This is a collection of thoughts and writings on my favourite films this year. Warning - there will be spoilers! To start off, here is a rundown of my Top 10 favourite viewings, with capsule essays. Leading the way is a modernist masterpiece by Yoshishige Yoshida:
Much Japanese film of the 1960s found a fetish in the perceived ‘death drive’ of the contemporary youth culture. A parentless generation, scrabbling for a new set of values in the shadow of a mushroom cloud, they were depicted as strung between the urge to destroy and the urge to die. Yoshida’s film probes this idea and transfers the analogy onto a new theme: destroy or die? Fuck or be fucked over? The lives of two Taishō-era political radicals are contrasted with those of a pair of late-60s students who research, retell and roleplay their lives and philosophies. Sakae Ōsugi is an anarchist who believes in free love, Noe Itō is a feminist activist and his longtime mistress. The idealism of their politics short circuits in the shallowness of their sociomoral consciences as their attempts to create a society of ego backfire. Meanwhile, 40 years later, their cultural backdrop is a wasteland and their narrative heirs try to paint meaning using their genitals as brushes. Yoshida develops a storytelling counterpoint that culminates in a climax as radical in its formality as in its subject, all characters past and present meeting on the same narrative plane, resolving a mystery of the past and creating one for the future.
Kirsanoff stands out from the rest of the French Impressionist directors of the 1920s in that he probably came closest to achieving a purely sensory subjective cinema with this early featurette. A background in musical accompaniment for silents must have prepared him for the emulation of noise and colour he achieves in the rhythmic jigsaw of city scenes and the sad, quiet refrain he finds in Sibirskaïa’s fathomless eyes. We aren’t guided through this story because we are expected to be the consciousness behind those eyes: it is the gaping mouth of
our madman father that threatens to swallow us up, it is
our shadow we glimpse on the cobblestones as we cradle our child, staring into the Seine, knowing yet unwilling to know what we are thinking. And in the final retreat into the night it is on our skin that we see the reflections of city lights, will-o-wisps that promise a bright future but lead us only into the mire.
This is a beloved film, but it would be more appropriate to fear it - so jagged and apalled is its dissection of the American Dream and Small Town USA. This is about a man’s lifelong, thankless martyrdom to an ideal with nothing to offer him in return but shame and self-doubt. Stewart was the good old boy, watching him unravel is true horror. Capra’s widely publicised belief in happy endings meets the story system in an internecine agreement - perhaps an accidental one on the author’s part, but one that says more about the American community than
It’s a Wonderful Life’s pop culture heritage as a sentimental classic would suggest. Because the smiles at George’s Christmas ‘homecoming’ are grimaces, the hugs are desperate graspings. He’s still trapped, and to understand that is to understand this film.
This film begins and ends in the same place, at the same time, with two separate deaths: one a murder, one a sacrifice. Both, in some awful way, cleansing. A romance scrapes away what separates a macho labourer from his emotional world, and the purity of his discovery overwhelms him. He can’t help but give himself away to ideals of love, honour and truth, but his surrender leaves him sensitive to forces that subvert these ideals. He must destroy them to preserve what is good - but will this act make him a hero or a villain? Prévert’s words sketch a moral maze, the clarity of the performances illuminate it one passage at a time. And Carné’s imagery, though black and white, seems to exist in living colour: twilit rooms, dusty sidestreets, the grime mottling factory windows - they all glimmer green, indigo and gold in the beams of streetlights.
It is strange - and probably the fault of archiving and exhibition troubles following its release - that this film doesn’t share the same standing as some of its New Hollywood thematic cousins. Like contemporary works by Coppola and Scorsese it has a fetish for examining a certain kind of toxically arrested masculinity, but it has a brutally aestheticised understanding of what pushes machismo over the edge towards emotional isolationism and violence. Kotcheff’s fever dream image of the Yabba, where our intriguingly passive lead finds himself, is that of a man’s oasis from responsibility - from regard for money, property, commitment or ‘rules’. A time warp where men live in a perpetually belligerent adolescence, an ego vacation that fills the protagonist’s ears with a grunting, lager-soaked siren song. An encounter with a fellow ‘exile’ threatens the central narrative stability and leads this snake of a story back to bite its own tale. Kotcheff’s and writer Evan Jones’s structure moves past classicism towards an almost biblical mode of storytelling. It is edited like shotgun fire and tastes like sweat and steel, blood and dust.
