Full disclosure: I watched the Oscar-nominated courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall for its setting: that huge, half-renovated French chalet-turned-crime scene whose high balcony becomes the subject of such fierce debate for the film’s two-and-a-half hours. Sandra Hüller was brilliant, but I couldn’t stop looking at the kitchenette, with its breakfast bar and views out over the mountains, and the makeshift lounging area in front of the fireplace where Hüller’s character spends hours drinking wine and resenting her husband. Alongside the Italian-Belgian film The Eight Mountains the year before – in which two childhood friends renovate a tiny cabin in the Italian Alps – Anatomy of a Fall was pornography for those of us with a bleached wood fetish. Even the courtroom, when we finally got there, was a vision in clean, Scandi-style pine.
In fact, it’s been a good year for anyone who likes memorable interior design in film. In November, Saltburn treated us to an anarchic tour through Drayton House in Northamptonshire, a mostly Baroque country house which had never been seen on film before. Its interiors were dressed with the shabby trappings so characteristic of the real-life English upper classes: old flypaper, motheaten hats and cheap TVs not replaced since the early 2000s. Much like Boris Johnson offering tea from a bewildering array of mugs to journalists camped outside his home, Saltburn’s director Emerald Fennell knows that the poshest people don’t drink from matching Laura Ashley china – that’s reserved for the petit-bourgeoisie – but instead live their lives in a state of artfully tumbledown chaos. The beautiful but dirty interiors perfectly reflected the tone of the whole film; file it alongside Ridley Scott’s, uh, creative take on Napoleon, and you have the beginnings of an argument that such lush period interiors are best deployed in films of the highest camp, and as homes for the sexually depraved (if you haven’t seen Saltburn yet, google “saltburn bathtub scene” – but don’t do it on a work computer).
Every taste was catered for by the past year’s cinematic interiors. At the beginning of this month, Dune: Part Two offered a take on space-Brutalism which, in hindsight, was probably the only way that the scale and ambition of Denis Villeneuve’s films could have really been articulated: imagine the Barbican floating through space, or the National Theatre grinding along the desert horizon, sifting the sand for spice. All of Us Strangers channelled the loneliness of the 21st-century new build into a whole plot point of its own, given Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal’s characters first meet as seemingly the only residents in a huge, soulless new block of flats. And Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House, of Barbie, confirmed what we all knew all along: that a horse-based interior design scheme was not only workable, but desirable.
Maestro, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon all set their action at least partially against period backdrops of 20th-century dark wood furniture and panelled rooms, though it was Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (who else?) which took its interiors a step further, establishing 1960s Graceland itself as a major presence in the story of Priscilla and Elvis Presley’s budding relationship. Over the eight major films she’s made, Coppola has mastered the ability to imbue the surroundings of her heroines with a sort of suffocating femininity and luxury; here, she does it with an opening shot of her lead Cailee Spaeny’s tiny feet sinking into the superdeep pink pile of a shag carpet, and by setting the action in room after soft, quiet Tennessee room in which Spaeny’s Priscilla is sequestered, lonely and waiting for Elvis to come home from Las Vegas (and, of course, rumoured dalliances with Ann-Margret and other actresses). The whole thing is a tone poem on teenage romance, and the interiors are as much a part of that as any of the spare dialogue.
Was Priscilla the best use of interiors “as a character in the film”, to borrow an old cliché? Probably. But the best interiors per se – as in, the ones that probably set the most pulses racing – came from an altogether unexpected film: American Fiction. For those unfamiliar with the premise of the film, a Black American writer called Monk Ellison, fed up with writing smart, highbrow novels that nobody buys, instead writes a parody novel under a pseudonym about violent, impoverished life in the hood – and white liberals love it. In the film, a large New England brownstone townhouse made for a great indicator of Monk’s fusty, academic tendencies, explaining without the need for words why Monk would write a novel based on Aeschylus’s The Persians. Nonetheless, it was the Ellison family’s beach house that was the interiors star of the film. Clad in white frames and clapboard, all sheer curtains, wingback chairs and Pierre Frey fabrics, rattan furniture and sofas to sink into on the airy beachfront, it oozed Wasp-ish style, which of course was the point.
And then, finally, there was Poor Things, the statement set design of the year. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Grand-Guignol fairy tale was set between London, Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris, sometime around the end of the 19th century, and it demanded interiors to match. Lanthimos’s production designers Shona Heath, James Price and Zsuzsa Mihalek duly created something unseen since Terry Gilliam last made a film, conjuring Art Nouveau conservatories dripping with plaster bas-relief, cut glass and squat four-posters for Emma Stone to clamber and gurn over, fin-de-siecle grandeur reminiscent of the weirdest designs that Gaudí or Montaner ever dreamed up in 1890s Catalonia. And that’s just London – once a heady dollop of Portuguese chic is stirred into the mix, it’s hard to follow what’s going on for all the carved beds, drapery, varnished inlay and scalloped mirrors. A ship the characters take across the Med looks like Soho House opened a branch in the Natural History Museum, with sumptuous chinoiserie and rattan deck chairs. The sets are divine. Which is good, because the plot of the film was pretty much just a dire slog through two hours and twenty minutes of sexual hysteria and toilet humour, as if the Marquis de Sade was writing scenes for Willy Wonka.
So yes – all in all, we’ve been spoiled for interiors this year. And until they introduce an Academy Award for Best Taste, all we can really do is keep watching, and coveting.
