Broken elbow + smaller-than-usual, online festival means that I got to watch all 142 films over the course of a couple of weeks and now have more than enough great movies under my belt to make a top ten. Most of these are by women, most of them are first features, and the top four are all from Latin America. If you’re not excited about the current cinema, maybe you’re looking in the wrong place?
IF I WERE THE WINTER ITSELF (Jazmin López, Argentina, 2020) – Amazing cinema that sounds oppressively academic on paper but is breathtaking on the screen. A group of people congregate in a vast run-down mansion in the middle of nowhere and set about filming reenactments of Godard’s
La Chinoise, Ana Mendieta’s
Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant) and Harun Farocki’s
Inextinguishable Fire. Meantime, lead actress Carmen is haunted by a recently ended relationship and that distraction starts to infect the band’s quixotic project. Linear time begins to break down, and the cast seem to be reenacting their own lives as well as those classics of activist art. The whole thing unfolds in long, sensuous prowling tracking shots, and the elaborate choreography spins off into a couple of arresting dance sequences. It’s like a reflexive, slow cinema, architecture porn, musical ghost story.
SICK, SICK, SICK (Alice Furtado, Brazil, 2019) – Another young Latin American woman filmmaker making films as good as anybody alive. Furtado is clearly a disciple of Claire Denis, but who’s going to complain about another Claire Denis film in the vein of
L’Intrus and
Trouble Every Day? Other overt references in the film are made to Renoir’s
The River and
I Walked with a Zombie, but actually, it’s ultimately an adaptation of
The Monkey’s Paw.
The mood of this is brilliantly calibrated to very slowly increase the mystery and tension until the hair-raising final shot.
YOUNG HUNTER (Marco Berger, Argentina, 2020) – As South American horror movies go,
Sick, Sick, Sick has nothing on this film, and it’s another one that plays expertly with tone. It’s not actually a horror movie: it’s creepier than that. The film starts out as a tentative adolescent coming out story, incongruously paced and scored like a thriller. About halfway through the film there’s a sickening twist and a reset with a new protagonist and we’re in a
noir twilight world where the actions of the first half replay as through a dark mirror. It’s a bold experiment in audience identification, and another remarkably sophisticated first film.
FIRST COW (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2020)
IDENTIFYING FEATURES (Fernanda Valadez, Mexico, 2020) – The same subject confronted in Ai Weiwei’s boilerplate documentary
Vivos is given vivid life in this first feature. It’s the simple quest of a mother trying to find out what happened to her son, who ‘disappeared’ on a bus trip to the US border, but it avoids the button-pushing clichés of a lot of crusading cinema and instead goes for slow-burn alienation as the trail gets sketchier and stranger. The unexpected reveal at the end seems more than a little unlikely, but it’s sold by a demonic flashback, and you realize that the film has, inch by inch, moved from the everyday into the mythic.
LARA (Jan Ole Gerster, Germany, 2019) – Classically mounted Euro drama that pivots on a superb performance by Corinna Harfouch as an overbearing success-focussed mother, who’s alienated everybody around her. Everything comes to a head on a very significant day. It’s a great performance, but it’s also expertly directed so that we get continually drawn in and repulsed from the character. Just when you think she’s been treated unfairly, she does something absolutely horrible. The strong ending is similar in conception to
Phoenix, but very different in impact and narrative context.
THE UNKNOWN SAINT (Alaa Eddine Aljem, Morocco, 2019) – Gorgeously shot deadpan comedy about a fleeing robber who buries his loot and disguises it as a grave. He comes back to claim it years later, only to find that a mausoleum has been built over it and it’s become the focal point of a local community (who are themselves about as eccentric as the hapless thief). The laidback style is reminiscent of Suleiman (not his mediocre last film), but with a stronger narrative drive.
THE LONG WALK (Mattie Do, Laos, 2019) – Already mentioned in the sci-fi list thread. Strange and increasingly dark Laotian ghost story that meets the sci-fi brief by being set in the future and involving time travel, even though it feels nothing like most films in the genre.
