The second coming of the prologue

In the modern age, the supporting feature can appear as hopelessly an antiquated slice of cinematic lore as Robin Askwith's Confessions of... series. But recently they seem to have been undergoing something of a revival – albeit in the disguised shape of artfully accomplished extended prologues. Paul Martin finds plenty to get excited about before the movie even gets going.

Prologues have, for a long time, been a gruesome carbuncle on the otherwise unimpeachably glossy face of movie blockbusters. They have too often been used as the cheapest and nastiest of short cuts to investing their parent film with a bit of narrative coherence. In lieu of directors bothering to coax wonderfully subtle and nuanced performances from their leading players, or producers putting their hand in pocket and investing in writing that smartly and undemonstratively elucidates the protagonist's personality, we poor viewers have instead regularly been battered about the skull with 'Twenty Years Previously' title cards, usually followed by some rubbish, vaguely lookalike youngsters acting out a bit of supposed character-forming daftness which we are meant to take as stone-carved justification for every bit of action to occur within the ensuing two hours. For an unintentionally hilarious illustration of this tendency, see the comical kiddie berserker fury of James Howlett (Troye Sivan) in the opening minutes of X-Men Origins: Wolverine – that prologue depicting the six-clawed tearaway launching into a nineteenth-century homicidal rage against his estranged poppa with all the menace of a junior speed skater swooshing across the finishing line.

Yes, there have been a few honourable exceptions. Spielberg's opening salvo for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (featuring River Phoenix as a boy scout Indy) combined invigorating action with some teases about the origins of character habits with which audiences were already well familiar as a result of the previous two instalments. Plus, following on from the limping rehash that was Temple of Doom, this change of opening tack gave audiences an instant indication that the second Indy sequel would inject some fresh elements into the already established formula (without disastrous recourse to big-eyed aliens cribbed from the barmpot pages of Eric von Däniken books, atomic bomb-proof refrigerators, or Ray “strike a light, rub a duck, gor blimey guv'nor” Winstone). But on the whole, prologues have tended to be as lugubriously loathsome as terrorist abominable snowmen with swine flu, who lie about their addresses in order to get their terrorist abominable snowchildren with swine flu into the best schools, and park their terrorist abominable snowmobiles with swine flu in the disabled spaces at the supermarket.

And yet, what is that stirring aroma? No, not the dirty laundry you forgot to put on last night – this is an altogether more invigorating whiff: the smell of change! 2009 has been the year of many a filmic rebirth, with several feature phoenixes soaring up out of the ashes of unfashionable ignominy. 3D movies have struck back with all the relentless determination of a highway juggernaut trying to mow down Dennis Weaver, while The Wrestler signalled a comeback for Mickey Rourke of the like not seen on the silver screen since Michael J. Fox's Beavers basketball team won out in such nail-biting manner at the conclusion of Teen Wolf. And we have also seen the prologue finally reinvented for the third millennium, with some of the openers served up this year almost functioning as short films in their own right, such were the levels of wit, skill and clear-minded purpose on display. For while the B-movie proper has long since joined dinosaurs, Cheggers Plays Pop, and the Raleigh Grifter in the humongous multi-coloured cosmic trashcan in the sky, the oft-splendid prologues of today have successfully established a kind of a spiritual continuity to the supporting features of the past.

The most recent evidence of the prologue's reincarnation was delivered courtesy of those muddy funbags the Coen Brothers, with their newest offering, A Serious Man, delivering a self-contained, offbeat intro that plays every bit like its own miniature movie. This sequence - which is utilised for thematically illustrative purposes, rather than serving a direct narrative function - depicts curious goings-on at an eastern European shtetl (a nineteenth-century small town with a predominantly Jewish populace), where a husband (Allen Lewis Rickman) arrives home to his wife (Yelena Shmulenson) and explains that he has a vague family acquaintance in tow. The ground outside is thick with snow, and the husband explains that he has offered his hospitality to this friend. The wife is aghast, declaring that the described acquaintance has been dead for no short length of time, and that this doppelganger must therefore be a dybbuk (an undead soul, in Jewish folklore). The supposed dybbuk (Fyvush Finkel) duly shows up just as this seed of doubt has been sown in the husband's mind, thereby ensuring a strain a darkly comic tension is present as the latter uncertainly welcomes the jovial former into his home. The battleaxe wife is no such captive to hostly protocol though, leaving the suspected spectre in no doubt as to what she thinks of him. With her husband prevaricating over quite what to do with his house guest, the wife takes matters into her own hands in dramatic fashion, unexpectedly and without ceremony stabbing the dybbuk where he sits. As the shirt of the perforated dybbuk turns red with blood, the glowering wife is utterly unrepentant for her actions. It is a witty scene, being nicely played, and replete with humour and atmosphere.

It is unexpected too within the Coens’ oeuvre, for in spite of their predilection for period pieces, they have never previously explored pre-twentieth century chronology. However, for all its quality, this prologue scene does suffer somewhat from the same problem that afflicts A Serious Man as a whole - namely that the movie sometimes seems to coldly serve up the Jewish faith simply as a source of mirth for predominantly atheist, or at the very least agnostic, metropolitan audiences (when I was watching the film I found myself recalling, of all things, that antediluvian episode of The Simpsons where Krusty sombrely says grace in Hebrew, eliciting big yuks from Homer at the clown's “funny talk”). A Serious Man is apparently the Coens’ most autobiographical piece of work, with experiences and memories from their own upbringing in 1960s Minnesota being woven into the film's mise-en-scene. However, the pervading air of cynicism does occasionally come across as a slightly snarky pop at Judaism as a whole.