How far can you remove yourself from your roots? You can layer mask upon mask but underneath it all you’ll still have a face. At this point in his career Uchida had spent years making Milesian examinations of individual stories mutating over time and distance. This film, also translated as
A Fugitive from the Past, can represent a culmination of this style of storytelling: part police procedural with an eye on class and economy, part Greek tragedy of love and spiritual fulfilment continuously darting out of reach, dodging our haunted heroes, rejecting before they can be rejected. An itinerant worker is caught up in the scheme of two robber-murderers, and ends up with their loot after they die during an escape attempt. Given shelter by a prostitute, he thanks her with the money and leaves her with his memory. This forks Uchida’s narrative across the ensuing decades; the stories of the robber and the prostitute encircling each other like a caduceus but never quite touching until a thunderstruck climax, where old identities break through new façades and flint against each other like firestarters. In one earlier scene, the prostitute is questioned by a detective on the whereabouts of her mysterious benefactor. She provides some variant of “he went that-away” and, in an act of unknowing symbolism, plugs her mouth with a daisy she’d been idly twirling between her fingers. “I’ll never talk to cops!” she spits out after he leaves. In Uchida’s labyrinthine narrative system this isn’t just a rebel yell from the depths of the Japanese feudalism, but an affirmation of the mentality that both gives impetus to a thousand individual journeys and prevents them from ever reaching their goal. Speak no evil.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Crack! Watching this film hurts. Stoker’s pain becomes your pain and the ringside jeers ring in your brain. Wise never did better than this, a boxing film almost in real time, double-taking between injury and retaliation as compulsively as picking a scab. The dynamism of the images and the furious cutting are not what make it brutal - they only emphasise the ruthless contrast between the desperate grasping for honour and the darkness of knowing the world doesn’t give a shit about your private moral struggle. Indeed, it will cage it and charge an entrance fee.
No other film of the time - and few from other times - said as much about urban alienation as this one. Stoker’s need to prove his goodness to his wife (and his honesty to himself) nearly destroys him. But as his body and dignity are dissected in the ring, Julie, his love, goes on an odyssey of her own, a green-mile walk down neon streets. The quietness and emptiness of her observations meet the emptiness and noise of his endeavours. It is only at the end of their journeys that they can meet again, and fill their shared void with broken love.
The woman does on Day One what she had done every day before it. She inspects her space thoroughly, walking the halls like Charon rowing the Styx. She dutifully prepares the hide-a-bed for her only love, her son. She cooks the dinner and cleans the dishes, and takes special care to scrub her mind of wants and dreams. On Day Two, however, things start to go wrong. She drops a spoon, she ruins a meal - the whirlwind of doubts in her head upset her coiffure and buffet her against the walls of her apartment. On Day Three she finds no other choice but to reverse her self-lacerating confusion; to unleash it on someone else: the one who put her here, in ‘her place’. Akerman’s film is a triumph of both theory and structure, ingenious in the way it revolutionises the condescending idea of closed space as ‘feminine’ and courageous in its exploration of the psychology in actions and lives that are seen as beneath, our outside, artistic concern. And true to its spirit, it treats Jeanne’s Day Three not with an implosion of pity but with an explosion of righteous anger, settling on a glow of respect.