Uncle Boonmee meets
Primer gives you some idea of its conceptual ballpark, if not its stylistic one. The
Primer aspect of the film ultimately unfolds into horror, making the film even more heterogenous and its success more miraculously unlikely.
THAT WHICH IS TO COME IS JUST A PROMISE (Flatform, Italy / Netherlands / New Zealand, 2019) – The Italian experimental collective come up with a dazzling fake single shot film. In a 20-minute continuous tracking shot (compiled from different takes, for obvious reasons), the camera prowls through, over and under the island nation of Tuvalu as people go about their business. The remarkable thing is that this complex movement was shot in several passes, at times when the ground was flooded or dry. When the seawater heats up, it permeates the earth and floods the land, so the single continuous shot dissolves between takes recorded at different water levels (e.g. somebody walking down a road will suddenly be wading down a river). It’s not just a stark visual record of global warming and rising sea levels, but a mesmerising cinematic feat.
DARK CITY BENEATH THE BEAT (TT the Artist, USA, 2020) – Brisk, vivacious portrait of the Baltimore music scene that’s structured less like an expository documentary and more like a mix tape – which is really the perfect form for this kind of film. It makes you resent all those so-called music docs that aren’t wall-to-wall tunes.
Bumped to no. 11:
CHARTER (Amanda Kernell, Sweden, 2020) – Kernell’s first film,
Sami Blood, was a bit of a misfire for me, a hot topic forced into the stays of a somewhat conventional period drama. This follow-up is much more assured and tougher, and is another film on my list with an opaque protagonist that’s hard to relate to. Here it’s a woman who has previously ‘abandoned’ her children and kidnaps them just as she’s about to lose custody. They hide away in the Canary Isles, and for most of the film we have great anxiety about whether or not she poses a danger to them (all we know is that she didn’t just abandon them, but also did something much, much worse – and the resolution of this mystery is one of the film’s deftest narrative tricks).
TEN MORE GREAT FIRST FILMS
LAST AND FIRST MEN (Jóhann Jóhannson, Iceland, 2020) - Johannson's first, last and only feature is old school hard science fiction. Tilda Swinton calmly speaks to us from 2000 million years in the future about our demise while Jóhannson calmly investigates the ruins of an extinct species. Structured more like a piece of music than a conventional narrative, and the music is as strong as you'd expect from this composer. Hypnotic and assured if you're up for the challenge.
KALA AZAR (Janis Rafa, Greece, 2020) – Raw and strange Greek drama about a pair who pick up dead pets for cremation. They also have an under-the-table sideline in roadkill. They’re the main strand in a film that gives a vivid, visceral portrait of the rural region in which it’s set and the animals that cohabit with its human beasts. It’s more of a mood piece than a developed narrative, though things do come to a dramatic head in an unexpected but retrospectively inevitable manner.
PARADISE DRIFTERS (Mees Peijnenburg, Netherlands, 2020) – Bleak, confident drama about three marginal characters thrown together by happenstance on a dodgy cross-European journey. Things unfold unexpectedly, and the filmmaking syntax keeps us off-balance by abruptly cutting to black before scenes seem to have naturally ended.
THEY CALL ME BABU (Sandra Beerends, Netherlands, 2019) – A spoken narrative about the experiences of an Indonesian nanny taken back to Holland by her employers is accompanied by repurposed period (early 20th century) home movie footage. It’s a rich exploration of ideas of colonization and self-determination on several levels.
IN THE NAME OF THE LAND (Édouard Bergeon, France, 2019) – Classically mounted “farming is hell” generational drama that gets way, way darker than I expected and ends with a delicately placed icepick in the heart.
SOME KIND OF HEAVEN (Lance Oppenheim, USA, 2020) – Morris-esque documentary about the world’s largest retirement village in Florida. The film transcends kitsch (which is there all across the background for the taking) by focusing on three characters who are outsiders in different ways and offer unusual and fascinating takes on the bizarre artificial world in which they’ve found themselves (or not found themselves).
