Let’s journey across some of this year’s most beloved movies, from Vim Wenders “Perfect Days” to Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers”. Along the way we’ll find that cinema is coming to a hopeful characterisation of solitude, leaning away from a melancholic portrayal of loneliness. Then again, to sit together in the darkness of a movie theatre is already not to be alone.
It’s impossible not to acknowledge solitude as an intrinsic part of the shared human experience. Something we will strive to sidestep every chance we get. And as such it has long made its cameos on screen, where art imitates life, enveloping main and supporting characters alike. Cinema, imbued with childlike curiosity, may go one step further by dissecting the solitary side of the human condition, placing characters in rooms full of this heavy molasses to simply ask: what happens next? As the 2024 awards season kicks into high gear, with it, the theme of solitude has made its guaranteed return to cinema. But something feels different this year.
Last year’s melancholic ode to solitude was undoubtably the heart-wrenching work of Darren Aronofsky, “The Whale”. A movie for which Brendan Fraser won Best Actor at the 95th Academy Awards. The protagonist, a recluse and morbidly obese English professor, is unable to escape the bubble that his condition has created. He lives a lonely life, never stepping out of his porch and barely interacting with the outside world. Other characters attempt to break through the screen that separates them from his solitary haven. It is the kind solitude that in a dangerous self-sustaining cycle feeds into a rejection of the outside world. The exchanges with a pizza delivery man – carried out exclusively through a closed door – seem to be the closest this man will ever get to genuinely interacting with his surrounding reality.
A man in his solitary haven. A description that perfectly fits with Wim Wenders’ most recent film, “Perfect Days”, set in Tokyo, nominated for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards. Wenders describes the main character of the movie as “someone who has found a profound inner peace through the simplicity of his routine life.” It is a simple life, made up of small, meaningful gestures like opening the front door in the morning or looking up at the sky. The key element of Wenders’ depiction of solitude: it is hopeful. His character rarely speaks his own lines, but rather lets his life beat at the pace of the surrounding world’s soundtrack. He inadvertently or purposefully crosses into the outside world, whether that is to help out a lost child, or to play naughts and crosses with a stranger. Within it he finds how solitude is undone by these fleeting connections. Similarly, set miles and years apart, in Winter 1970, in an elite boarding school in New England, a cranky professor, a stubborn student and a recently bereaved mother wind up spending the holidays together. This is Alexander Payne’s sharp comedy “The Holdovers”, nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. The unlikely trio, each draped in a solitary, invisible mess of wounds and dreams, inevitably manages to find comfort by acknowledging each other’s pain. Again, a glimmer of hope that signifies solitude is not a locked door, and the way out is just that obvious: human connections. Here’s to this cinematic 2024, where solitude is not a hopeless endgame.
Having lived both in Italy and the UK, I enjoy exploring how multiculturalism affects our personal identities. I use language, writing and journalism as tools to decipher the world around me. And, I will of course never turn down a lively convo about current news. With a degree in Economic and Social sciences, I’m now pursuing a master’s in Politics and Policy Analysis.