Naruse’s career ended several years later but this is where his thematic trajectory climaxes: a shot of a face, inscrutable in the wake of a seismic loss. A moment’s stare and a sudden cut to THE END, a suicidal finality that shatters illusions of rehabilitation or reconciliation. The end of love, the end of a journey, the end of a life, the end of Japan. Hideko Takamine in
Yearning, her tour de force, is Reiko, a quiet widow whose efforts running her late husband’s grocery are invisible to her higher-minded in-laws. Her brother-in-law Koji makes a nuisance of himself with crime and belligerence. The end of an era is approaching - big business is sweeping in and uprooting family-owned stores. Koji makes a confession that slices through Reiko’s workaday concerns, turning the mists of financial worry into the smoke from a repressed, perhaps subconscious love. Together they leave the city for a mountain resort. The stars will shine brightly for a moment and then they will go black. This is where Naruse leaves us, perched between beats of a heart that will never revive.
To watch
Sans soleil is to be confronted with the impossibility of discovering (or creating) a concrete truth. Krasna’s correspondent - or muse - leads us down a rabbit hole, demanding we look into a tunnel of memory ringed by the strata of multiple gazes or subjectivities: Krasna’s, the storyteller’s, Marker’s, our own. The deferral of our own perception of the film to those of others both real and imagined reveals the mercurial nature of ‘remembering’. The documentary or travelogue, with its focus on the factual and the ‘real’, is subverted, becoming a scrapbook or illustrated brainstorm where the corporeal ‘event’ becomes ephemeral and psychic. When this hourglass has run out all that is left is the imprint of our emotions and our responses to the shifting ideas and images on screen: the sadness and beauty of realising that we can never truly hold on to what we see or know.
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Here are my 20 favourite scenes from my 2012 selection:
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#20 - Parallel workdays,
Lonesome (1928, Fejös Pál - USA)
This joyous, elemental romance earns points in the formal inventiveness sweepstakes just a few minutes in, where the workdays of two soon-to-be lovers are juxtaposed with dazzling use of wipes on superimposed images, which shift the action within the frame like a Rubik’s cube.
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#19 - Birth,
Tulpan (2008, Sergey Dvortsevoy - Kazakhstan)
This is a modest, engaging pastoral for the most part, depicting life on the Kazakh steppe. It was shot over the course of month with its non-professional actors living together in a yurt. This lends it a curio factor but doesn’t necessarily impact the on-screen product until a marvelous formal sleight-of-hand kicks off the third act: the protagonist is forced to deliver a lamb alone in the desert. This unplannable event is shot in real time, requiring the actor to assist in the birth, and it becomes a landmark in the development of the central character. Documentary isn’t simply incorporated reflexively here - it
is, and functions simultaneously with, ‘fictional’ representation and storytelling.
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#18 - “One more, then we go home”,
The Happiest Girl in the World (2009, Radu Jude - Romania)
An exposé on capitalism in suburban Romania written as a razor-sharp miniature, this retells one mind-numbing day in the life of a plain teenage girl called upon to shoot an advertisement as prizewinner of a soft drink promotion. Bitching and whining her way through the shoot, forced to drink gallons of the sickly product in question, she is an unlikeable character until a shockingly abusive announcement by her father swings the pendulum of audience engagement once again. The following scene, an extended long take in long shot that shows her and an increasingly exasperated crew struggling to finish the shoot, is almost unbearable in its tension
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#17 - Café eavesdropping,
Oslo, August 31st (2011, Joachim Trier - Norway)
The narrative and stylistic centrepiece of this
Le feu follet adaptation, the peripatetic hero rests at a café and eavesdrops on his fellow diners’ conversations. The camera’s gaze picks out a couple and follows them throughout their day in a bewitching silent montage.
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#16 - An encounter,
The Innocents (1961, Jack Clayton - UK)
The spooky second-act kickstarter that grinds the ghost story narrative into motion, Deborah Kerr’s nanny hides by a window during a game of hide and seek. Through a pane of glass a sinister face slowly moves into view, bloodcurdling and unforgettable.
