Martin Scorsese on the most unforgettable “final stretch” in modern cinema
I can picture the final unfurling moments of The Departed as though Martin Scorsese filed the closing storyboards in my brain like an unspooling Rolodex of cinematic memories. There is nothing more frustrating than when a story doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, and Scorsese has a better grasp on that than just about any other director. However, he’s been around long enough for proceeding generations to pick up on his central tenet of ‘the build’ and deploy it in their own original fashions.
The Goodfellas director touts the iconic ending to the old 1956 John Wayne classic The Searchers as his favourite ending of all time. He commented: “Only an artist as great as John Ford would dare to end a film on such a note. In its final moment, ‘The Searchers’ suddenly becomes a ghost story. Ethan’s sense of purpose has been fulfilled, and like the man whose eyes he’s shot out, he’s destined to wander forever between the winds.”
However, when it comes to modern cinema, there is one emerging director who you can’t get the talkative little maestro to shut up about. “Right from the start, I was impressed,” Scorsese said of Ari Aster. “Here was a young filmmaker that obviously knew cinema.” He went on to say that his debut picture Hereditary was “disturbing to the point of being uncomfortably so”, but it was the crescendo of his follow-up, Midsommar, which he reserved special praise for.
Scorsese stated: “I can also tell you that there are true visions in this picture, particularly in the final stretch, that you are not likely to forget. I certainly haven’t.” Aside from elements of brutal gore, the film offers up unforgettable flashes in almost mystic ways as the slow pace of the film is often uncomfortably incongruous in a brilliant shiver-inducing way. You feel like you’re somnambulant sleepwalking through a car crash which unspools in slow motion, then all of sudden the speed flashes back to reality and you cast into carnage which you saw coming but for some reason failed to brace for.
As Aster said of the film himself: “I think the fun of the film is that it is a contribution to the ‘folk horror’ subgenre. So, it goes exactly where you’re expecting, but the surprise is in how it feels to get there. It’s like the guys in the movie are in a folk horror movie, but Dani [Florence Pugh], it turns out, is not. She’s in something else, and she’s our conduit. She’s the person that we’re attached to, so it’s her movie, not theirs.”
Then, as Scorsese asserts, all of sudden the chaos she has been cast in as unravelling script beyond her control, because a preordained reality as though Aster is a wicked bastard who has directed her life like a Svengali of sick kicks. It’s for this reason that upon release, many Swedish critics actually praised it as a dark comedy and laughed their funny little caps off.
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