We live out our childhoods in suburbs and towns and leafy little villages. Then, as we grow through puberty and start to busy ourselves with the person we're meant to be, we start watching movies – the ones that represent big city life in that hyper-idealised way; the energy and diversity and intensity of it all, the sheer size and scale of the built environment.
Movies depict the world's greatest cities as exactly that – places against which you can define yourself. Places that could swallow you whole, chew you up and spit you out. But where stuff tends to happen that couldn't – wouldn't – happen anywhere else.
In the best films, the city becomes a protagonist, more than a setting in which characters and dramas play out. Unlike Friends, where bird's-eye shots of the New York skyline were cut with endless scenes in Central Perk (in fact, a studio in Los Angeles), the city becomes the film’s driving component, the location indivisible from the narrative.
But which are the best city films? The ones that, once watched, seep into your memory of a place, the way you'll think about it and refer to it from that moment on? The films that make a place feel tangible, recognisable, instead of foreign and far away. Some films just wouldn't work if they weren't so embedded in their city. But they are and, as a result, they're almost perfect.
Here's Refinery29's selection of the best city films...
Paris
Bande à part, Jean-Luc Godard, 1964
Pauline Kael called Bande à part, Anna Karina’s breakthrough film, "a reverie of a gangster movie." It is maybe Jean-Luc Godard’s most irreverent film, a love triangle between three bright young things, running around Paris in love with each other, even as their bickering and teasing becomes freighted with consequence.
The film is remembered for the spontaneous Madison that breaks out between Karina's Odile, Sami Frey’s Franz and Claude Brasseur’s Arthur, with John Lee Hooker’s "Shake It Baby" on the jukebox. The scene was shot, without warning, “in a bar at Vincennes, at the busiest hour.” Parisians can be seen watching on from the rest of the café.
There’s also the scene in The Louvre, the three of them running through the ancient statues and works of art, hand-in-hand and laughing, the guards trying to chase them down. This, again, was an entirely spontaneous, unstaged moment.
Of the film, Godard wrote in his book Godard on Godard: “Referring to my 'Bande à Part,’ the mood characters live off the cuff…The interesting thing is this sort of fluidity, being able to feel existence like physical matter: it is not the people who are important, but the atmosphere between them. Even when they are in close-up, life exists around them."
It’s a beautiful way of describing the singular feeling of Paris at its best. Few things are able to capture the city, its youthfulness and adventure and tolerance for expression and experimentalism, quite like Godard’s early film.
Photo: Anouchka/Orsay/REX/Shutterstock
New York
Ghostbusters, Ivan Reitman, 1984
Blockbusters used to be good. They used to have original ideas. They used to have scripts not screen-tested and focus-grouped into a shiny, edgeless veneer, made to appeal to a global audience of the broadest demographic imaginable, from Texas to China.
Take, for example, this film about a bunch of genius “parapsychologists” charged with trying to catch ghosts across New York City. Almost at once, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd et al are summoned to investigate the strange happenings in Sigourney Weaver's Central Park West apartment.
The film, from that moment on, is a riot of New York energy, from an old lady morphing into a howling wraith in the New York public library, to Rick Moranis legging it through Central Park, pursued by gargoyles. The lines are constant, and often edgy, including a character fantasising about a ghost going down on him. New York is the most iconic of film locations, but Ghostbusters can’t be ignored.
Photo: Columbia/REX/Shutterstock
Shanghai
Lust, Caution, Ang Lee, 2007
Based on a short story by Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution is essentially a spy drama, spaced out over almost three hours, and set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the Second World War. But really, Ang Lee’s follow-up to Brokeback Mountain is a deeply complex, ambiguous love story between a young dissident student and a high-up Chinese official, the film revolving around some of the most intense sex scenes in modern cinema. You may have to watch the film establish itself for an hour and a half before the party starts, but it’s worth the wait.
Few filmmakers can compete with Lee’s ability to create a work of sheer beauty and this portrait of post-war Shanghai, a city under threat of tyranny, yet just beginning to emerge into the modern world, is Ang Lee at his finest. If you haven’t seen it, the film’s final scene is one of the most restrained moments of latent power in modern cinema.
Photo: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock
London
Basic Instinct 2, Michael Caton-Jones, 2006
“I'm not going to confess all my secrets just because I have an orgasm.” Sharon Stone landed that line, 25 years ago, as she walked along a Californian beach with Michael Douglas. Her depiction of the bisexual author and brilliant serial killer, Catherine Tramell, in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, caused plenty of controversy; almost overnight, the character became one of the most iconic femmes fatales in popular culture – a performance that seemed to transcend the film.
It was 14 years before Stone returned to the role. This time, she’s in London. She is again suspected of murder, and her psychiatrist is David Morrissey. Michael Caton-Jones’ Basic Instinct 2 was derided upon release – David Cronenberg was attached for a while but dropped out, and everyone expected it to be a turkey of a movie. But for my money, the film is a brilliantly self-aware genre thriller; a macabre, gothic depiction of modern London, which makes the Square Mile look like some great moody metropolis of light and steel. The city of Jack the Ripper, in which Tramell’s murderous sexual desires somehow make perfect sense.
Photo: Sony/REX/Shutterstock
Tokyo
Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola, 2003
Find me a millennial who hasn’t seen this movie. Or hatched an idyll of long summer nights in Tokyo after watching it again, post-pub, late at night. Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film stars Bill Murray, an ageing American actor in town to shoot a whisky commercial, whose life at home has left him discombobulated. Then there’s Charlotte, a 17-year-old Scarlett Johansson, who is expected to mooch around the hotel while her photographer husband (played by Giovanni Ribisi) cavorts around the city. Both are marooned in the midst of the Blade Runner -like Tokyo, and so, as Bill and Scarlett keep running into each other in the hotel bar, they fall into a deep, unspoken kind of platonic love.
Coppola owned a clothing company in Tokyo throughout her 20s. She’s called this her most personal movie, for her experiences in Tokyo were spent, she says, “not knowing what I was going through at the time.”
Without Coppola’s surety of touch, without Scarlett’s ability to stay at a slight remove from her surroundings, and without Bill Murray’s wry sense of ennui, this could so easily be a creepy, cringeworthy ham-up of emotions. As it is, Lost in Translation is one of the best movies of its generation, and an unbeatable depiction of Japan’s capital.
Photo: Snap Stills/REX/Shutterstock
Barcelona
Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010
Before Birdman, there was Biutiful. Iñárritu sets the film in the rough outskirts of Barcelona, worlds away from the picture-postcard exteriors of a Woody Allen film, in streets down which a tourist would never think to trespass.
Here we meet Javier Bardem’s Uxbal, his face like the etching on a Roman coin, as he attempts to raise two young children, keep his manic wife on track, and organise an underground sweatshop of Chinese immigrants making gear for Senegalese pavement peddlers in upmarket Barca.
Uxbal, we learn, is psychic, paid by impoverished locals to act as a medium for the deceased. But this proximity with death has its consequences, and Uxbal discovers he has incurable cancer. He decides, in the dog days of his life, to try and do something good – but will the city allow it?
Mixing magical realism with strange fantasy tropes that wouldn't look out of place in a horror movie, Iñárritu sets Bardem’s slow failing of strength in the teeming undergrowth of the city. The performance and the setting mesh entirely, in a film which should perhaps be recognised as the Mexican director’s most enduring creation to date.
Photo: Ikiru/REX/ShutterstockLike what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
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