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#15 - The burial,
The Catch (1961, Nagisa Ōshima - Japan)
The people of a rural Japanese village ‘inherit’ an African-American POW and subject him to steadily intensifying maltreatment and torture, ultimately resulting in his death. His potter’s field burial is performed by every member of the community - a bird’s eye of the casket slowly obscured by dirt thrown by dozens of hands. A breathtaking extended spectacle and a perfect summary of Ōshima’s thesis on Japanese society’s tendency to suppress and ignore collective guilts and traumas.
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#14 - Packing plant robbery,
Gun Crazy (1950, Joseph H. Lewis - USA)
This film’s most famous sequence - the single-take bank robbery - is a stunner, but I find the tension to be more carefully modulated in this later scene, where the deadly lovebirds rob the meat packing plant they’d been working in. This is pure adrenaline, and Lewis’ hyperkinetic direction ensures that we live in through our leads.
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#13 - Fireworks!,
All These Women (1964, Ingmar Bergman - Sweden)
An unfairly maligned comedy by Bergman, it is perhaps unfairly wedged between the Faith trilogy and
Persona in its director’s filmography. Funny in that it seems to take pains to
not be funny, its centrepiece is a kaleidoscopic, frantically edited sequence where a Disney Castle-esque mansion is set alight with fireworks. The pop art sensibility and free-jazz structural rhythm (some shots are cut together right-side up and upside down) anticipate tricks that Godard would start using a year later.
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#12 - The hunt,
Wake in Fright (1971, Ted Kotcheff - Australia)
A nighttime kangaroo hunt in the bush becomes the most animal and horrific example of the Yabba’s poisonous maleness.
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#11 - “Taxi!”,
Kinatay (2009, Brillante Mendoza - Philippines)
After a series of petty crimes leads him to complicity in the murder and dismemberment of a prostitute by a loan shark, the bewildered protagonist of
Kinatay moves haltingly out of the night into a new day. Throwing up during his cohorts’ oblivious breakfast, he tries to take a taxi home. Its tire bursts, and he tries to hail a new one. He waits - and waits. The seemingly endless deferral of an ending is more tense than anything else in the film and spells out a message with a rockslide’s impact: you can’t go home again.
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#10 - The abortion,
Polisse (2011, Maïwenn - France)
Infectious but incoherent,
Polisse is a tumult of competing narrative voices that only rarely manage to speak in perfect unison. This is one of those moments of clarity, a shattering emotional high from this messy movie: a cold-opened window into the late-term abortion of a rape victim’s miscarried fetus. The script tells us nothing about this girl’s past or pain, but Maïwenn is a sensitive dircetor and Alice de Lencquesaing (daughter of Louis-do, who also acts in the film) is some kind of acting genius, giving us a four-minute window of unblinkered empathy for the vicious and contradictory inferno of emotion contained in her eyes and the crack of her voice.
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#9 - Vengeance,
The Forbidden Christ (1951, Curzio Malaparte - Italy)
A critical exploration of the uncritical drive for vengeance, Malaparte’s only film - a stunner - pits friend against friend in the breathtakingly emotional and visually stunning climax. Here, the ‘forbidden Christ’ of the title martyrs himself completely in an attempt to absolve both his own sins and the sins of his oldest friend.
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#8 - The storm,
Straits of Hunger (1965, Tomu Uchida - Japan)
The centrepiece of
Straits of Hunger’s hinged narrative closes the circuit of two stories and opens the gate for a new one: two lives that have orbited each other for so long meet, spark and die out, a history of crime ending with a crime, engendering a new odyssey of justice.
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#7 - Storytelling,
Paris, Texas (1984, Wim Wenders - Germany)
The sky, the road, and a lot of emptiness. A man meets a woman, and tells a story - and the emptiness makes sense. The distance we’ve been seeing is the years between them.
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#6 - The kindness of strangers,
Ménilmontant (1926, Dimitri Kirsanoff - France)
Nadia Sibirskaïa’s elemental waif has gone from country girl to suicidal street urchin in a cyclone of black and white colour, a silent cacophony. She sits on a park bench amidst her own emotional wreckage, and the man next to her, wordlessly, hands her a slice of bread. He looks away, wilfully ignorant of his own charity.
