スティーブン・ソダーバーグの実験的なインディーシネマガイド

Presence takes place inside a haunted house that breaks with horror tradition: an attractive suburban home, with a modern fitted kitchen and spacious rooms for a couple and their two teenage children, shared with a ghost that is more curious and melancholy than vengeful. When Rebecca (Lucy Liu), a hard-nosed professional who’s careless with parental favouritism, moves into the house with her sensitive husband Chris (Chris Sullivan), jock son Tyler (Eddy Maday) and grieving daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), their invisible housemate manoeuvres between their prolonged silences and uncomfortable divisions with a lightweight precision. The ghost’s agile gaze is the centre of attention for this paranormal drama since director Steven Soderbergh shoots exclusively from his spectre’s point of view.

Soderbergh is too playful a director to tie his films to auteur metaphors, but the fact that he is also Presence’s cinematographer (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, which he’s used for nearly 30 years) makes us consider connections between Presence’s lo-fi roving camera and the creative force behind it. Since his Palme d’Or winning debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh has bounced between far-ranging genres with a minimalist style and tonal dexterity, taking commercial concepts and experimenting with form in ways that may feel counterintuitive, but often reveal a depth of texture, drama and commentary without sacrificing their inherent tension and excitement.

As Presence begins to haunt cinemas, AnOther recommends six exciting and accessible experiments from Steven Soderbergh.

A man lives in his car and asks you invasive questions in a blunt, cool tone. He has a box of videotapes, each labelled with a woman’s name, and tells you about his sexual inadequacies. If we came across someone like this in real life, alarm bells would be going off but in Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), he’s played by James Spader, and his erotic magnetism promises to unsettle our tedious lives in a destructive and cathartic way. Soderbergh’s debut was financed for a meagre $1.2m and its critical and commercial success paved the way for Hollywood’s love affair with independent filmmakers in the 90s. Soderbergh shied away from screenwriting as his career progressed (this is the only film on this list that he wrote) but the script’s focus – one man’s urge to unveil and document the ways in which erotic desire lives inside everyday people – has been a recurring motif in the 30-plus films that followed (Solaris, Magic Mike, The Girlfriend Experience).

Although Sex, Lies, and Videotape made 90s Hollywood a relatively friendly place for indie fare, ironically Soderbergh had trouble finding success with his follow-ups. The new millennium saw a shift to mainstream fare (and Oscar success) with Erin Brockovich (2000), Traffic (2001) and Ocean’s Eleven (2002). But Soderbergh was clearly fidgety working on large-scale projects, and after Ocean’s Twelve he signed a deal to produce six films for HDNet, shot digitally and released ‘day-and-date’ in cinemas and on the HD channel. Bubble (2005), which wraps up in a neat 70 minutes, centres on a small baby doll factory in the American midwest, where the arrival of a young female employee (Misty Wilkins) disrupts the mundane bond between Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) and the much younger Kyle (Dustin Ashley). With non-professional actors, a dry wit and a simple but arresting observational style, Bubble let Soderbergh play with drama in its barest form. It’s a dry but melancholic crime story that unfolds with patience and precision, characterised by a thrumming, small-town anticipation for normality being upset.

As a two-part account of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevera, split between two major campaigns in his political and guerrilla career, Che is one of Soderbergh’s longest and most explicitly political works. Here, the expanded scope and ambition pays off. The largely non-English language film stars Benicio Del Toro as the Argentine central to the Cuban revolution and Castro’s government, who anchors the 4.5-hour march of history with a committed, affecting lead performance – one of the finest in Soderbergh’s filmography. By shooting with natural light in a vérité style, Soderbergh undercuts the commodified image of Guevera that lingered in capitalist societies, refusing an easy rise-and-fall structure so typical of biopics. Che is defined by horizons widening before they incrementally narrow, giving us a window into a period of history that feels authentically rooted in Guevara’s own voice.

