TOP TEN
An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo) – The most impressive film of the year for me by some margin. Having seen a large chunk of the Cannes slate now, I agree that it was a really good year, but so far it’s mostly made up of better-than-average films by good / great directors rather than knock-down masterpieces. Thus my top ten leans on films that represent ambitious departures for established greats (Martel, Loznitsa and to a lesser extent Maddin and Rosales) and a few very impressive first films.
In the latter category, this is a doozy: a densely novelistic four-hour urban epic, incorporating a couple of dozen significant characters in separate narrative strands that only gradually interconnect and cohere, with four protagonists eventually emerging. Hu favours long, gliding mobile plans-sequences, often following characters in the manner of Bela Tarr, but this doesn’t otherwise have much in common with slow cinema. The action unfolds over less than 24 hours, and it’s the kind of crazily eventful day that would be implausible in a more condensed, less carefully constructed or more formally manic film.
The film is beautifully shot in desaturated colour (a few shots do betray some dodgy digital artefacts owing to the threadbare production) and is expertly paced and acted. It’s one of the best first films I’ve seen, and certainly one of the most ambitious. And unfortunately it’s destined to be one of those great one-offs of cinema, like
Night of the Hunter, as Hu Bo killed himself after completing the film.
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The Ancient Woods (Mindaugas Survila) – A stunning natural history documentary about the Estonian woods full of extraordinary footage that’s also superbly cinematic from start to finish. Survila employs a complex sound mix to generate a semblance of a narrative structure (shots and sequences are more often linked by natural sounds than visually). The film features the best opening sequence of the year: our eyes slowly get accustomed to the darkness, becoming aware of more and more points of light, some of which are moving, which are gradually revealed to be swarms of fireflies shot against the night sky. This in turn leads – through an achingly slow dissolve - to a rhymed shot of small silver fish glinting underwater. This is ambient cinema of the highest order. Sink in.
Trailer
Zama (Lucretia Martel) – (Adapted from my comments in the Woman Directors list thread.) This is a substantial leap forward for Martel in terms of ambition, and it’s a triumph. It’s a complex mix of genres and registers, combining a sweeping historical epic with a bureaucratic comedy, but Martel masters the slippery twists of tone and introduces other, stranger flavours at will, including a kind of tinnitus effect that adds an otherworldly dimension to scenes of personal crisis for our woebegone anti-hero. There’s a fleeting visual reference to the panoramic historical paintings of Argentine artist Candido Lopez, which seems to be there only for its visual beauty and to indicate that Martel has done her homework. This is one of those films that affords the pleasure of entrusting yourself to a master filmmaker who’s going to take you a journey who knows where.
Donbass (Sergei Loznitsa) – This film is even more in the carnivalesque, scabrous and funny / despairing vein of Kira Muratova than
A Gentle Creature. It’s a rotten daisy chain of bleak sketches targeting the ongoing atmosphere of violence, corruption and disinformation in Ukraine that ends up almost back where it starts, with one gruesome twist. As cinematically impressive as all of Loznitsa’s work, I initially wasn’t as impressed with the film as I was with
A Gentle Creature, or
My Joy, but it’s had a much more vivid half-life in my memory than I expected for such an episodic work. It really packs a cumulative wallop.
Custody (Xavier Legrand) – French domestic dramas are not exactly thin on the ground, and I caught this film just to fill a gap in my schedule, but it really knocked the wind out of me. It’s a film about domestic violence that keeps us firmly in the place of the victims, and winds up with one of the most harrowing suspense sequences I’ve ever seen – a textbook example of what most genre films should be doing but aren’t (keep the action grounded, give the victims agency, proceed logically, remain aware of your surroundings, cut away from the tension sparingly. . .) It seems like a simple enough trick - of course we’re going to side with the victims – but I think there’s a lot of thought and planning that’s gone into the construction of the film, and of that sequence. For one thing, the film is largely stripped of conventional characterization. There are feints at back story and motivation, but for the most part all we have to hang on to is the action in its immediate context, and we, like the characters, are in the unnerving position of having to gauge from minute to minute the actual level of peril they’re in. The final shot of the film is a smart and unexpected choice. I’m really interested to see where Legrand goes next after this little bombshell.
The Green Fog (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson) – A hugely entertaining, succinct remake of
Vertigo, compiled from footage from dozens of other Hollywood films set in San Francisco. Thus we get collages of every shot the filmmakers could find of somebody falling into the harbour, or climbing steep stairs, or visiting a florist and so on. They even managed to scare up ringer shots of people looking at portraits of Bette Davis and Joan Fontaine in period drag. For the heavy dialogue scenes, they find substitute shots and roughly strip out all the dialogue (except in the very few cases where it is a close match for the dialogue in
Vertigo), so we end up with hilarious stuttering sequences of contextless reaction shots and cutaways. A bizarre cinematic curio, to be sure, but if you know
Vertigo well, it’s a blast.