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#5 - Call from Pookie,
The Sterile Cuckoo (1969, Alan J. Pakula - USA)
I find it interesting that a character type - now known as the ‘manic pixie dream girl’ - had just been ‘invented’ when it was dissected so thoroughly in this small wonder of acting and storytelling. Pookie wants to be a force of nature, but she is just a person. A person with unbearable want and overwhelming need. Want and need that are laid bare in a 5-minute miracle of character building by the young Liza Minnelli, giving the most stunning aria of the best performance I’ve seen this year. We’ve seen the image and now we see the underpainting - splotchy and messy, the lines bleeding into each other.
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#4 - Thunderstorm,
Rapt (1934, Dimitri Kirsanoff - France)
Kirsanoff was a great experimenter and in this crucial period of transition between silence and sound he plays the great Trickster figure of film soundscapes, blurring the line between diegetic and non-diegetic, scrapping sync sound entirely in scenes to replace it with psychedelically Mickey Mouseing passages of music. A girl is kidnapped by a naïve mountain man as part of a territorial power play, but she soon gets the upper hand, manipulating him with her sexuality in the hopes of escaping to her own town and own lover. But the jagged glare of the lightning and the screeching chorus of thunder, rain on glass and toxic thoughts suggest there may be something genuine to her lusty masquerade.
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#3 - George is upset,
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra - USA)
This beloved holiday classic contains the single most stressful sequence I’ve seen this year. George Bailey, the “richest man in town” (get it?) is losing it all. A night of shattered illusions steers him home and he explodes, scolding his children for things they didn’t mean to do, stalking through his own house like a wounded animal. His life is falling apart, and we’re forced to watch the decomposition in real time.
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#2 - “Temptation”,
Violent Summer (1959, Valerio Zurlini - Italy)
Zurlini beckons melodrama with one hand, pushes it away with the other.
Violent Summer is energised by this contradiction of stylistic interest, one which reflects its heroine’s own choice between messy love and tidy society. In this scene, a hypnotic dance plays out, eyelines scratching grooves in the ballroom floor, sexual and emotional interests cross to the tune of a song that could have been corny even by contemporary standards. We don’t need to see the sweat because it is coating the walls of our subjects’ minds.
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#1 - Midnight rendez-vous,
Spring in a Small Town (1948, Fei Mu - Republic of China)
I find it very interesting where filmmakers went to solve the problem of technological expenses or scarce sound-on-film stocks in the early sound era. Some of my favourite films - Lang's
M, Kirsanoff's
Rapt - offer interesting ways around this. In Asia of course the transition period lasted longer, and I assume that such problems provided difficulty for the crew behind the 1948 Chinese film
Spring in a Small Town, which uses sparse sound effects, sync dialogue and a voice over but little else. Whether the hermetic soundscape of this film was imposed on it by a budget or technological issues or whether it was a conscious choice on the part of director Fei Mu, it complements the central drama perfectly.
The aftermath of the Second Sino-Japanese War - in a dilapidated manor the lonely Zhou Yuwen lives with her ailing husband Dai Liyan, her sister-in-law and their servant. Her marriage is lacking in real passion but she and her husband do seem to love each other. One day, her husband's childhood friend Zhang Zhichen returns to town. Zhang was Zhou's first love, unbeknownst to Dai. After a series of quiet scenes where the two former lovers politely dance around their now-inappropriate feelings, Zhou arrives at the guest house one moonlit night. Zhang lets her in, and the two nearly kiss. Zhang pulls away and leaves the guesthouse against the struggles of a protesting Zhou. Before Zhou can follow him, he turns around and locks the door from the outside. We see her anguished face behind a pane of glass. She begins beating on the glass, breaking it with her fist. The shattering of the glass is the only sound we've heard in over a minute - in a film that has developed a tight-lipped, stately emotionalism true passion breaks through in a gesture of breathtaking need and violence, and we suddenly realise that the heat of the torch they carry has the potential of burning through the veil of manners and morés which has been our view for the film's first hour, lichen on the walls of the decaying Dai mansion. The urgency of this gesture is shadowed by the tenderness of the following action - Zhang, a doctor, nursing and kissing Zhou's bleeding hand, again in silence, Zhou's unreadable expression visible only by the moonrays streaming through the window. Ever so politely, she says "thank you" - and the dance resumes.