THE SURROGATE (Jeremy Hersh, USA, 2020) – Stylistically flat indie satire that works because of a funny, smart script predicated on thorny ethical dilemmas and some great performances. Felt like a US indie from the 90s, which was actually quite nice.
PERFECT 10 (Eva Riley, UK, 2019) – Let’s face it, nowadays there are a lot of young filmmakers who make better Ken Loach films than Ken Loach.
LESSONS OF LOVE (Malgorzata Goliszewska / Kasia Mateja, Poland, 2019) – Sweet documentary about an elegant older woman finding love, that gains a valuable extra dimension as we slowly realize that her tentativeness is because of the long, abusive marriage she has (almost) escaped.
KIDS RUN (Barbara Ott, Germany, 2020) – I found it hard to empathize with the too-hapless protagonist, but this was a very assured, gritty debut directorial effort.
TEN MORE GREAT SECOND, THIRD AND UMPTEENTH FILMS
FAMILY MEMBERS (Mateo Bendesky, Argentina, 2019) - Low-key black comedy about siblings 'trapped' in an idyllic beach town and, more to the point, in the house of their dead mother.
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH (Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Japan, 2019) – Comic whimsy isn’t what I expect from this director, which might be why this is possibly the film of his I’ve enjoyed the most to date.
ZERO (Soda Kazuhiro, Japan, 2020) – Sequel to the great 2013 observational documentary
Mental. Like that film, this one stages a striking reveal in the second half that completely changes our view of the subject. Soda’s work is a lot like Fred Wiseman with a twist of Kazuo Hara.
KIDS (Michael Frei, Switzerland, 2019) – Hilarious minimalist animation that’s no doubt grimly allegorical.
TENCH (Patrice Toye, Belgium, 2019) – The kind of film that you watch through your fingers. A young paedophile is released on a technicality and struggles to curb his desires, while being pestered incessantly by the neglected and needy little girl next door. Just about every aspect of this film is painful to experience, but it’s an impressive achievement by the director and cast.
DRAMA GIRL (Vincent Boy Kars, Netherlands, 2020) – Bizarre, dry docudrama in which a young dancer stars as herself in reconstructions of her life story, with actors playing her parents and partners. Because she’s edited certain (painful) details out of her filmic life story, some of the crucial scenes seem poorly 'motivated'. The film consists of rehearsals of the ‘scripted’ biographical scenes (delivered with a blunt, Straubian mise-en-scene), ‘behind-the-scenes’ footage of the cast and crew discussing the scenes, and interviews with the star about how fucking weird it all is.
MI VIDA (Norbert ter Hall, Spain / Netherlands, 2019) – Elderly woman finds herself during sunny Spanish jaunt. Normally I’d run a mile from a film that looked as ‘inspirational’ as this, but seeing absolutely everything meant I had to cross its path, and it was actually smart and delightful. There’s an inevitable scene that the film gravitates toward (shy widow / courtly, dapper, available older gentleman) and then tacks rapidly away from in a delightful moment that finally won me over. Cadiz looks spectacular. Who wouldn’t want to run away there?
KING OF THE CRUISE (Sophie Dros, Netherlands, 2019) – Smooth, sly documentary about Ronnie Reisinger, a massively obese elderly American who cruises around the world posing as a “Scottish baron”. Spoiler, I guess, but you’d have to be extraordinarily gullible to fall for his line. You worry that the film has nowhere to go beyond abject gawking at one truly ugly American once you figure out what’s going on, but the film is very carefully structured to stage further reveals that give us a much more nuanced character portrait. My new visual image of purgatory is a cruise like this, seated next to Baron Ronnie in his kilt and cape at the captain’s table.
CODED BIAS (Shalini Kantayya, USA, 2020) – Smart, thorough documentary about racist algorithms. The worst kind of algorithm.
EXILE (Visar Morina, Germany, 2020) – Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Unnerving (if a little over-egged) Kafkaesque vision of workplace discrimination gone worse. There’s a well-used plot twist in here that’s spruced up quite well, and an ominous suspended ending that works better for me than quite a bit of what led up to it.