Compared with the carbonated, artificially-flavoured, genetically-modified pap that mainstream cinema dishes up, Robert Altman's Nashville now tastes like a crisp organic apple. This magnificent ensemble movie from 1975 is part of the National Film Theatre's revival season of American cinema 1967-1980. Spacious, shrewdly detailed and conceived with compassion and wit, it unfurls at an unhurried walking pace, spreading itself across a very American urban landscape.
Nashville is the home of the Grand Old Opry, the epicentre of American country music where musicians, producers, promoters and good ol' boys are getting pressured by a political wheeler-dealer into supporting an independent new presidential candidate. Dozens of stories and lives criss-cross each other. Lily Tomlin is the mother of two hearing-impaired children and is having an affair with a handsome singer; Scott Glenn is an intense young soldier obsessed with a country star; Shelley Duvall is a space-cadet visitor from California - and there are many, many more. Their intersections are brilliantly constructed by Altman, yet everything appears utterly natural and unforced - could a modern screenplay seminar teach anything like this? Nashville looks more stunningly distinctive and overwhelmingly real than ever, especially with the news-reportage feel for the outdoor concerts. That highway pile-up scene is the most convincingly authentic auto smash-up ever shown on screen.
But what this reissue reveals is how profoundly mysterious the film is. You find yourself wondering: what on earth is going on? What am I watching here? The country music is profoundly conservative, yet subversive, in tune with this shadowy "replacement" candidate who wants big government off the people's backs, yet plans to ban lawyers and tax churches. The America it reveals seems profoundly strange: as mutinously, ungovernably alien as the Dallas that President Kennedy found himself in just 12 years previously.
· Released on January 1