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My ten favourite characters from my 2012 selection!
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#10 - “Babou”, played by Isabelle Huppert (
Copacabana, Marc Fitoussi - 2010, France)
Copacabana is a film that is strictly ‘formula’ in enough ways to make you feel guilty for being so affected by the sensitivity and sincerity it shows. Huppert’s performance is
not formula, and she elevates Babou from a ‘kooky’ role to a resourceful but flighty dreamer, a staunch individual whether she’d like to be or not, too fond of seeking the fair and the right to be truly cynical. We can understand what makes her an annoying mother, but Huppert makes it so much fun to
be her that we couldn’t dream of being on someone else’s side.
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#9 - “Janice”, played by Regina Baff (
Road Movie, Joseph Strick - 1974, USA)
Janice is the quintessential downtrodden woman, a hooker with a heart of gold, maybe - but stolen gold, and a heart that she keeps locked up for herself. She’s crafty if not smart - she hides her money in her wig and hides her motivations in her thrown-away insults. And she makes it her mission to avenge her abuse and that of every woman that has ever been in her situation. As hard as it is to identify with her actions it becomes easy to identify with what drives them: anger at the way a man’s world screws women over.
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#8 - “Sidney Falco, J.J. Hunsecker & Susan Hunsecker”, played by Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster and Susan Harrison (
Sweet Smell of Success, Alexander Mackendrick - 1957, USA)
Pepper, salt and sugar. Or maybe just salt, salt, salt. Two ravenous fish in the sea of business, and their smallfry prey with a spike in her gills. Falco is the imp whose heart you hope will never grow - when it almost does, you feel cheated, and when he’s given his comeuppance you’re almost disappointed. J.J. is a rock face from which pours a waterfall of bilge. And to call Susan a ‘damsel in distress’ is to belie the power ploy of her last-act emotional blackmail. Three great characters and three incredible performances to flesh them out - Curtis’ hot-poker staccato, Lancaster’s laconic bitterness and Harrison’s tremulous, soulful insularity fill out this circuit and keep the film cracking until the happy ending that seems appropriately blasphemous in context.
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#7 - “Major Jack Celliers”, played by David Bowie (
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Nagisa Ōshima - 1983, Japan)
A lot of this film is about the disrupting Western influence in the closed circuit of Japanese custom. How can a country exist outside of a country? Bowie as Celliers is the disrupting force, and boy is he disrupting: his androgyny and curious, halting charisma are so different from anything else in the film that he threatens to lopside it. Ōshima is too canny a director to allow that, of course, and he lets Jack develop as a standard against which the other characters can measure themselves, or look at themselves. His entrance is a shock to his system, his exit is like the zen death of a spiritual leader - which, in a way, is what he’s become.
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#6 - “Constance Elsworthy”, played by Donogh Rees (
Constance, Bruce Morrison - 1984, New Zealand)
I don’t really get into the whole ‘national pride’ aspect of criticism when it comes to homegrown films, but I
do get proud when a Kiwi flick is strong enough to make the A-range of my own lists.
Constance is an interesting beast - an RKO melodrama updated for colour and 1980s concerns. Constance herself wants to be in the movies. She likes the centre of attention, but she likes to be in it for the right reasons - she’s a primadonna, yes, but she becomes a victim as well, and the shrewd development of scenario and Rees’ fascinating star turn juggle the two modes of ‘women’s picture’ address with incredible poise. Constance is sensible but a bit too susceptible to illusion - which makes Morrison’s revitalising take on an old ending all the more tragic.
