Well, I’ve seen over 130 films in the last couple of weeks (a few dozen of those were shorts). Still more to come, but I feel prepared enough to compile a rough top ten. Lots of fantastic films this year, but mostly not from Cannes (of the dozen or so I’ve seen, only one makes my top ten, but there are plenty of very good films from the Cannes line-up).
Edit: a week and a dozen films later, I've shaken up my top ten with two new additions and a very strong also-ran.
Top 10
Happy Hour (Hamaguchi Ryosuke) – I loved this so much I started a thread for it. 100+ films later, it’s still lodged in my brain and one of the best things I’ve seen in years.
The Son of Joseph (Eugene Green) – Or, Eugene Green’s Greatest Hits. A step back from the stylistic extremity of
La Sapienza, and perhaps the most enjoyable film he’s yet made. Dense with allusion (mostly Biblical, and mostly subtle and unexpected), with a twisty, expansive plot and cast, frequently hilarious and ultimately very moving. It’s only the second of those characteristics that should come as a surprise to Green veterans. He’s one of the greatest working filmmakers, so if you haven’t caught up, here’s the ideal opportunity.
Life After Life (Zhang Hanyi) – This was produced by Jia Zhangke, and it bears a stylistic similarity to early works like
Platform, but there’s also a strong whiff of Sokhurov’s otherworldly side. The story is extremely simple: a dead mother inhabits the body of her son in order to get her husband to do something important (which, in a subdued running gag, mystifies the mere mortals they encounter: “You came back from the dead for
that?”) The film is so quiet and low-key that it manages to sell its outré premise(s) completely, but the real coup comes in the closing seconds when
a trapdoor opens under us into an abyss of existential horror.
(Cristi Puiu) – Another domestic epic, and like
Happy Hour, it’s nothing like the plush, manicured character study that description might imply. Here, it’s an incredibly detailed examination of one sprawling family, on one afternoon, at an endless family dinner in a poky apartment that might as well have been catered by Samuel Beckett. Puiu’s formal discipline is hugely impressive (oftentimes, the camera will be stranded in the hallway, panning back and forth as doors open and close on the major and minor dramas unfolding behind them), and the characters are built up casual gesture by casual gesture with incredible care, but there’s nevertheless a freewheeling, improvisatory feel to everything. It’s also extremely funny. Our focal character, Lary, is burly and buoyant and spends most of the time wryly amused by the emotional chaos swirling around him. Most of the time.
The Five Minute Museum (Paul Bush) – Bush photographed thousands of museum artifacts, and then edited single frames of them together to create fantastic, pulsating Ur-arrowheads, or to show pottery shards reassembling themselves in the fourth dimension, or to create found animation of battle scenes or galloping horses from the images on hundreds of vases or coins. An animation tour-de-force.
Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt) – Reichardt has always been a gifted miniaturist, so the ‘lightly interrelated short stories’ form is far better suited to her than to most directors (who generally manage to fudge at least one of them). It’s just great work all around here, particularly from those certain women (Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, Kristen Stewart).
Les Démons (Philippe Lesage) – Commanding first fiction feature from Canada. Stylistically it flips between ominous formalism (long, slow lateral tracks back and forth, 360° pans, very slow zooms) and busy Pialat intimacy (including one of the most shocking and convincing family rows I’ve ever seen in a non-Pialat film). It all revolves around a very young protagonist navigating a world of random adult hostility, parental betrayal, casual cruelty (his own), burgeoning, and confusingly contradictory, sexuality, and the bewildering chaos of real world horror, with young Felix understandably unsure about what threats are exaggerated and which are real. It’s mesmerizing and extremely tense, though nothing really plays out as you expect, dramatically – which is not to say that there aren’t several major dramatic payoffs. There’s an unusual and assured use of music, with the heavy, dread-inducing score playing over scenes that seem completely innocuous (but which get tied in with other scenes featuring the same score much later on in the film), and with Miriam Makeba’s insanely joyous ‘Pata Pata’ successfully dispelling a feeling of dread in other scenes. In the long run, the film is in some respects a competition between which music will prevail. A really terrific, mature and complex work that marks the emergence of a major talent. I suppose Haneke is the obvious contemporary reference point, but I found this film a lot more tonally supple and fruitfully complicated than most of his work.
A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies) – The most autobiographical film Davies has made since his actual autobiographical films, and perhaps also the best (
The House of Mirth is really the only serious competition). He conceives of Emily Dickinson as a kind of 19th century Dorothy Parker, and the dialogue of the film is highly stylized to be 80% aphorisms. This gives the film a brisk wit, but as the film progresses the wordplay becomes less and less capable of masking Dickinson’s pain. Great performances by Cynthia Nixon and Jennifer Ehle (and Keith Carradine, of all the people to find in a Terence Davies film) in roles that require very precise balance between comedy and drama.
Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi) – The great Italian documentarist delivers one of the most starkly beautiful films of the year. Like the far more functional (but also very good) Austrian documentary
Lampedusa in Winter, it’s a portrait of the remote Italian island that has become the target destination of thousands of African refugees (thousands of whom die on the voyage). The film is split between documentation of the rescue and care of some of those refugees (and the horror they have endured), and relating the experiences of a local boy with a lazy eye and a slingshot. Rosi has such a great eye that he finds images that evoke beauty and awe wherever he looks, and there are a whole lot of night-time shots (punctuated by dancing torchlight or the psychedelic gold-green shimmer of space blankets) that are just spectacular, but he also has an extremely firm grasp on the human dimension of a serious international tragedy, which makes for a much more focussed film than his previous, Golden Lion-winning,
Sacro GRA.
Anatomia Sonora: Sentinels of the Tides (Phil Dadson) – A two screen work in which Dadson kayaked around the back canals of Venice. Each doubled, matched shot shows the approach to identical bridges (in most cases, the shots are the same bridge approached from different directions, but there are some delightful ringers smuggled in amongst them), identically framed, with each bridge reflected in the calm water. Overall, the film has an abstract identity (approaching and passing through looming circles), though every component is itself a unique micro-documentary. And if you cross your eyes, it’s an even more radically psychedelic 3D movie than
Adieu au Langage.
The Great
Apple Pie (Sam Hamilton) – Extremely ambitious and accomplished experimental New Zealand feature – a bunch of descriptors that get to be combined all too seldom (and which also apply this year to Adam Luxton and Summer Agnew’s
On an Unknown Beach). The various sections are linked by cosmological gobbledygook and named after planets (and the Sun, and the Moon), but they stand or fall as individual short films, mostly predicated on visual metaphors for cosmic movement. Different sections evoke Anger (the hieratic nighttime masked procession of ‘Jupiter’), Barney (a man bound to / suspended from a gnarled tree in ‘Mars’), Paradzhanov (figures racing around one another on perfectly symmetrical mini-hilltops in ‘The Sun’), or the Whitneys (mesmerizing mandalas of pulsating rings evoking Saturn) and there’s a brilliant use of landscape throughout.
Bleak Street (Arturo Ripstein) – Content-wise, this seemed very standard to me, but Ripstein’s drastically updated noir style (basically noir lighting, but with the addition of copious shadow detail and gliding Steadicam) made this one of the most visually compelling films I’ve seen this year. Through that lens, this is kind of like the first twenty minutes of a ‘couple on the run’ film, stretched out and derailed. Hardly surprising from a miserabilist social realism point of view, but more novel if considered as a modern noir.
The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra) – Albert Serra doesn’t really make movies of ideas: they’re movies of texture and corporeality, and this is really an extended painterly mood piece that you either get absorbed in or reject. It’s another chapter in his ongoing project of humanizing mythic figures, and while it may appear to be just be a big heap of burnished molasses, there are nevertheless moments of punctuation in the form of humour and shock. I found it absorbing and the time flew, but if your mileage doesn’t vary, Serra would have failed at what he set out to do.
The Exquisite Corpus (Peter Tscherkassky) – A detourned old naturist film erupts into an erotic fever dream. Yet another dazzling tour-de-force of cinema eating itself alive from Tscherkassky.
Francofonia (Aleksandr Sokurov) – Explores, more explicitly, a lot of the ideas that were implicit in
Russian Ark (including the idea of a great museum as a ship carrying the cargo of culture through time, though this time the vessel is at the mercy of a mammoth storm and needs to throw its cargo overboard in order to survive). It’s a dreamlike collage of found footage, artfully recreated period scenes (in Academy ratio and antique colour, with a visible optical soundtrack), metaphorical pantomime, dodgy Skype, and diary-film reflections. It’s actually one of Sokurov’s most stylistically diverse and content-rich films: I can’t think of another of his works that really resembles this, which is great to see in a career encompassing more than fifty films and now entering its fifth decade.
Julieta (Pedro Almodovar) – It’s been a long, long time since I was especially engaged by any of Almodovar’s films, but I surrendered to this one and had a great time. As usual, the plot is basically an old Hollywood melodrama of the 40s or 50s shot in ravishing widescreen with luxurious close-ups and a Pop Art use of colour. I still find the narrative pastiche kind of hollow (the storyline touches on all sorts of potential issues, but is never actually about anything other than the elaborate machinations of its plot), but stylistically this was incredibly seductive. Beautiful filmmaking from start to finish.
