I saw three ‘arthouse’ films in three different cinemas this past week or so. They were Drive, Tomboy and Melancholia. I say ‘arthouse’, but in fact, I’m not sure I find that term particularly useful, nor accurate. I understand why it exists. It helps differentiate and distinguish between movies that are made, usually by Evil Hollywood, with the end goal of producing huge fistfuls of cash, and movies, usually made in other countries in Strange, Foreign Languages, with the end goal of winning awards at film festivals and making middle class British people who read The Guardian hum, haw and argue.

The reason I don’t find it particularly useful nor accurate is that I think it’s a rather lazy and vaguely insulting euphemism. Because, you see, when people usually say ‘arthouse’, what they in fact mean is ‘foreign’. Or: not American or English. Surprisingly, two of the three films I saw are in English, but both are directed by Scandinavian men and neither of them were churned out by major Hollywood studios. This is why I suppose they qualify as ‘arthouse’, despite ‘Drive’ being show in mainstream cinemas across the land and featuring Oscar-nominated Hollywood totty and hotstuff.

The other issues over which the term ‘arthouse’ becomes thorny is the one about artistic intent and integrity. During my first year of university I became convinced that authenticity and artistic integrity do not exist, or at least do not matter and are impossible to measure, and, real or imagined, are the realm of impossible snobs. That may or may not be true, but either way, there is definitely a split, in all art forms and disciplines that have become ‘industries’, between people who primarily care about gaining the aforementioned huge fistfuls of cash and the people who primarily care about making a work of art. That is to say: something that resonates, provokes, innovates, inspires, angers, endures and/or invokes flatulent outbursts of euphoria.

It would be lovely to say that mainstream Hollywood fare fits neatly into the first box and all arthouse into the second, but it just doesn’t work that way, and anyway, that is to ignore the fact that almost everyone who has ever made a movie probably felt a conflicting or harmonious combination of the two, tempered and coloured by myriad other feelings. It’s a complex subject, and one which I shall leave, for now, partly because it’s past midnight and I am blistered and drained, but also because if I carry on like this, I’ll never stop, and then it will have to become a thesis and then a book and then a tome and then a neverending scroll and let’s just not go there thank you very much.

The first film I saw, Drive, has been described by many as a neo-noir and I guess this is accurate enough. In case you were completely unaware, I am obsessed with and in love with film noir. Don’t probe me too deeply, though, as my obsession is a fledgling one, and I’ve yet to properly tackle the vast noir back catalogue properly. I know that this particular genre is misogynist, predictable, often slow and convoluted, difficult to understand, full of hard-boiled, miserable sociopaths and double-crossing victims and sometimes cruel, mindless, violence, but I just don’t care. To me, it is a cocaine-laced triple chocolate baked alaska replete with cherry liqueur ganache, tobacco meringue and blood-flavoured ice cream: completely irresistible and definitely wrong (Queen Wrong in fact).

I thought Drive was decent enough. It gripped me, it featured an incredible musical score, beautiful cinematography and invoked a variety of emotions in me, but I just couldn’t wax Evangelical about it. For a start, I wasn’t quite sure, despite his heroic pouting and frowning and lip pursing, that Ryan Gosling really possessed the cool or charisma to carry off tha part. I mean, he was good, but I wasn’t in awe and I wasn’t really aroused either. He didn’t scare me and he didn’t really blister or burn. Carey Mulligan, too, was almost too docile. I love her, I really do, but she must have had about 2 lines, and, as I memorably (or not) said on twitter, watching the two enact their blossoming romance was like watching two beige balloons chafe gently together. In other words: boring.

I wasn’t too bothered about the plot holes or the context-less mega-violence, I think that’s sort of par for the course with noir or neo-noir, but I felt my beloved and flawless Christina Hendricks was underused and my heart wasn’t set on fire by Ryan’s thin lips. As great as it looked it felt like it embodied the old cliché ‘style over substance’.

Melancholia was the last of the three films I saw and I found it similarly frustrating. Kirsten Dunst turns in the performance of her career (and the year so far), and I certainly didn’t hate the movie, but I didn’t feel like it had anything to say. At all. Whether or not cinema, or art in general, has to SAY something is a tricky and irritating topic, so I won’t tackle it, but I felt more than almost any ‘arthouse’ film I have seen in a long time, that it merely observed. To me, it seemed to be a film about depression, but only in the most superficial sense. It depicts the severe crippling depression of two sisters set against a disastrous wedding and a rather clunky, heavy-handed but exhilarating metaphor for descent into despondency so deep and sickly blue it overwhelms and consumes. But that’s it. I don’t feel I gleaned anything, and, perhaps I am totally wrong, but I don’t think any of the sorts of people who might consider parting with money to go and see it would consider it revolutionary or eye-opening to be confronted with a frank but not totally unusual depiction of the mental illness.

After the film I had a lengthy discussion with my best friend Jenna about whether it was honest or dishonest for Von Trier to come across as such a trickster and to subvert our expectations about how characters should act in a film or how they should unfurl, gleefully piling on ‘arthouse’ cliché and unrelenting gloom, knowing that pretentious youngsters and hardened critics the land over would be arguing over the meaning of nominal details that might have actually meant nothing. We didn’t reach any conclusions, other than: if Kiki doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Actress it’ll be a travesty greater than the last great travesty you can think of.

The second film I saw, but last here, because I enjoyed it the most, was the Céline Sciamma-directed Tomboy. It was so good, in fact, that it almost toppled The Skin I Live In, as my film of the year, beating out The Tree of Life, which at the time, I thought was incendiary and heart-stoppingly wonderful, but has since proven to be almost completely forgettable. If Melancholia seemed to petulantly say nothing at all, Tomboy said it all, albeit without moving its lips very much. It’s a deceptively simple film, frighteningly well acted by a bunch of unknown French kids about a rather butch and incredibly beautiful young girl who moves house and tells her new friends she’s a boy, with both funny and horrifying consequences.

Perhaps this is an LGBT thing, as most of the reviews I’ve read by straight men manage to be both positive and ambivalent, but it affected me in a disturbing way that had long lost feelings, buried deep in a draw in the back of my brain and emotion-box, lurching sickeningly forward and making tiny human tears prick into the corners of my eyes. I never tried to persuade my friends I was a girl, and have comfortably inhabited my biological sex of ‘male’ my entire life, but as a self-confessed queer artist and gender non-believer, the weird, fascinating horror of seeing children so happily and comfortably mimic their parents’ heteronormative gender identities whilst the film’s protagonist stood outside their boundaries, perplexed but desperate to conform, made my heart ache in a very specific way.

It reminded me that although I inhabit a supposedly liberal and liberated Western 21^st century world, growing up can still be stained by the trauma of not understanding or wanting to belong to the strict imaginary gender binary that holds its iron grip over us, still. I had forgotten that. As I have grown into a young adult with greater understanding of sex and gender politics and a privileged life where I don’t necessarily have to daily answer to people about my choices re: how I dress, walk, talk, do my hair, interact with other people, I have forgotten that almost totally. Also the film made me laugh out loud and do what is commonly referred to on the interdots as a ‘squee’ due to cuteness.

Anyway.