Love triangle

Director Ernst Lubitsch, 1933, USA 
91 min, 16mm, B&W, unclassified 15+ 
Frederic March, Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins 

Based (exceedingly liberally) on Noël Coward’s Broadway play, Ernst Lubitsch’s exquisite comedy of manners opens on a meet-cute aboard a Parisian train. Two American transplants (March and Cooper) encounter a third: the commercial artist Gilda (Hopkins), who immediately entrances the pair with a devilish grin and a blithe spirit. Sparks fly. Stars cross. Soon, the trio are cohabitating under a chaste ‘gentleman’s agreement’, though their bohemian bliss is tested by the delicious lures of passion and immorality. Released just months before the Hays Code expunged sex from screens, Lubitsch’s film is salacious and sophisticated, a protofeminist treatise on the expansiveness of desire. As Gilda avers, ‘A thing happened to me that usually happens to men.’ 

16mm print courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Director Norbert A Myles, 1920, USA 
83 min, 35mm-to-digital, B&W, rated PG 
White Parker, Esther LeBarre, Jack Sankadota 
Silent with English intertitles 

One of the earliest features comprising an entirely Native American cast, The daughter of dawn vanished shortly after a limited release in 1920 and remained lost for almost a century, until a set of nitrate reels was discovered by chance in a garage and restored with a fresh orchestral score. The film’s mythology proved almost as epic as its portrait of duelling affections, where the daughter of a tribal chief (LeBarre) must choose between her great love (Parker) and a more prosperous prospect (Sankadota). A classic saga of forbidden romance that unfurls within an archive of Indigenous life, complete with bison hunts and ceremonial dances.  

Director Howard Hawks, 1940, USA 
92 min, 16mm, B&W, rated PG 
Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy 

At 240 words a minute, Howard Hawks’ screwball comedy might just hold the throne for the fastest-talking film in the world. It certainly feels that way, its ballistic dialogue befitting both the discursive glee of its newsroom setting and the vertiginous freefall of its ill-advised courtship. Cary Grant plays Walter, the tough-as-guts editor who contrives a scheme to woo back his star reporter Hildy (Russell), who also happens to be his ex-wife, now betrothed to a far more vanilla suitor (Bellamy). Bribery, kidnapping and the potential scoop of a lifetime: like any worthy love triangle, Hawks’ film is totally convoluted and completely exhilarating. 

Director Kira Muratova, 1967, Ukraine 
91 min, 35mm-to-digital, B&W, unclassified 15+ 
Nina Ruslanova, Vladimir Vysotsky, Kira Muratova 
Russian with English subtitles  

Banned by censors for 20 years, Kira Muratova’s debut solo feature is an entrée into her cinema of discord and disenchantment. The bewitching, bewildering slipperiness for which Muratova garnered post-Soviet acclaim late into her career are immediately evident in this tale of two women scorned by the same man. The director herself plays a hard-boiled councilwoman who hires an idealistic young maid (Ruslanova). Unbeknown to the pair, they share an affection for a noncommittal flame (Vysotsky), whose sporadic incursions into their lives are mirrored by the film’s own sui generis structure: a haze of freeform memories that locates poetry in the bleakest of circumstances.  

Director Éric Rohmer, 1967, France 
87 min, 35mm-to-digital, colour, unclassified 15+ 
Haydée Politoff, Patrick Bauchau, Daniel Pommereulle 
French with English subtitles  

Éric Rohmer’s first colour film is resplendently hued, rendered so warmly by his longtime cinematographer Néstor Almendros that it’s easy to mistake the coastal French setting for a Biblical idyll. Not so. In a Saint-Tropez summer house, Rohmer depicts a series of dangerous liaisons between two male friends (Bauchau and Pommereulle) and an elusive younger woman (Politoff) caught in the crosshairs of their amorous brinkmanship. As the trio tumble from verdant hillsides straight into the tangled sheets of their love shack, their relationship grows increasingly tortuous – and increasingly depraved. All’s fair in lust and war. 

The 7.15pm session will be introduced by Cate Shortland, the award-winning director of films including Somersault, Berlin syndrome and Black widow.

