#23: if you can't actually go to italy, watch the leopard

on nostalgia movies

just two stunning people (via Queensland Art Gallery)

Spoilers for The Leopard ahead, but I promise it’s one of those movies that can’t actually be spoiled

---

A recent interactive article in The New Yorker highlighted how and why Wong-Kar Wai’s distinctive aesthetic has been making the rounds on TikTok. From its beautiful colors to its beautiful people, this aesthetic - exemplified by Wong-Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love - is perfect viral bait.

In the Mood for Love shots (via Giphy)

The article explains that the appeal of the aesthetic lies both in its visual pleasures (cigarette smoke curling through the air, Maggie Cheung’s vibrant qipaos) and in the thematic pleasures Wong-Kar Wai is known for (bittersweetness, missed connections, and aching, yearning love), all of which connect neatly to favored social media themes (“i’m the main character”, “romanticize your life”, etc.).

The word isn’t used in the article, but something In the Mood for Love typifies is a specific kind of nostalgia. This isn’t the nostalgia for our own childhoods— it’s the nostalgia for that which is already gone, regardless of whether we personally experienced it when it existed. This sentiment is encapsulated perfectly by Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, which wonders how you can make the past the present if the future is already here.

I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it— but, I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace

More than anything else, this nostalgia is about time. It understands that many things are ephemeral, and it’s living in spite of this ephemerality that makes things beautiful and sad, all at once. It’s a shamelessly romantic notion, and it’s one that undergirds many of my favorite films (i.e., my Letterboxd list “films that make me nostalgic for pasts I haven’t lived”). 

A version of this type of movie is a classic that I only watched recently: Visconti’s 1963 epic The Leopard (Il Gattopardo). The movie, which is based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel of the same name, takes place in 1860s Sicily during the risorgimento (the Italian unification) and follows an aristocratic Sicilian family that is being unwillingly rendered obsolete by the new sociopolitical order.

What’s particularly incredible about the nostalgia of The Leopard is that there’s something inherently unsympathetic to its premise of aristocrats scrabbling to stay in power. In contrast to In the Mood for Love or other Wong-Kar Wai movies, what’s being lost here is an entire world and way of living, not an individual romance. And, by all modern standards, that way of living - aristocracy, classism, deep inequality -  should not exist. And yet, The Leopard evokes a similar feeling, a deep sadness for that which will never return, a simultaneous repulsion and attraction to that which is decaying even while it struggles to live.

One of my favorite scenes of the film shows the entire family seated in a church, having recently arrived in Donnafugata, their preferred annual vacation spot. The risorgimento meant that they should not have been allowed to make their usual summer voyage, but ironically, it’s newfound rebel connections allow them to continue their aristocratic traditions

This slow pan continues down the full family, each as still as the last

In the scene, the family sits in Donnafugata’s church, uniformly exhausted, utterly bored, caked in dust from their journey. The camera pans slowly down the line, from the noble patriarch to the youngest child, and all the actors hold still as stone while the camera moves by. It’s an eerie moment, rendered even more effective for its departure from the general realism of the film. For all that the family scraped one more summer together, the life that they’ve lived for so many decades (and centuries) can no longer be lived. They might as well be statues, lifeless and already relegated to the past.

The Leopard is full of moments like this, which illustrate its distinctive nostalgia. Whereas Wong-Kar Wai’s nostalgia palette is all vivid colors, glances, and touches, The Leopard uses aristocratic sumptuousness contrasted with decay. When Tancredi and Angelica, the young lovers of the film and one of the few bright spots of the future, run through a dilapidated pleasure villa, endless doors and once-glorious rooms passing them by, you see everything suspended in a single sequence: the vivacity and irreverence of youth who use the crumbling ruins of the Sicilian aristocracy as a playhouse.

The film’s pièce de résistance is its 40-minute recreation of a ball, teeming with hundreds of extras, all coated in sumptuous fabrics and lounging around plush interiors. The visual richness is at its height in this scene, which means the opportunity for contrast is also at its greatest: the beautiful ballroom vs. dozens of chamber pots, old money vs. nouveau riche, youthful romance vs. resigned old age. 

In one of the most affecting moments of the film, Don Fabrizio, the patriarch of the family and the titular leopard, is asked to dance by his soon-to-be niece-in-law, Angelica. She is an obvious beauty, but she’s also deeply perceptive— her genuine love for Don Fabrizio’s nephew Tancredi is tempered by her understanding that their marriage represents the end of the Salinas family line and that she herself represents the rise of a new kind of wealth and power. 

Angelica’s dance with Don Fabrizio is therefore a final meeting of the past and the future. As they waltz before a crowd of old and new money alike, the world holds its breath. This is Angelica’s gift to Don Fabrizio, the future’s kind offer to let the flame of the past burn bright for one last night. They make a beautiful pair, but after the music stops, Don Fabrizio is done. That dance, this night, are a last hurrah, but like the waltz itself, everything that Don Fabrizio represents is ending.

The Leopard, like any great nostalgia film, understands that the very things we’re nostalgic for are flawed and fractured. Whether it’s a longing for the glory days of a princely line or a long-gone love affair, these films don’t pretend that wishing makes it so. Instead, they are testaments to the feeling that when change inevitably comes, good or bad, necessary or not, there is always something that becomes lost to us. The best of these films capture and crystallize that loss, paradoxically transforming the fleeting into forever.

---

Culture Crumbs

• I’m late to the party, but this RDJ NYT interview, done for Oppenheimer, makes you realize how staid most press with megawatt celebrities is 

• Stephen King played Mambo No. 5 so much that his wife Tabitha threatened to leave him

• Olivia Rodrigo’s new album Guts came out this past Friday. She is the unmatched Gen Z lyricist 

  

  (via Stereoguts)

• Taylor Swift’s already massively successful Eras Tour concert film has SAG-AFTRA’s approval— please, go support physical theaters! Oldboy (NEON), Talk to Me (A24), Priscilla (A24), Anatomy of a Fall (NEON), and What Happens Later (Bleecker St) are all non-AMPTP films that are out or coming out soon. All are great ways to support the critical theatrical link of the entertainment ecosystem!

• Two trailers for two movies I’m excited about— Julia Garner in The Royal Hotel and Tom Hardy doing serious accent work in The Bikeriders

---

Thank you as always for reading!