Following on from their A Serious Man prologue, the Coens are set to venture into another icebound Jewish community with their adaptation of The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Pulitzer Prize-winning author (and Spider-Man 2 co-screenwriter) Michael Chabon. The book is a detective tale set within an alternative world history, in which Nazi-persecuted European Jews were settled in Alaska in 1940, although the latest word from Camp Coen is that any movie version will in all probability have to wait till after their Jeff Bridges-starring take on True Grit.

It is not only the Coens who can claim credit for this year's outbreak of worthwhile prologue action. Audiences were also treated to powerhouse openings in movies from two of modern cinema's most unapologetically individual directors, Lars von Trier and Quentin Tarantino. The commencing segment of the latter's Inglourious Basterds, which is appended by the Sergio Leone-riffing subtitle of 'Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France', is by some distance the best sequence in that entire film, with a great deal of the leviathan-flabby material which follows it being less the work of an enfant terrible, and more someone who is actually just terrible. And while it may possibly be stretching things to characterise this lengthy section as a prologue, it does actually tick many of the narrative function boxes which we earlier used to characterise the more traditional, usually torpid form of the prologue. For not only does the scene take place some years prior to the bulk of the movie's main action, but it also supplies key motivation for one of the central protagonists, Mélanie Laurent's Shosanna Dreyfus (indeed, she being pretty much the solitary character operating on the side of the angels with whom Tarantino bothers to furnish with anything at all resembling a personality). With the adroitly-cranked tension stemming from the manner in which Christoph Waltz' pipe-chugging rotter Hans Landa weasels the hiding place of the Dreyfus family out of stoic farmer LaPadite (Denis Menochet), the scene works effectively to establish Shosanna's disgust for Nazis and collaborators alike, and also sets up her personal enmity with Landa himself. Unfortunately, this intimate duel is subsequently fumbled by Tarantino as if it were a grease-coated ball bearing, with the final fates of Shosanna and Landa going mystifyingly unlinked.

There are similar issues in terms of what comes after failing to match up to what has gone before going on in von Trier's ominous mood-piece Antichrist. Although at least in the case of von Trier's film we need not engage in any agonising over whether its prologue qualifies as such under the strict and exacting edicts of the Geneva Prologues Convention, because the section under our consideration is explicitly identified as a prologue within the diagesis of the movie. Antichrist managed to divide critics when it came out earlier this year – some hated it, some really hated it – and it is an undeniably oddball affair overall, being a mix of taciturn tedium and loopy ultraviolence. But, while not universally loved, the movie's prologue was generally far better received than the rest of its dramatic action, with the beautifully-photographed monochrome opening at least offering up some superb stylistic touches. Delivered in slow motion, and soundtracked by Handel, the sequence displays a preoccupation with those artistic perennials of sex and death, and is possessed of an elegiac quality which is not to be found in the grimy woodland milieu of the rest of the film. It also makes several lorryloads more sense that the closing epilogue depicting a badly-wounded Willem Dafoe in the forest, which is a scene roughly as perplexing as a large-whiskered stranger walking up to you at the train station, handing you the 'Z' tile from a Scrabble set, and telling you that “The jovial eagle swoops four times past the golden artichoke.”

Prologues were also order of the day in the two best-received blockbusters of the year. J. J. Abrams' Star Trek commenced with a suitably pyrotechnic slice of event movie action, by pitting Captain Kirk Sr. (Chris Hemsworth) against Romulan era-hopper Nero (Eric Bana), with the clash between the two facilitating the history-twiddling that enabled the reboot of the entire franchise. It proved a highly significant role for Hemsworth too; the Australian actor's performance having manoeuvred him into the big red cape and pointy-winged helmet of Marvel superhero Thor, in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of the comic of the same name. So soon happy boy Hemsworth will get to exclaim things like “By Odin's raven!” or “Fafnir's teeth!”, or “By my father's beard!”, but probably not “Nice to see you, to see you... NICE!”

Also attracting kudos like a colossal kudos-magnet was the opening of Pixar's Up, which like Inglourious Basterds was built somewhere on the border of prologue-dom, though certainly close enough in my book (which is actually a cruddy crayon-scrawled thing, with pictures of aardvarks dressed up as various members of the professional classes) to earn its place in this summary.

The reason that the Up prologue functions so well is because of the purposeful efficiency with which the life of Carl Fredricksen is whipped through - succinctly showing how childhood dreams can get constantly shuffled to the back of the deck via the hustle and bustle of adult living, and siring many a moist eye when the little shoebox-headed fella bids poignant farewell to soulmate Ellie. And this sequence from writers and co-directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson gives a marvellous exposition of the revised art of the prologue, with a large amount of very finely-nuanced character information being disseminated to the viewer in wonderfully expedient fashion. It is impressive, affecting stuff. But then it is of course always far easier to deliver a good opening than it is to dig out a decent finish. It can be sometimes difficult to know how to wrap things up. Sometimes things just drift on and on and on and on and on and on, in an aimlessly rambling flail, prevaricating and procrastinating when really it would be best for all concerned to just bring an abrupt halt to proceedings. In fact, that sounds like a good idea...