I keep thinking about how One Battle After Another, while being entertaining, left me with the same feeling of having seen something dated that I experienced with Caught Stealing or Highest 2 Lowest. It’s not so much that its characters fall into old roles - I have nothing against middle-aged white men with a bit of a belly, though they have been lead characters forever. Maybe it’s not character-related but more that One Battle After Another’s underlying structure is a reheat of something as old as cinema itself: the chase.
Chases are the easiest way to make gripping movies. Whether it’s a foot chase, a car chase, a roof chase, a tunnel chase, or any kind of chase, as long as your characters are running, the audience will be kept on the hook. For cinema is just that: movement.
French filmmaker Claude Sautet loved rain because it made his actors run, which, in turn, gave his movies a bit of speed. And who remembers that Michel Poiccard in Breathless - to continue from my previous post - is in pursuit of a man who owes him money? Nobody, but we all remember him going from place to place and the carousel of stolen cars he drives.
As long as Michel is on the run, we are captivated, but once in the small hotel room where he lingers with Jean Seberg, the movie stalls. Presumably, this is how Godard ‘invented’ the jump cut. My guess is that he never said to his editors, as portrayed in Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, that the jumpcut would ‘create movement within the static frame’. He simply understood that he had a long, boring scene in his hands, and tried to speed it up with the only option available: compressing time artificially.
Compressing time is also what a chase does. A chase overwrites the space to impose its own speed. Have a character run, and you have to worry much less about space; it becomes a blur, but this is the wrong way of filming a chase. In One Battle After Another, we don’t have a clear understanding of where DiCaprio is when he runs in the city. Which city? The hospital, the migrant building, the rooftop, even his house, and the tunnel from which he escapes: it all feels fake, like decor.
When I say this is the ‘wrong way of filming a chase’, I mean that the running in this case is just a narrative tool. Those scenes end up running on empty: DiCaprio doesn’t need to run to go to Del Toro’s place; he could just give him a phone call, he doesn’t even need to run with Del Toro’s students through the rooftop; he could just walk out through the basement with the migrants. Those chases are artificial constructs, and this is why they feel fake. Come the car pursuit in the rolling hills of Borrego Springs, and all of a sudden, we are truly there.
What makes a chase great is not how fast or intense it is, but how it reveals the space around it. The car chase in One Battle After Another is wonderful because of the hills impeding our line of sight. Bullitt’s car chase is memorable because of San Francisco’s unique topography. The chase in The French Connection is unforgettable - and one of my favorites - because it’s filmed under an elevated railway in Bensonhurst.
And you don’t even need a chase to be fast: in The Night of the Hunter, there’s a haunting scene where two children escape from the preacher who is after them by fleeing down a river. This chase has a sluggish, nightmarish quality. But as the boat slides further down the river, the landscape opens under a star-studded sky that seems to protect the children, and the nightmare veers back to a dream. Good chases are not made to speed up a movie; they are an ode to space.
I couldn’t help trying my hand at some chase scenes in my own movie. The first one is a slow, almost stalking, foot pursuit across the industrial landscape of Red Hook. I did it because I wanted Red Hook’s gritty neighborhood to unfold for the audience.
My second chase is fast, short, and takes place both in a car and on a subway. This is a chase about trying, and failing, to get out of the city - a very New York nightmare. It also has a slight social satire undertone: some can catch an Über and a plane to get out of the city, while some will never go further than the last subway stop.
I loved filming these scenes, but the paradox is that while they do the job of both showing the space and speeding up my movie, they are ultimately in the way of its true rhythm, because something I did not anticipate happened during filming: water took over the story.
I was kind of underwhelmed with 'One Battle After Another' for the same reasons you stated (among others). The film is certainly propulsive, but often without reason. The movement is largely unmotivated at the character level and, like you pointed out a lot of it is staged, I don't want to say carelessly but certainly in such a way that spatial relations are not entirely respected, and character motivations are not entirely clear. You mention DiCaprio running across the rooftop being largely unmotivated, and I agree, but even when it comes to film grammar, the way the scene ends is set up rather clunkily for my taste. The previous shot of the students making their way across without any problem and not even giving any indication that they had to jump, is something of a cheat so that when DiCaprio falls off it comes out of nowhere. I didn't laugh (which I assume was the intended effect) but instead wondered what exactly happened, and how. This is the exact opposite of the final car chase which, as you pointed out, sets up the punchline beautifully while withholding just enough to make it surprising without cheating. I just don't think we get enough of that, particularly the use of the space as an integral element to the chase. Someone like Hitchcock would have made each stage of the chase feel like a mini-setpiece with its own unique environmental challenges to overcome. Each space would be distinctive, clearly defined and explored. Or even Craig Zahler, whose 'Dragged Across Concrete' ends with an extended 50-minute chase that is some kind of mini masterpiece of its kind.
I think it also doesn't help that all of that movement in the film never really winds up leading anywhere (narratively or thematically). I have to imagine that was Anderson's point, given the themes in 'One Battle After Another' (such as they are), but I don't think that the film makes a strong enough case for it to feel earned. Then again, at this point it's likely that I'm just not a Paul Thomas Anderson guy.
Anything you can share about when/where we can see your film?