Parting shots
A frame within a frame: the last shot of The Searchers.
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My three most useless skills are: being able to guess (within .2) the score of any Pitchfork review from the band, title and standfirst on the homepage; being able to guess how many stars the Guardian will award a film based on just the title and a short synopsis; and being able to guess the last shot of a film.
It’s a thing I do. I may even say the words ‘last shot’, which is annoying. I’m particularly pleased with myself if it’s not that obvious, such as in Monos (which is, on one level, ‘a psychedelic drama about child soldiers’, and on another ‘Colombia and the sixty years of chaos that has been happening’), which we saw a while back, and its last shot is of Rambo’s crying face (not that Rambo) in the helicopter. I correctly guessed it would be the final shot. The person I watched it with was like, wait, what?
Often, it just feels right that a film should end on a certain shot, not necessarily because it’s an ending as such. It’s hard to tell what to look for. An overlong static shot is an indication; the shot will last longer than it should, or has done in the film thus far.
I probably like endings best where nothing happens – or at least the action has already happened, and the last shot is just a bit of release, a time to reflect, like in The Nest with Jude Law (which I knew the Guardian would give four stars) – a simple family breakfast around the kitchen table looks so innocuous unless you know what’s come before.
In the 1960s Filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni succeeded in making the obscure mainstream. One of my favourite endings is to Antonioni’s Blow Up, his London swinging sixties flick, with David Hemmings as a fashion photographer (whose photos were actually taken by Don McCullin) who thinks he’s photographed a murder. The enigmatic ending has Hemmings watching a mimed game of tennis. There’s no plot conclusion, only confusion.
No such confusion to the conclusion of Before Sunset (written about previously), as Celine dances to Nina Simone and warns Jesse, ‘You’re gonna miss your plane, baby’. He grins and simply says, ‘I know’. We all know what’s coming next.
Generally we like a film to have closure and be nicely wrapped up, but life – and even death – isn’t like that, so why should films be? I like to think that life is continuing after the titles end.
Fat City has one of my favourite, open-ended endings, with Jeff Bridges and Stacey Keach sat side-by-side enjoying a late-night coffee in a diner. Keach asks Bridges to ‘Stick around, talk awhile’, Bridges replies ‘Okay’, and they sit there… in silence. Then Kris Kristofferson’s Help Me Make It Through The Night comes on (the same song the film starts with) and the end titles come on.
But nothing beats the ending of Two-Lane Blacktop (inspired by Persona, perhaps; Hellman was a Bergman fan), where the projector melts. Lights go out. Film ends.
Classic film endings can be on a line of dialogue: “‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” (Gone with the Wind), “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown” (Chinatown) or “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” (Casablanca). They can be a shock revelation, as in Seven, The Vanishing, The Shining, Planet of the Apes and The Usual Suspects. Or they can be ambiguous, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, The Graduate, The Lobster and Stalker (I want a sequel that starts with that shot). Others are nihilistic, as in the endings to Bonnie and Clyde, Night of the Living Dead, The Wild Bunch and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 remake). It might be a long close up of a face: Monas, Sound of Metal, The 500 Blows and Call Me By Your Name are a few examples.
The classic, cliched movie ending trope used to be of a cowboy riding off into the sunset at the end of a western, with rousing music and THE END titles. This was not necessarily a happy ending, the drifter was simply moving on to new pastures, having done what needed to be done. The Searchers is probably my favourite western ending, with John Wayne iconically framed in the doorway in the John Ford classic.
Previously on Barnflakes
Everything is four stars