Kate Plays Christine (Robert Greene) – This is a hard one to rank, and it’s occupied every tier of this summary (or none of them) while I was working things out. It’s a making of the Christine Chubbock biopic, focussed primarily on lead actress Kate Lyn Sheil’s struggle to get a handle on the real life Christine. We see her do lots of research, track down people who worked with her, and have doubts about the exploitative nature (and quality) of the entire project. We also see glimpses of the film she’s making, which looks frankly awful. For an hour and three-quarters it’s a kind of interesting document of a filmmaking process that might not have been a good idea in the first place. I had already decided to avoid Antonio Campos’
Christine, on the basis of his utterly mediocre
Simon Killer, and the glimpses we get of the film here inspired no confidence whatsoever. But wait a minute:
Christine doesn’t star Kate Lyn Shiel, and the bearded Campos-a-like directing the film in
Kate Plays Christine isn’t actually Campos. And then we get the final scene, which is. . . quite something. And clues us in to what is really going on here. Definitely one of the most violently original documentaries of the year.
Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas) – I don’t know what everybody was complaining about, unless some people just find the presentation of genre material in arthouse language too distasteful to countenance. Let’s not forget that Assayas has done this a number of times before (
Demonlover,
Boarding Gate), and he’s taken a critical hit every time he does so. For me, Assayas took a couple of wacky premises (ghost story plus erotic thriller – if this had been a Mario Bava film, nobody would have batted an eyelid at the narrative), subverted them and mined them for new ideas – and delivered plenty of set-piece thrills along the way. There’s stuff here that doesn’t work (most notably a big expository scene that provides the fulcrum for the plot but seems way out of character on top of being shoddily written), and while Kristen Stewart has presence, she hasn’t demonstrated much range yet (though that’s not necessarily required for this role), but overall this is an involving thriller, with interesting takes on its genres and some really effective understated special effects. The final ‘conversation’ in the film ‘explains’ many of the film’s concerns and ideas, without resolving anything at the level of plot (and if you couldn’t figure out the point of the big text-messaging set-piece in the middle of the film, here’s its analogue analogue). If parts of this film don’t make sense, it might be because you’re considering them in the wrong mode: some scenes just don’t work if you’re assuming that everything’s going to boil down to art house normality, with apparently supernatural goings-on largely packed neatly away into lightly ambiguous realism. Likewise, if you’re following the genre template, you’re going to expect all the supernatural and psychopathic shenanigans to be tied up in a great big bow, with criminals caught and restless spirits calmed. You’re also going to expect the protagonist to behave like an idiot, which, in what might be my favourite fakeout in the film (and it’s a subtle one that happens entirely off-screen), she doesn’t. This film is very much a companion piece to Paul Verhoeven’s
Elle, which attempts a lot of the same tricky things with genre (in a more bombastic and confrontational way). That film had a much stronger central performance, but I think this one wins on points.
The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit) – Masterful wordless animated feature, the first product of EuroGhibli. A film of great beauty, with exquisite use of negative space throughout. The early going where it’s a straight survival tale is the most compelling section, but the latter parts are no less accomplished. I was surprised and delighted to see that this was written by Pascale Ferran (though the bird’s-eye-view section of
Bird People certainly showed that she could tell a story very effectively without dialogue.)
The Really Good
Aquarius (Kleber Mendonca Filho) – This is a much more conventional film than Filho’s debut
Neighbouring Sounds, and it’s kind of disappointing in those terms, but the direction of this film is so full of subtle tricks and touches – all at the service of the story – that I have to admire it.
Chevalier (Athina Rachel Tsangari) – I’m not 100% on board with the new wave of Greek absurdism revolving around the Tsangari / Lanthimos axis, but this is one of the best films from that gang so far. Again, there’s an obsession with high-stakes game- / role-playing, though this time it’s in the somewhat more naturalistic context of the pissing contest to end all pissing contests. Masculine pretensions are predictably skewered, but there are enough laughs along the way to keep the satire afloat.
Paris 05:59 / Theo & Hugo dans la meme bateau (Olivier Ducastel / Jacques Martineau) – As the original title implies, this is, in a very perverse way, a gay
Celine et Julie. The film opens with about twenty minutes of hardcore gay sex (including, during penetration, a stylized fantasy sequence) in a Paris sex club that’s exclusively electric blue and dayglo orange, and then continues to unfold in real time as the two guys wander around the streets of Paris in the middle of the night dealing with the fallout of their erotic encounter. The real coup (and challenge) is that it turns into a rather sweet relationship movie, with not another fuck in sight.
Paterson (Jim Jarmusch) – I went into this not knowing whether the title referred to the place, the name of the main character, or William Carlos Williams. Spoiler: it’s all three. And it’s a really sweet and relaxed low-concept film for Jarmusch. Just sit back and enjoy.
Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade) – A hell of a lot of fun, but if this really was the best thing at Cannes (I don’t think it was) then it was definitely an off year. Formally very ordinary, and I felt like the father was far more a plot device than a complete character, but this was nevertheless consistently entertaining and genuinely hilarious at (the right) times.
Winter Song (Otar Iosseliani) – More of the same from Iosseliani, which – since nobody else makes films like this – is more than enough.