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The Wild Pear Tree (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) – This is more of the same from Ceylan, but with his last three films he’s been at the top of his game and this morally complex, leisurely character study is masterfully controlled from start to finish. The subject is slightly novel in that he’s dealing with a young protagonist for what I think is the first time, so the world-weariness takes on a different inflection. A number of the director’s trademark conversational set-pieces are seasoned with some unexpected flights of fancy. If he keeps churning out one of these every few years, I’ll be very happy.
3 Faces (Jafar Panahi) – If this film weren’t so good, it would be a little embarrassing how much it seems like
Kiarostami’s Greatest Hits. Panahi has slyly synthesized the DNA of
Life and Nothing More,
Through the Olive Trees,
Close Up,
The Taste of Cherry and
The Wind Will Carry Us into a kind of Frankenkiarostami meta-feature. But Kiarostami was all about meta-features, and he’s not making them any more, so I’ll take what I can get. Another film that has very positively developed in my memory rather than fading away.
Letting Go (Ulo Pikkov) – Bizarre Estonian animation indebted to Svankmajer and the Quays (and, for all I know, Yoko Ono): in a world in which everything is roughly painted white, stiff babydoll paintbrushes are engaged in a life and death struggle with a voracious monster constructed from old books. Something to do with orphans, apparently, but I just liked it for its thoroughly imagined, totally alien world.
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Petra (Jaime Rosales) – Rosales specializes in interrogating the impact of violence on ordinary lives. This isn’t his best film, but it’s his most melodramatically eventful, and (as usual for Rosales) there’s a fascinating and provocative disconnect between the content and the formality of his style. This time around, the visual style is less obviously related to the idea of surveillance footage, but that notion is implied by the way the camera often moves mechanically through or across physical space, at times leaving crucial actions out of frame. There’s also a simple, clever shuffled chapter structure that strategically delays crucial plot reveals and adds further necessary distance to what could have been a fervid and unlikely story.
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Ten More Great Films:
Burning (Lee Chang-Dong) – I’m decidedly not a Lee fan, but this disturbing Hitchcockian thriller is by far the best of his features to date.
Milla (Valerie Massadian) – See comments in the Women Directors thread.
The Island of Hungry Ghosts (Gabrielle Brady) – Likewise.
Transit (Christian Petzold) – A slight step down from his last couple of films, and I felt the loss of Nina Hoss (particularly as Paula Beer seems to be here mainly as a lookalike). This is another film where a somewhat unlikely and overcomplicated story is tamed by austere cinematic style, but this one doesn’t quite shrug off its potboiler contrivances. Franz Rogowski is a solid lead (he does possibly even better work in the comic drama In the Aisles). The film’s strangest and boldest decision – to stage a World War II story unchanged in the present day – is its most successful one. After all, how is a tale about the rise of fascism and a burgeoning refugee crisis
not a contemporary subject?
Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhang-Ke) – Another excellent film from Jia, and Zhao Tao really gets to stretch herself as never before.
Wednesday with Goddard (Nicolas Menard) – Deadpan animated spiritual quest. Basic animation, but expertly designed for maximum hilarity.
Leto (Kirill Serebrennikov) – This ridiculously ambitious film about the Leningrad rock scene in the early 80s piles a bundle of unlikely gimmicks onto itself, any one of which could easily sink a normal film (it’s a musical; there’s one character who can see and converse with us; there are animated elements. . .), but somehow, like a shark, it stays alive as long as it keeps moving. Extremely vague spoiler: the first time something happens, it’s one of the great cinematic moments of the year. It’s definitely a case of diminishing returns, and I can imagine that scene losing almost all of its impact if you know it’s coming, so keep your spoiler radar highly attuned if you think you might want to see this film.
The Tesla World Light (Matthew Rankin) – Retro silent-film-style animation relating an allegedly true story about Nikola Tesla, celebrated pigeon fancier and lunatic. Some fun film historical references, but worked into its own coherent aesthetic.
Happy As Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher) – See comments in the Women Directors thread.
Pear Fall (Leonid Shmelkov) – Nuts and bolts theme-and-variations animation (a la classic Bill Plympton, whose new film
Cop Dog happens to be a return to form) with perfect comic timing.
WORST FIVE
Jirga (Benjamin Gilmour) – Ghastly narcissistic Aussie in Afghanistan quest film, in which an entire culture's and country’s tragedy becomes collateral damage to some white guy’s psychodrama. Nice landscapes, abysmal acting.
Looking for Oum Kulthum (Shirin Neshat) – See comments in the Women Directors thread.
Border (Ali Abbasi) – Fundamentally dumb film that keeps its ridiculous mystery going much longer than you think it needed to, until you see how bad it gets once it’s out in the open and all the stupidity gets doubled down upon.
Capharnaum (Nadine Labaki) – See comments in the Women Directors thread.
Climax (Gaspar Noe) – See comments in the film’s dedicated thread.