Programme Notes: CineMasters: Denis Villeneuve

There’s a moment late on in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2015) that sums up the French-Canadian director’s curious position in the film industry. Amid the glowing orange wastelands of a dirty bomb-ravaged Las Vegas, Ryan Gosling’s new-generation Blade Runner trades blows with Harrison Ford’s Deckard in an abandoned casino while all around them glitching 3D holograms of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Liberace perform their most famous routines. In a movie full of jaw-dropping images it barely counts as a showstopper. But in a movie that’s also very much part of Hollywood’s tail-eating obsession with exploiting any potentially marketable blockbuster IP — in this case a real-time sequel to one of the most influential science fiction films of all time — it plays like a subversive dig at the way the entertainment industry would rather use cutting-edge technology to create flawed simulacra of the past than take a chance on something new. 

Villeneuve, in other words, is not averse to nibbling the hand that feeds him — and if that means giving the audience extra nourishment in the form of a $185m sci-fi tone poem rather than some amped-up, focus-grouped action movie set in the world of Ridley Scott’s meditative original then so be it. He’s certainly one of the film industry’s savviest operators, having navigated a spectacular path from his Oscar-nominated breakthrough film Incendies (2010) to his current darling status as Hollywood’s box-office saviour du jour with the Dune movies (collectively, both Dune films have taken well in excess of a billion dollars at the global box-office). 

Like closest contemporary Christopher Nolan he's figured out a way to protect the big screen experience by making large scale cinema that isn’t beholden to algorithms and studio notes. Unlike Nolan, he’s is an auteur by default not design, a prime example of the master as mimic (see also Brian De Palma). His personal style, for instance, is hard to pin down, derived as it is from whichever cinematic touchstone he’s in the process of topping. Which isn’t a diss. His blistering narco drama Sicario (2015) out-mans Michael Mann and remains one the best crime thrillers of the last decade; his sci-fi puzzle Arrival (2016) is the only modern sci-fi blockbuster to match the elegance of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); and the aforementioned Blade Runner 2049 is a better Ridley Scott movie than the man himself managed with his Alien prequels.

There have been encroachments too into David Fincher territory with 2013’s serial killer thriller/war-on-terror allegory Prisoners; and his low-key doppelgänger curio Enemy (also 2013) nodded to both David Cronenberg (particularly 1975’s Shivers and 1988’s Dead Ringers) and Roman Polanski (see the psyche-fracturing likes of 1965’s Repulsion, 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby and, especially, 1976’s The Tenant). Even the Montreal/Middle East-set Incendies — with its fateful twist, its globe-hopping plot, its interconnected storylines, and its mediations on grief, family and the past (all hauntingly soundtracked to Radiohead) — played like an attempt to best the muscular arthouse filmmaking-style Alejandro G. Iñárritu forged with Amores Peros (2000), 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) in the years following Villeneuve’s off-beat sophomore feature Maelstrom (2000). 

It’s certainly a little hard to reconcile the quirky European sensibility of that film (which features a dead fish narrating the story of a successful young woman enduring a series of personal disasters) with the more serious tone and spectacular visuals of his later work. Though he grew up in Quebec and began his career with the French New Wave-influenced August 32nd on Earth (1998), he told the New York Times in 2021 that it was only when he admitted to himself that he was an American filmmaker at heart that he felt real freedom as a director. 

And yet there are commonalities across his films. Long before #MeToo forced the film industry into a reckoning about its treatment of women, Villeneuve was attuned to the toxicity of patriarchal society, most explicitly in his 2009 film Polytechnique, a black-and-white dramatisation of the senseless slaughter of a group of female engineering students at a Montreal technical school by an enraged, misogynistic mass-shooter. 

He’s also always put his money where his mouth when it comes to his feminist credentials. His first four films were all centred on female protagonists and, after decamping to Hollywood, he fought to cast Emily Blunt in Sicario (the studio wanted it re-written for a male star), and followed it up with Arrival, a film about a female linguistics professor (played by Amy Adams) who has to talk the male-dominated governments of the world out of attacking the race of visiting aliens before they even know what they want.

As for Dune (2021), just check out the emphasis he puts on exploring the complexities of the Benne Gesserrit, the all-powerful matriarchal superhuman sisterhood whose multiple agendas drive the story — or the way he’s built up Zendaya’s character Chani to expose the problematic nature of its ostensible hero Paul Atreides’ messiah complex in Dune: Part II (2024). The women have the power in his films, or at least they have the moral fortitude to recognise what lines in the sand shouldn’t be crossed. 

Villeneuve is an intensely political filmmaker in this way, but he’s also one of the few who can make intelligent and entertaining movies around important themes without compromising on scale. Which shouldn’t be underestimated. Dune’s cinematic success was far from guaranteed, having already flummoxed David Lynch and, before that, defeated cult visionary Alejandro Jodorowsky. Yet Villeneuve cracked it for Dune diehards by cleaving Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi doorstopper in two and reshaping the story, even though there was no guarantee the studio would let him do the second half. 

But if the Dune films (he’s currently writing a third instalment) will likely define Villeneuve from this point on, perhaps the key to what makes something ‘Villeneuvian’ — now there’s an adjective — is to be found in Arrival. At one point Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner’s characters liken the process of immersing yourself in a new language to rewiring your brain because it changes how you think about the world. This is what Villeneuve is doing in each of the films in this season: immersing us in worlds that just might subvert our expectations about what cinema can really do.

 

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