with 1965’s Alphaville, which inventively used the glass and concrete of real Paris locations to render a dystopian, technocratic future. Pulp movie star Eddie Constantine plays the secret agent who arrives from the ‘Outlands’ into the city of Alphaville, where he’s tasked with tracking down and killing the metropolis’s evil creator, one Dr Braun. Godard’s vision is a bric-à-brac of ideas borrowed from Orwell, Fritz Lang and the Orpheus films of Jean Cocteau, but his cold-as-steel DIY futurism has left its own long vapour trail of influence. It’s just been added to BFI Player.

Strasbourg 1518 (2020)

Where’s it on? BBC iPlayer

Getting its world premiere last Monday on BBC2 and now sitting there on iPlayer daring you to press play is this new short film from Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer. It’s the second of these Glazer-Beeb launches in the last 10 months, his short-sharp-shock lynching nightmare The Fall having dropped into the schedules last autumn. Strasbourg 1518 has been co-commissioned by Artangel and Sadler’s Wells theatre, making inspired use of the latter’s dancers at a time when the culture industry is locked down. Named for an outbreak of collective hysteria in the 16th century that supposedly prompted citizens of the French city to dance until they died, Glazer’s 10-minute frenzy shows a series of isolated dancers writhing like banshees in private choreographed mania in a succession of bare rooms – the kind of confinement that’s had us all climbing the walls these last months. It’s a frantic, sad, terrifying joining of hands between bizarre events half a millennium apart – all set to a jackhammer techno score by Mica Levi. Imagine Chris Cunningham directing the final scene of Beau Travail (1999) and you’re midway there.

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Where’s it on? BBC2, Friday, 11.20pm

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

The Dollars trilogy must be nearly alone in film history in that each successive entry turned out to be better and more ambitious than the one before. For a Few Dollars More is more in most respects. It had more budget than A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and half an hour more running time. Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name was now joined out on the sun-toasted plains by Lee Van Cleef as a fellow bounty hunter, and the operatic swagger of Sergio Leone’s widescreen world-building was reaching full bloom. With the recent passing of Ennio Morricone, BBC2’s Friday night dusting down of this epochal spaghetti western is a chance to kick back in the company of one of the maestro’s most whistleable scores, which cleverly integrates with the action on screen via some business with musical pocket watches. It all remains an electrifying way to lose two and a quarter hours, with the even more expansive The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) to come.

Murders in the Rue Morgue/The Black Cat/The Raven: Three Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Bela Lugosi (1932-35)

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

This new box in the Masters of Cinema series collects three Bela Lugosi films from the Universal Studios horror boom of the 1930s, all made in the slipstream of the phenomenon that was James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and all extremely tenuously based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) is set in a 19th-century Paris filtered through the expressionist influence of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Lugosi plays the maniacal Dr Mirakle, who attempts to prove his own evolutionary theories by injecting women with the blood of an ape. The Black Cat (1934) is an early film to handle Satanism, with Lugosi teamed with Boris Karloff on immortal form as the devil-worshipping architect who’s built a modernist castle on the ruins of an old First World War fort. And the fun meta-horror The Raven (1935) stars Lugosi as a Poe-fixated surgeon with his own chamber of elaborate torture devices. Poe may have been more faithfully served on screen since, but at 60 minutes each, the economy, visual wit and gothic imagination of this trio remain delicious.

Krabi, 2562 (2019)

Where’s it on? BFI Player

And now for something completely different… Krabi, 2562 is the result of a meeting of minds between Anocha Suwichakornpong, the extraordinary Thai director behind Mundane History (2009) and By the Time It Gets Dark (2016), and British experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers (of Two Years at Sea and many more). Krabi is a resort town on the Thai coast, the setting for this languid, mystical travelogue. 2562 is the Buddhist year for what we know as 2019. It’s there and then that Rivers and Suwichakornpong introduce us to a cluster of characters, principally a movie location scout and an actor shooting a caveman-themed commercial. Typically for Suwichakornpong, though, and rather like the films of her compatriot Apichatpong Weerasethakul, other time-frames seem to be co-existing with this 2562, including – in one beguilingly puzzling scene – the prehistoric era. Patience is required for this one, but if you’re open to its becalmed air of enigma it instils a kind of bliss.