If sex work truly is the oldest profession, then the industry has witnessed more economic recession and upheaval than any other. Like Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience (2009) is under 80 minutes, minimal on plot, and composed of unstylish digital shots of non-professional actors (except for then-pornographic actress Sasha Grey). But the film is defined by the sleek, unsympathetic nature of modernity, as freelance escort Christine (Grey) struggles with the emotional and fiscal precarity of New York in the post-Wall Street Crash, pre-Obama election days of 2008. Christine (who professionally goes by ‘Chelsea’) may sell sex in a way deemed palatable and ‘sophisticated’ to New York’s elite, but her proximity to the power players of the financial world doesn’t lessen her instability in a reckless, patriarchal economy that protects its own interests above all else. With bursts of non-linear editing and an even-toned candour, The Girlfriend Experience effectively mines the tension of capitalism’s transactional distaste for intimacy and security.

Contagion had effectively two releases – first, in 2011, when it was warmly received as a detailed but wordy outbreak thriller, and then in 2020, when the Covid virus made the film’s researched but speculative dread look like an authoritative blueprint for our new health crisis. As the film shot up the streaming and VOD rental charts, the morbid desire to see narrative order imposed on to contemporary chaos was widely felt, and in the years since its surge in popularity, Contagion has been unfairly critiqued on what it ‘got wrong’ about a modern pandemic. In adapting Scott Z Burns’ script, Soderbergh avoids the easy thrills of global disaster pics, digging into the paranoid, fatalistic self-preservation present in many strata of American society. No character’s fate is secured, no confident breakthrough is sustained, and every scene conforms to the extreme yellow, green or blue colour tinting – the filmmaker is the only arbiter that matters here.

Some of Soderbergh’s more extreme formal experiments have fielded accusations of using visual inventiveness for its own sake – a coat of unusual paint on material that is otherwise untransformed by his clinical, ironic style. But with Unsane (2018) it dovetails perfectly with the plot, the terror of a stalking victim (Claire Foy) involuntarily admitted to a gaslighting psychiatric hospital filtered through the lens of an iPhone 7 Plus with disturbing results. Having held a camera like this in our hands for years, we’re so familiar with the texture of the images that being taken to abject, dehumanising places feels disorientating and invasive. The camera’s size and weight allows for compositions that express acute paranoia and discomfort, as if responding to Foy’s wide, fearful eyes as her tormentor rears his head. This is a movie of emotions before plot, and those emotions live entirely in how he shoots his lead performer.

Presence is out in UK cinemas on January 24.

Presence takes place inside a haunted house that breaks with horror tradition: an attractive suburban home, with a modern fitted kitchen and spacious rooms for a couple and their two teenage children, shared with a ghost that is more curious and melancholy than vengeful. When Rebecca (Lucy Liu), a hard-nosed professional who’s careless with parental favouritism, moves into the house with her sensitive husband Chris (Chris Sullivan), jock son Tyler (Eddy Maday) and grieving daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), their invisible housemate manoeuvres between their prolonged silences and uncomfortable divisions with a lightweight precision. The ghost’s agile gaze is the centre of attention for this paranormal drama since director Steven Soderbergh shoots exclusively from his spectre’s point of view.

Soderbergh is too playful a director to tie his films to auteur metaphors, but the fact that he is also Presence’s cinematographer (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, which he’s used for nearly 30 years) makes us consider connections between Presence’s lo-fi roving camera and the creative force behind it. Since his Palme d’Or winning debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh has bounced between far-ranging genres with a minimalist style and tonal dexterity, taking commercial concepts and experimenting with form in ways that may feel counterintuitive, but often reveal a depth of texture, drama and commentary without sacrificing their inherent tension and excitement.

As Presence begins to haunt cinemas, AnOther recommends six exciting and accessible experiments from Steven Soderbergh.

A man lives in his car and asks you invasive questions in a blunt, cool tone. He has a box of videotapes, each labelled with a woman’s name, and tells you about his sexual inadequacies. If we came across someone like this in real life, alarm bells would be going off but in Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), he’s played by James Spader, and his erotic magnetism promises to unsettle our tedious lives in a destructive and cathartic way. Soderbergh’s debut was financed for a meagre $1.2m and its critical and commercial success paved the way for Hollywood’s love affair with independent filmmakers in the 90s. Soderbergh shied away from screenwriting as his career progressed (this is the only film on this list that he wrote) but the script’s focus – one man’s urge to unveil and document the ways in which erotic desire lives inside everyday people – has been a recurring motif in the 30-plus films that followed (Solaris, Magic Mike, The Girlfriend Experience).