Director Věra Chytilová, 1970, Czech Republic 
99 min, 35mm-to-digital, colour, unclassified 15+ 
Karel Novák, Jitka Nováková, Jan Schmid 
Czech with English subtitles 

Věra Chytilová’s follow-up to her masterpiece Daisies is a similarly anarchic parable of the love triangle’s urtext: Adam, Eve, Satan. The Garden of Eden becomes a spa retreat where the marital bliss of a vacationing couple (Novák and Nováková) is interrupted by a handsome devil (Schmid), whose presence is equal parts seductive and sinister. Is he a Casanova or a killer-in-waiting? Brimming with optical illusions and hypnagogic compositions, Chytilová’s film cedes reason to carnal hunger: a defiant protest against rapidly invading Soviet restrictions which saw her barred from filmmaking for seven subsequent years. 

Director François Truffaut, 1962, France 
105 min, 35mm-to-digital, B&W, rated PG 
Jeanne Moreau, Henri Serre, Oskar Werner 
French with English subtitles 

François Truffaut’s immortal ménage à trois stars Jeanne Moreau as a free-spirited bohemian who attracts the attention of two friends, a shy Austrian (Werner) and an exuberant Frenchman (Serre). Buoyed by rumbustious energy, the film follows their love triangle across several decades, from early sun-kissed holidays to sombre reunions in the wake of the First World War. Truffaut delights in experimentation, with a barrage of freeze frames and fast cuts that express the push-and-pull of their whirlwind union. An ode to the stylistic possibilities of the medium, this beloved classic doubles as a valentine to Moreau, the astonishing actress who Truffaut once called ‘the greatest sweetheart in French cinema’. 

Directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1996, USA 
108 min, 35mm-to-digital, colour, rated R 
Jennifer Tilly, Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano 

Bound was conceived with a simple premise: the noirish template of a wife caught between a staid husband and a thrilling outsider. In director Lana Wachowski’s words: ‘If this other person in the love triangle is a man, then this person becomes a crutch for the woman. What if it’s a woman?’ 

So began the film’s lascivious tale of lesbians on the lam, starring Jennifer Tilly as the beguiling, baby-voiced mob moll Violet who seduces Gina Gershon’s butch ex-con into a scheme to swindle millions of mafia dollars. The two women slink beneath the nose of Violet’s gangster boyfriend (Pantoliano), turning their Chicago apartment into a den of iniquity and intrigue. Leather, smoke, rope and chrome: three decades on, the Wachowskis’ debut remains one of the steamiest love affairs on screen. 

Director Shirley Barrett, 1996, Australia 
101 min, 35mm-to-digital, colour, rated M 
Miranda Otto, Rebecca Frith, George Shevtsov 

Miranda Otto and Rebecca Frith play a pair of chalk-and-cheese sisters in this oddball comedy which netted debut director Shirley Barrett the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1996. Otto – who still considers the film a ‘career highlight’ – is the diffident Dimity, prone to wilting before Frith’s far more excessive Vicki-Ann. Enter: Ken Sherry (Shevtsov), an unctuous radio personality and multi-time divorcé who floats into their nowhere town with a lothario’s swagger and a baritone prefabbed for late-night dedications, instantly igniting the affections of both sisters. ‘Barrett’s sly film is well aware of the archetypes that underlie this simple story … which are satirised with amusing panache.’ – critic Janet Maslin, The New York Times 

Director Roger Avary, 2002, USA 
110 min, 35mm-to-digital, colour, rated R 
James Van Der Beek, Ian Somerhalder, Shannyn Sossamon 

The late James Van Der Beek stars in this godless foray into adolescent annihilation, sloughing off his mop-top milquetoast Dawson Leery for the far more wicked stylings of college drug don Sean Bateman. Rootless and rakish, Sean finds himself entangled with swooning classmate Paul (Somerhalder) and sensitive arts student Lauren (Sossamon). Pulp fiction writer Roger Avary adapts Bret Easton Ellis’s infernal campus novel, transferring the infamous halls of Bennington College to screen with starting visual aplomb and trick-a-minute editing. Beneath the debauchery, though, there’s something resembling romance: a desperate grasp for connection in a narcotised milieu for whom pill-popping is a panacea and sex is self-immolation.