Character Cheat Sheet

Good films don’t simply portray a character; they have a specific perspective on and approach to it. I will share a few character-driven films here, each with a different approach: perhaps a cheat sheet to help you appreciate & learn from them.

Character-Driven Films

400 Blows (1959), Francois Truffaut: Character as personal experience. It is built entirely from the director’s personal experience of childhood. It rejects universal cliches and representations.

Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Jean-Luc Godard: Character as analytical object. It keeps the audience outside of emotional identification with the character and forces cold analytical observation.

8½ (1963), Federico Fellini: Character as inner world. It reveals the complex inner world of its character: dreams, memories, and fantasies blend together.

La Collectionneuse (1967), Eric Rohmer: Character as dilemma. It questions the character’s reliability by exposing the conflict between his inner thoughts and actions.

Nashville (1970), Robert Altman: Character as ensemble. It focuses on the crowd; it lets the event be the protagonist. Multiple characters interact around a central event without the need for a single hero.

Opening Night (1977), John Cassavetes: Character as intensity. It focuses on a few days of the character’s extreme crisis and shows moments in high focus.

Vive L’amour (1994), Tsai Ming-liang: Character as silhouette. Characters reveal themselves through silence and simple intersections rather than dialogue. It lets the audience fill the void with their own speculation.

Taste of Cherry (1997), Abbas Kiarostami: Character as blank canvas. The character’s core motivations are intentionally withheld from the audience, which forces them into introspection.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), Cristi Puiu: Character as mirror. The character’s misfortune is used to expose the flaws of the corrupt system.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Ethan Coen & Joel Coen: Character as cycle. It establishes the traditional Hollywood arc (conflict/change/resolution) and then deliberately rejects it, keeping the character in a cycle, like a song that repeats its chorus.

The Death of Louis XIV (2016), Albert Serra: Character as mortal. A famous historical figure is framed through human frailty and mortality, which removes historical context and shows the universal reality of a dying old man.

You can find the list of films mentioned in this post on my Letterboxd page here.