Compliance (Craig Zobel)
In this terrifically executed provocation, a manager at an
Ohio fast food outlet is manipulated into detaining an employee on suspicion of
theft, not suspecting that the unseen police officer on the other end of the
line is just a sick prankster, exploiting inherent human gullibility and
submissiveness. It works well enough as an effectively creepy thriller, but
Zobel’s real intent is to position the film more
as a social phenomenon (one based closely on documented real-life cases), with
almost limitless metaphorical potential, broadly speaking to a wider capitulation
in America culture.
Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman)
Stillman’s first film in fourteen years seems to evidence
his regret at the time he’s lost, underneath a proud and slightly cranky
defiance. It takes place on a college campus, in more or less the present day,
with hardly a person over thirty in the mix: for a director who’s somehow found
himself hitting sixty, that might be viewed as charming and progressive, or as
a sign of denial. The film is considerably strange, and – let’s say – distant from
the pressing issues of our times; although I don’t think it’s as strong as his
previous works, I was just damn happy to have him back.
A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)
David Cronenberg’s A
Dangerous Method – depicting some episodes from the birth of
psychoanalysis, and the souring of the relationship between Freud and Jung -
superficially seems like an anomalous project for him, even for the more
“respectable” latter day Cronenberg, but on greater reflection it might be the
masterpiece he’s been inching toward for almost forty years: astonishingly
tightly controlled and one of the most gripping films of ideas in a long time.
It’s thrillingly complex and overflowing with implication and nuance,
ultimately surveying a battle over the creation of meaning, taking place at a
time when the world was up for grabs.
The Deep Blue
Sea (Terence
Davies)
Davies’ first narrative feature film since 2000, set in the
early fifties, focuses with intense compassion on a woman (mesmerizingly played
by Rachel Weisz) who’s left her husband, a senior judge and knight of the
realm, to live in threadbare circumstances with her lover, despite knowing he
doesn’t truly return her feelings; at the same time, Davies is also preoccupied
more broadly with post-WW2 dissatisfaction and displacement. Throughout the
film, in a way that’s rare now, you feel a vital guiding presence alongside the
camera, totally immersed in the act of creation, working closely and humanely
with his collaborators.
Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
The most necessary film I saw this year, even if it’s born
out of a melancholy skepticism that we’re entering a time when little or
nothing about cinema will reach that bar. It follows Mr. Oscar, played by Denis
Lavant, as he’s driven around Paris in a white stretch limo on a series of
mysterious appointments, each of which involves assuming a different character
and – in general terms - enacting a “scene.” The film has the death
of cinema written all over it – Carax has barely been able to work in the last
twenty years (triumphant returns after long absences are obviously a feature of
this list) - but as he stares into the jaws of apathy and defeat, he finds
scintillating proof of life, creating more exhilarating moments than you can
process.
The Master (Paul Anderson)
The range
of responses to Anderson’s fascinating and rewarding film – loosely inspired by
the origins of Scientology, and more broadly by America’s post-war confusions
and its long history of homegrown religions and cults, sexual gurus and
motivational speakers - was unusually stimulating, often hailing it as a
masterpiece while leaving it unclear what people actually admired. Indeed,
Anderson has crafted a kind of metaphysical quicksand, in which it’s hard to
distinguish truth from lies, dreams from reality, black from white; in part
though, it seems to me about the firming up of the modern concept of ego, in
all its deluded, decaying hypocrisy.
Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)
In the
past, I’ve said that Anderson’s familiar style “has the effect of draining the flavour
from everything he looks at,” but I don’t feel that way anymore – maybe because
of his ever more exquisite skill at refining his invented environments, or
maybe because of reflecting on how much cinema owes to its dreamers. In this
jewel of a movie, carrying a rather moving sense of melancholy and regret, an
orphaned pre-teen boy runs away from his scout group to hike across some old
Indian trails with his soul mate, various scouts and adults on their trail. You
wouldn’t want to change a single frame of it.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Ceylan’s
deliberately paced saga of a police investigation – built around a witness
who’s confessed to burying a body but is then unable to find it – sometimes
feels early on like it might just end up in the middle of the arty “slow
cinema” pack, but it pays off strongly with an unpredictable and strangely
satisfying final act, one which actually makes something of the somewhat
over-familiar theme of the arbitrariness of fate, of how reality and
storytelling become intertwined. Along the way the film packs in a huge amount
of local information, sensitizing us both to the sustaining and transient
aspects of community.
Take this Waltz (Sarah
Polley)
I was very surprised how Polley’s Toronto-set chronicle of a
marriage and a love affair played in my mind afterwards. It seems to me an
astonishing advance from her previous film Away
with Her – like comparing a short story to a big overflowing, sensuous
mixed-media narrative installation. There’s a risk in there too, that at times
the film starts to seem like a series of evasions - for example, at the main points where anger
seems warranted, Polley cuts around it, or looks away. But how often,
Cronenberg aside, does a Canadian filmmaker even demand to be gently critiqued
in the highest terms?
Weekend (Andrew Haigh)
Haigh’s film didn’t even open
here, to our city’s shame, but it’s available on DVD. It’s a British film about
a short-lived love affair between two men, carried
along by terrific, unforced interactions and observations, not to mention large
quantities of sex and drug-taking. It might at various points be seen as a
modern gloss on David Lean’s Brief
Encounter, even including the use of a railway station as a defining
location, but to the extent it has its contrivances, they’re deployed here for
radically different purposes than we’re used to, to examine how being gay
continues to demand a degree of conscious self-examination and positioning that
being straight, the default state, just doesn’t.
Thanks for reading, and see you
in 2o13.
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