The Cinema of My Becoming

It feels almost quaint now, being asked for your three favourite films - a question from another age, when culture still arrived in tidy, nameable forms. It’s the kind of list-making that belonged to the High Fidelity generation, when our tastes were declarations of selfhood and entire relationships rose or fell on the strength of someone’s top five. (For the record, High Fidelity itself doesn’t make my list, brilliant as Jack Black was.) But perhaps that’s why the question still lingers: it reminds us of a time when cinema didn’t just entertain - it taught us who we were becoming.

When people ask me for my three favourite films, I always stall. It’s an impossible question, but I have a prepared setlist. The Last Seduction, Before Sunrise, and Un Cœur en hiver. They all arrived in the same decade - the 1990s - when I was in my twenties and still forming my worldview. I didn’t just watch those films; I absorbed them. They became part of my emotional architecture, the grammar through which I learned to feel, desire, and recognise beauty.

In The Last Seduction, I loved the shamelessness - the way Linda Fiorentino’s Bridget Gregory weaponised intelligence and sex, and how Bill Pullman’s manic desperation gave the whole thing a deranged sparkle. It was noir without apology: fast, funny, cruel. Before Sunrise, by contrast, was all tenderness and talk - two people walking through a city, inventing a world with words. It was the fantasy of a perfect encounter, suspended outside time. And Un Cœur en hiver - that quiet masterpiece - still feels like a diagnosis of the soul: Auteuil’s exquisite repression, his slow, self-engineered ruin, a kind of music in itself. My melancholy was sated.

But then I think of La Belle Époque, and why, despite its brilliance, it doesn’t make the grade. Nicolas Bedos’s film follows a disillusioned man who’s offered the chance to relive the best week of his life - a meticulous re-creation of the past staged by a theatre company that specialises in immersive illusions. It’s artfully realised: funny, stylish, seductive. Watching it, I wanted to fall for it completely. Yet something in me resisted. Its nostalgia feels a little too polished, its sentimentality too safe. The film flatters our longing for youth and passion, but spares us their real mess.

Years ago, I worked on an immersive theatre production in London called You Me Bum Bum Train. The audience moved alone through a sequence of meticulously staged rooms - a courtroom, a hospital, a nightclub, a TV studio - each one a perfect simulation of a life they’d never lived. My role was to compère their entrance onto a live chat show: bright lights, applause, a camera crane sweeping overhead. For a few seconds, they were the star; then the curtain dropped and they were somewhere else entirely. One night, the participant who found himself in the hot seat happened to be Jonathan Ross - a delightful twist that proved no one, not even a professional host, is immune to the absurdity of being thrust into someone else’s script.

That show, like La Belle Époque, dealt in illusion - but it didn’t romanticise it. It exposed the ache beneath the artifice, the exhilaration and the void that followed. Bedos’s film, for all its charm, prefers the comfort of the fantasy. It gives you what you want and then lets you go home unscathed.

Maybe that’s why it doesn’t stay with me. The films that shaped me did more than entertain - they rewired something. They met me when I was still porous, when I believed cinema could change how I saw the world and how the world saw me. That’s harder now. The medium hasn’t failed; I’ve simply changed. There was a time when I was most alive and receptive, and those films - those cinematic moments of the 1990s - captured it.

It’s easy to mistake that period of discovery for an era that was somehow better. In truth, it’s probably me who’s less susceptible to the tricks of cinema, less willing to surrender. But perhaps that’s not something to mourn. Maybe it’s enough to recognise that cinema once gave me a language, and that language remains, even if the magic no longer takes me by surprise.

What’s curious is that none of these films make it onto the great lists - not the ones on Rotten Tomatoes, nor the critics’ polls or streaming algorithms that now define cultural memory. The Last Seduction, Before Sunrise, Un Cœur en hiver - they sit somewhere between cult appreciation and private devotion. They’re not forgotten, but they don’t belong to the canon either. And maybe that’s precisely what makes them mine.

Consensus has its place, of course. Lists reward endurance and reach; they celebrate films that unify taste across time. But personal favourites are different. They’re not about agreement - they’re about recognition. They meet you where you were, and they stay there, holding that version of you intact.

I like to think that those filmmakers - Dahl, Linklater, Sautet - knew the worth of what they’d made, even if the industry moved on. Their work doesn’t shout; it lingers. It finds the kind of viewer who doesn’t need to be told it’s great, because it already lives inside them.

In the end, those films are my private canon: not the greatest ever made, but the ones that taught me how to feel.