Although Sex, Lies, and Videotape made 90s Hollywood a relatively friendly place for indie fare, ironically Soderbergh had trouble finding success with his follow-ups. The new millennium saw a shift to mainstream fare (and Oscar success) with Erin Brockovich (2000), Traffic (2001) and Ocean’s Eleven (2002). But Soderbergh was clearly fidgety working on large-scale projects, and after Ocean’s Twelve he signed a deal to produce six films for HDNet, shot digitally and released ‘day-and-date’ in cinemas and on the HD channel. Bubble (2005), which wraps up in a neat 70 minutes, centres on a small baby doll factory in the American midwest, where the arrival of a young female employee (Misty Wilkins) disrupts the mundane bond between Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) and the much younger Kyle (Dustin Ashley). With non-professional actors, a dry wit and a simple but arresting observational style, Bubble let Soderbergh play with drama in its barest form. It’s a dry but melancholic crime story that unfolds with patience and precision, characterised by a thrumming, small-town anticipation for normality being upset.

As a two-part account of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevera, split between two major campaigns in his political and guerrilla career, Che is one of Soderbergh’s longest and most explicitly political works. Here, the expanded scope and ambition pays off. The largely non-English language film stars Benicio Del Toro as the Argentine central to the Cuban revolution and Castro’s government, who anchors the 4.5-hour march of history with a committed, affecting lead performance – one of the finest in Soderbergh’s filmography. By shooting with natural light in a vérité style, Soderbergh undercuts the commodified image of Guevera that lingered in capitalist societies, refusing an easy rise-and-fall structure so typical of biopics. Che is defined by horizons widening before they incrementally narrow, giving us a window into a period of history that feels authentically rooted in Guevara’s own voice.

If sex work truly is the oldest profession, then the industry has witnessed more economic recession and upheaval than any other. Like Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience (2009) is under 80 minutes, minimal on plot, and composed of unstylish digital shots of non-professional actors (except for then-pornographic actress Sasha Grey). But the film is defined by the sleek, unsympathetic nature of modernity, as freelance escort Christine (Grey) struggles with the emotional and fiscal precarity of New York in the post-Wall Street Crash, pre-Obama election days of 2008. Christine (who professionally goes by ‘Chelsea’) may sell sex in a way deemed palatable and ‘sophisticated’ to New York’s elite, but her proximity to the power players of the financial world doesn’t lessen her instability in a reckless, patriarchal economy that protects its own interests above all else. With bursts of non-linear editing and an even-toned candour, The Girlfriend Experience effectively mines the tension of capitalism’s transactional distaste for intimacy and security.

Contagion had effectively two releases – first, in 2011, when it was warmly received as a detailed but wordy outbreak thriller, and then in 2020, when the Covid virus made the film’s researched but speculative dread look like an authoritative blueprint for our new health crisis. As the film shot up the streaming and VOD rental charts, the morbid desire to see narrative order imposed on to contemporary chaos was widely felt, and in the years since its surge in popularity, Contagion has been unfairly critiqued on what it ‘got wrong’ about a modern pandemic. In adapting Scott Z Burns’ script, Soderbergh avoids the easy thrills of global disaster pics, digging into the paranoid, fatalistic self-preservation present in many strata of American society. No character’s fate is secured, no confident breakthrough is sustained, and every scene conforms to the extreme yellow, green or blue colour tinting – the filmmaker is the only arbiter that matters here.

Some of Soderbergh’s more extreme formal experiments have fielded accusations of using visual inventiveness for its own sake – a coat of unusual paint on material that is otherwise untransformed by his clinical, ironic style. But with Unsane (2018) it dovetails perfectly with the plot, the terror of a stalking victim (Claire Foy) involuntarily admitted to a gaslighting psychiatric hospital filtered through the lens of an iPhone 7 Plus with disturbing results. Having held a camera like this in our hands for years, we’re so familiar with the texture of the images that being taken to abject, dehumanising places feels disorientating and invasive. The camera’s size and weight allows for compositions that express acute paranoia and discomfort, as if responding to Foy’s wide, fearful eyes as her tormentor rears his head. This is a movie of emotions before plot, and those emotions live entirely in how he shoots his lead performer.

Presence is out in UK cinemas on January 24.