Freestyle

The good, the bland and the druggy? (That should really be "drugly" but it wouldn't make much sense.)

Saul Bellow's Augie March says that he will "go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way". A lot of film criticism is really just a high-powered form of feature-spotting, it seems to me: this close-up; that long-shot; an Oscar here or there; the mention of a scriptwriter or a director or an actor and a very brief note about why you might want to pay attention to them. Meanwhile, I have questions of my own. Like, how much of a visual medium is film? How much should the eye be allowed to take precedence? The critical consensus seems to be that, when it comes to the Three Colours trilogy, Blue and Red are the masterpieces. I'm a little doubtful about this. Don't get me wrong: all three are tremendous films. They're packed with intelligent nuance, they're visually stunning and the acting is superb. But I feel protective of the underdog. Red is a little too portentous for me. I distrust the supernatural elements, as well as the connection with Shakespeare (it's based on, or at least informed by, The Tempest); I feel, I think, that if you're going to make a valedictory statement then you have to stand on your own two feet. Kieslowski retired and then died soon after making Red and it's easy to see the retired judge, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, as a magus who is also a stand-in for the director. He somehow (how?) manipulates the lives of the protagonists of all three films, all of whom are linked right at the end, and it is, if you subtract the style, a banal point at best. I'm surprised at some of the critical language, which seems to suggest that we are getting life lessons of a very high order here. I love Blue, meanwhile. It's beautiful in its marshalling of mood and nuance – in its understanding, too, of how our feelings (in this case, grief) are manifested in behaviour that is seemingly incomprehensible – but it and Red are both very aware of their own beauty. The use of colour is virtuosic and you get the impression that you're expected to be impressed; that the blues and reds are there, almost, for their own sake. No, I'm sorry but my favourite is White. Perhaps this is simply because it gets treated as the runt of the litter. But I also think that Zbigniew Zamachowski's performance is, in its own immaculately downbeat way, as great as that of Juliet Binoche in Blue, while the story is a story: there's pleasure to be had in simply following its development. Also, the white in White is less obtrusive. It stands, I think, for hope, and for a sort of willed amnesia, as well as for the equality that is associated with the white of the French flag. (Blue is for liberty and red is for fraternity.) But it's also simply there. Poland is a white world – it's a world of snow and ice and unimpeded light – and the characters have to negotiate it as best they can. Still, these are quibbles. You have to watch all three together and they are, as I've said, terrific films. Kieslowski uses film the way a painter uses paint. It's exhilarating, and it makes your average Hollywood film look like the work of a machine. Which, let's face it, is what it is.

Speaking of which, Christopher Nolan, the director of The Dark Knight, has a keen eye for colour and scale. For beauty, too. Everything, you feel, has been thoroughly seen. There's a moment right at the beginning, when the camera pans over the top of some terrifically impressive buildings. You get their weight and height, and then, suddenly, one of the windows is shattered. It comes exploding outwards and it feels genuinely shocking – it's like a violation. Elsewhere, the colours, the night-time blues and blacks, are telling you things about insecurity and melancholy. But what – no really: what? – does it all add up to? I found the whole thing frustrating. In one sense, it's a great film. It has the slickness and the confidence of something like Skyfall. The action sequences are choreographed with such precision that, if you were a little less jaded than me, you might find yourself becoming slightly breathless. You also have Gary Oldman, giving it loads of queasy earnestness (I love Gary Oldman), and, crucially, Heath Ledger, who is fantastic: he comes lurching and leering out of the screen at you. Elsewhere, there are at least two love stories (three if you count Inspector Gordon's wife) but all of this is really just a sleight of hand. The film is a closed system; an excitement machine. The pay-offs are all intricately layered in, but the script is largely cobblers if you listen to it properly. Right at the heart of it there's nothing, and this makes me want to rephrase my question: can a film be a great film when it's a kind of feedback loop; when all that it appears to refer to is itself? In one scene, Batman is high up over Gotham City. The Joker has him by the throat. What's more, he has a detonator; he's going to blow up a ferry-load of people. But what I was thinking was: that sheer drop must be CGI. I didn't care, and I don't think that any amount of gloss or of fancy action can make up for that.

Thankfully, there isn't any CGI in Easy Rider. Neither is there much that resembles plot. How do you make a film about the counterculture? How do you communicate what's really going on? Well, for a start, you play games with traditional narrative. If seeing one thing then another unrelated thing and then another is the way a child sees, then it's also the way that a stoned person sees. And what we have here is a film about two people who are always stoned. Always. They smoke as soon as they wake up, to get "a fresh view of the world". The film is satisfying, I think, because it works in a similar way. It drifts; it looks with a dopey kind of fascination at people and at the surrounding landscape, so that you feel like you're experiencing what the characters experience. Meanwhile, the dialogue quietly but firmly lays out a whole alternative philosophy. Denis Hopper, who directed it, once said about David Lynch that he wasn't a "film buff". Which suggests that Hopper was, and what he does is film America in the manner of an arthouse European. He lingers over faces, and he's not afraid, towards the end, to make the camera mirror an acid trip. (The script, if there is a script, is great, here, because what the characters are saying and doing reveals all sorts of things about them, but they're all so completely wiped out that we don't know whether to trust them or even, quite, what they're revealing.) There's a nice shot (an updated Vermeer, almost) where two men are shoeing a horse in the foreground while Hopper and Peter Fonda mend a motorbike in the background. They are the new cowboys, and at this stage of the film, you feel, America belongs to them. Only it doesn't. The ending is brutal and, as Fonda says: "We blew it." There are parts of it that make you shudder. They visit a commune and it's clear that the love is as free there as it's ever likely to get. People wander around, stroking each other. But this is 1969, and you think: Charles Manson. So. No. It's not all an unmixed pleasure but it's way better than I expected it to be. The soundtrack is great as well. Stoner rock, it turns out, is not to be lightly dismissed. And neither is Jack Nicholson, who gets about twenty minutes of screen time and who completely steals the film.

So what does this all add up to? I don't know. I try to resist aesthetic systems because, just when you have it all down pat, something leaps out at you and surprises you. To watch something – to really watch it – should be an end in itself, it seems to me. I'm with Arthur Miller: "Attention must be paid!" To everything, always.