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#5 - “Takichi Inukai & Yae Sugito”, played by Rentarō Mikuni and Sachiko Hidari (
Straits of Hunger, Tomu Uchida - 1965, Japan)
Two crude, oddball personalities - a homeless man who finds himself the heir, accidental or not, of a small fortune, and the prostitute to whom he gives it - try hard to at least
look like good citizens. They live their lives almost as in call-and-response although they are hundreds of miles apart. When they finally meet again their collision of personality shucks them of their borrowed skins. Doomed misfits and haunted could-have-been lovers.
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#4 - “Jake LaMotta”, played by Robert De Niro (
Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese - 1980, USA)
I find it interesting that
Raging Bull has become such a figurehead of hypermasculine film fandom when it is one of the most critical of masculinity of all Hollywood films. LaMotta is the Great Wannabe, the boy whose inability to truly meet a masculine point of reference inspires him to try punching his way through the barriers of ego that separate him from ‘real manhood’. De Niro plays him like a wild animal, tired, hungry, confused and sexual in a rarefied way that borders on the gay and the incestuous. No one ever made, or played, a fuller portrait of the failure to ‘make passage’.
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#3 - “Pookie Adams”, played by Liza Minnelli (
The Sterile Cuckoo, Alan J. Pakula - 1969, USA)
Pookie isn’t a likeable character - in fact she can be downright unbearable. But she’s catnip for a certain kind of guy, the guy who can only see his path in life through tired, myopic eyes, and to some degree she realises this. She wants to be a goddess of love, someone whose personality can intrigue without necessarily being accessible. She wants to be loved, too, and loved wholly - too bad the persona she creates won’t allow for that. So she flagellates herself with her own constructed ego, and withers in the uncomprehending gaze of the boy on whose mirroring face she saw her own fantasies of self. Will she do it all again? Probably, because there’s no way out.
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#2 - “Hossain Sabzian”, played by Hossain Sabzian (
Close-Up, Abbas Kiarostami - 1990, Iran)
Can you play yourself? If you are made to ‘play’ yourself, does ‘yourself’ become a character? A role to be filled, approximated by some other personality? This man becomes a symbol of burning creative urge without outlet, and he becomes a figure seen through multiple lenses at once - the reenactment, the testimony, the ‘documentary’ ending. Sabzian may be an interesting person, or he may be an interesting character. What is impressive and interesting about
Close-Up is that it never lets the audience choose which one.
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#1 - “Lisa Cohen”, played by Anna Paquin (
Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan - 2011, USA)
Margaret is a film defined by its contradictions. Lisa Cohen is a contradiction: smart yet unfathomably stupid, self-absorbed to the extreme yet truly wanting to atone, sexual but just a child. She’s playing out America in the aftermath of 9/11, hopeful to make a difference but mistargeting her righteous anger, hurling herself forward blindly like a ball in a batting cage. She’s a behemoth personality, and the film reflects her in structure and story. In this spirit, Paquin’s problems as an actor become the foundations upon which Lisa is built: a brittle, self-conscious performer playing a brittle, self-conscious performer. It’s perfect yet imperfect - which is perfect.
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And my Top 10 endings from this year's selection! No commentary here, you'll have to watch the films yourself.
#10 BLACK NARCISSUS (1947, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger - UK)
#9 OLDER BROTHER, YOUNGER SISTER (1953, Mikio Naruse - Japan)
#8 I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932, Mervyn LeRoy - USA)
#7 CLOSE-UP (1990, Abbas Kiarostami - Iran)
#6 A BLOODY SPEAR ON MOUNT FUJI (1955, Tomu Uchida - Japan)
#5 STRAITS OF HUNGER (1965, Tomu Uchida - Japan)
#4 HOUSE OF TOLERANCE (2011, Bertrand Bonello - France)
#3 THE SWORD OF DOOM (1966, Kihachi Okamoto - Japan)
#2 THE END OF EVANGELION (1997, Hideaki Anno & Kazuya Tsurumaki - Japan)
#1 YEARNING (1964, Mikio Naruse - Japan)
That's all, folks! Happy new year!