ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER: Films You Can’t Miss
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Cinemaphilosophy in October unfolds through films as inevitable as a reef in a river. They are impossible not to watch. Too much of modern life is bound up in one of them, and too powerfully this very life is reflected in the other.
One — the timeless masterpiece by French director Robert Bresson, A Man Escaped (1956) — can be seen as an auteur paraphrase of Hitchcock’s Rear Window: instead of a photographer confined to a wheelchair by an accident, there is a death-row prisoner in a Nazi prison, enticed not by an image in someone else’s window but by the very essence of freedom, calling to him through the barred window of his own cell. Hitchcock revealed the voyeuristic nature of cinema through crime. In his world, the body is a useless appendage to the gaze. For Bresson, the body is an indispensable element of the spirit — one that breathes where it wills.
One Battle After Another (2025), a film that even venerable American masters like Francis Ford Coppola rush to see like schoolboys, is about us — about the people of today. About those aggressive to the point of stupidity, stupid to the point of aggression, yet so fragile and so unhappy. One can only pity them. And Paul Thomas Anderson does.
A MAN ESCAPED, OR THE WIND BLOWS WHERE IT WILLS (UN CONDAMNÉ À MORT S’EST ÉCHAPPÉ OU LE VENT SOUFFLE OÙ IL VEUT, FRANCE, 1956)
Director: Robert Bresson
Cast: François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock
T
he classic film by Robert Bresson (Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Best Direction) stands as the work of one of the greatest and most original French filmmakers — a director deeply admired by Andrei Tarkovsky, who either quoted or outright borrowed from him, yet whose films drew Bresson like a magnet, perhaps even more than Bergman’s.
The story of a Nietzschean young man languishing in a Nazi prison, awaiting execution for his part in the Resistance, is a kind of adaptation of Crime and Punishment — except here, instead of a murder, there is an escape. A Man Escaped is visually inventive cinema, where the narrative is told not so much through words as through confined space. If a shot contains both a man and a wall, it is the wall that acts, not the man.
The film is sorrowful, austere — and yet it grips the viewer, sustaining tension right to the end: will the hero dig his tunnel, flee, or be caught and executed? It’s a kind of Shawshank Redemption for intellectuals. But the meaning of the film, which Louis Malle called one of the four most important events in cinema history, goes far beyond its intrigue.
Bresson, the founder of moralist cinema that is nevertheless free of didacticism, creates films that are spiritually and stylistically refined. He eliminates psychology from his world and asks his nonprofessional actors — whom he calls «models» — to avoid any display of emotion. Without them, all that remains are glances, gestures, and sounds — which, for Bresson, are the true essence of cinema.
It is no coincidence that freedom seduces the protagonist literally by sound — the noise of a tram passing beyond the prison walls — prompting him to attempt an escape that seems impossible from the very start. A Man Escaped is a kind of cinematic haiku made of gestures (the hero scraping prison concrete, sawing iron bars with an utterly calm face) and of gazes.
Gazes of a man surrendering to his passion for freedom, above all, spiritual freedom. And since the spirit is free by definition, all that remains is to liberate the body that lags behind it. Gazes of a man defying his own reflection. Gazes exchanged between the fugitive and his fellow prisoner — a frighteningly meaningful connection just before the escape.
Gestures and gazes bind people with invisible rays, turning this prison break drama into a tragedy — despite its optimistic finale, dictated by the real story on which it was based (the memoirs of André Devigny, first published in Le Figaro Littéraire). Bresson tells of the tragedy that we are all bound to one another, condemned to each other — and destined for this. And that is both bad and good.
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (USA, 2025)
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infinity, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor
Though it sets out to explore America as such, this film ultimately points its finger at the entire modern world. The great American director Paul Thomas Anderson — still young for a genius at fifty-five — depicts it with such devastating precision that one can’t help feeling a strange mix of awe, gratitude, and disgust.
One Battle After Another appeared at a moment in history when conflict itself had become everyone’s daily duty. This makes Anderson’s film a deeply humanistic parable, a political commentary on the 2020s, and at the same time a timeless story of resistance, centered around a powerful love triangle. Former hippie Pet Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), who has joined the far-left terrorist group France 75 (they call themselves «fighters for justice»), has an affair with the eccentric Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). She, in turn, becomes infatuated with her hostage, the jittery Captain Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), in whose lustful, racist mind a psychosexual obsession with the Black revolutionary suddenly ignites after a fateful encounter in a refugee camp.
