Unless you’re Quentin Tarantino, if you’re a really intensely celebrated filmmaker, sometimes you just don’t praise anything because it sometimes draws attention away from less work or becomes reductive absorbed. The great Stanley Kubrick once famously said, “I am always reluctant to single out some particular feature of the work of a major filmmaker because it tends inevitably to simplify and reduce the work,” when deciding to praise Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “The Decalogue,” regardless. Christopher Nolan is another one who kind of plays his cards close to the vest, heaping tons of praise on classic films, but is relatively sparing when discussing contemporary movies (also, there’s that English politeness where you don’t say anything if you don’t have anything good to say.)
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But maybe Nolan is changing slightly in this regard. He recently gave huge plaudits to Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder’s “The Curse,” starring Emma Stone, which he said was unlike anything he’d ever seen on TV.
And in a recent interview with TIME, Nolan gave praise to two smaller indie films, 2022’s “Aftersun,” by director Charlotte Wells, which earned Paul Mescal an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor last year, and Celine Song’s 2023 intimate drama, “Past Lives” which recently received Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture. Here’s the little excerpt.
Yet Nolan has a taste for cinematic small-ball too. Asked to cite his favorite recent films, he doesn’t hesitate to name Past Lives and Aftersun. The latter is a tender coming-of-age drama, the former a gentle relationship tale that plays out over 24 years. Aftersun, he says, “was just a beautiful film.” Past Lives was “subtle in a beautiful sort of way.”
This kind of segues into the “news” that despite liking small, intimate dramas, which may surprise some audiences but probably shouldn’t, he wants to stick with a big cinematic canvas because he has that privilege and wants to honor it. In short, Nolan may appreciate movies like “Aftersun” and “Past Lives,” but he probably won’t be making films like that any time soon or ever.
And frankly, that’s fine. He is afforded that luxury, so it’s understandable that he wants to make the most of it while he can. Whether any of this is newsworthy or not is really beside the point: If Christopher Nolan can draw attention to two deserving films—more power to him. And notably, both “Aftersun” and “Past Lives” are feature-length directorial debuts that announce the voices of two great female filmmakers in Wells and Song (both films are on our Best of 2022 and Best of 2023 Film lists, too). Both are distributed by A24 in the U.S. (“Aftersun” is MUBI in the U.K.), and both tell reflectively melancholy stories about grappling with our pasts from wistful perspectives. If five more people watch these gorgeously intimate films because of Christopher Nolan, then his work, and ours, are done here, no?
Watch the trailers for both below.