Nine months later, the group will be destroyed; Perfidia will give birth to a daughter named Willa and end up in prison; while Calhoun, under the alias Bob Ferguson, will flee with the child in his arms. Having retired from the struggle, he settles in rural America and finds new meaning in fatherhood. Sixteen years later, Lockjaw tracks them down. Under the guise of large-scale anti-terrorist raids, he seeks either to prove or to refute his own paternity — his right to the now-grown Willa (Chase Infinity), whose existence both compromises him before his secret racist club and gives his lonely life order and purpose.
Anderson presents fascist-minded revolutionaries fighting «for everything good against everything bad» and sentimentally benevolent fascists — patriotic guardians of traditional values — as equally repulsive. Yet one must remember who Anderson is: a traditionalist and, above all, a man who feels compassion for everyone. Hence One Battle After Another unfolds at the crossroads of dark irony and tender empathy for his characters — people who, despite their convictions, are lost and fragile, unable to find their place in the world.
Sean Penn’s character (his best performance in decades, perhaps his best ever) is a quintessential Andersonian figure — the dysfunctional man, unbalanced, lonely, and hopelessly in love, like Adam Sandler’s character in the tragicomic Punch-Drunk Love (2002).
What should we know about the auteur who, in just a quarter century, built his own cinematic universe — a world of recurring motifs and interlinked souls? PTA (as Paul Thomas Anderson is known among his devotees) became a near-divine figure in his twenties, after Boogie Nights (1997), in which he captured not just America but the very end of the twentieth century under the cocaine-dusted lens of a microscope. His characters, who enchanted the whole royal court of Hollywood — from Spielberg and Coppola to Tom Cruise and Stanley Kubrick — were consumed by greed, fame, and self-destruction.
His next film, Magnolia (1999), was even more ambitious, cementing his cult status. This three-hour mosaic of intertwining lives unfolding in the mythical land called suburban Los Angeles told of ruinous relationships and cosmic discord between parents and children, husbands and wives, past and present.
Magnolia revealed characters facing a stranger and more incomprehensible trial than even the frogs falling from the sky — the trial of family. Since then, from film to film, Anderson has dissected the theme of family — and through it, America, and through America, the world. Whether it’s There Will Be Blood (2008), The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), Phantom Thread (2017), or Licorice Pizza (2021) — it’s always the same story, the same world, the same authorial universe.
And within this world dwell Anderson’s surrogate families — whether embodied by Joaquin Phoenix or Daniel Day-Lewis, Philip Seymour Hoffman or Julianne Moore, Adam Sandler or Paul Dano. This world is complex, beautiful, filmed on 35mm with lavish studio resources, and scored by the brilliant Jonny Greenwood — Anderson’s longtime composer and Radiohead’s guitarist.
One Battle After Another is built with the same intricate, unconventional artistry. That, perhaps, is why it infuriates fools. Its morally ambiguous characters, virtuoso camera choreography (with deliberately uneven movements, inventive tracking shots, and dizzying travelling sequences), dynamic rhythm, signature expressive scenes, and Greenwood’s tense, nerve-sharpening score all combine with a strong literary backbone.
For the second time (after Inherent Vice), Anderson adapts the explosive prose of Thomas Pynchon — in this case Vineland (1989) — the reclusive cult author, heavyweight of American postmodernism, and dark humorist who hooked the West on conspiracy theories. Transforming Pynchon’s fictional universe into one of his own characters, Anderson touches in One Battle After Another on the blackest wound of our age — loneliness, fear, the shadowy darkness beneath the surface.
Watching it, one feels how human life is surrounded by dread and despair. How thin the edge is between sanity and madness, and how easily one can fall into it with the best intentions. One Battle After Another is filled with the premonition of a global catastrophe. The old world is ending — with its cult of excessive comfort, aggressive, friendly populism, lies, and pretense. Yet Anderson, ever the pessimistic optimist, gives the world — and us along with it — a glimmer of hope.
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