Light Sensitive

Best of the year in cinema

(Jacques Rivette's autumnal Around a Small Mountain. Number six on my list. Image courtesy of Unifrance.)

The year’s best theatrical releases, numerically ranked, by title, (director and country), and where I first saw the film.

1. Carlos (Olivier Assayas, France): Cannes, official selection, out of competition. The second straight year a flick by Assayas takes the top prize. After what I had to say here and here, I’m not sure there’s much left to be said, except the circumstances that I first saw the movie, at the Cannes screening, mid-festival, an all afternoon affair, with a break after the second installment, was one of the great experiences of my professional life.

2. Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, US): Toronto. It’s hypnotic and way too ripe for some people’s taste; normally, I’m very resistant to this kind of “art,” but I was knocked out from the first viewing. It’s brash and kinetic and bravura filmmaking, and provides unimpeachable evidence Natalie Portman has a depth and presence neither demanded nor imagined.

3. Ne change rien (Pedro Costa, France): Cannes, 2009. Director’s Fortnight. In my ballot for Village Voice/LA Weekly critics’ poll, I also list it the best documentary of the year. It’s more an essay film. A melancholy and gorgeous study of the beautiful and gifted Jeanne Balibar, the actress and singer, Costa creates a fascinating and beautiful bookend to his extraordinary portrait of filmmakers Straub and Huillet, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, using his sinuous and rhapsodic camera to excavate the private realm of artists creating and even transcending art. 

I’ve still only seen it one time, at Cannes nearly two years ago, but it’s a staggering and transfixing work. For more on Costa, here’s my interview with him on the occasion of Criterion’s superb box set, Letters from Fontainhas.

4. White Material (Claire Denis, France): Toronto, 2009. 

Claire Denis’ extraordinary work is her third feature (following her autobiographical debut Chocolate and the 1999 masterpiece Beau travail) set in Africa, where she lived as a young girl.The new film unfolds in a bleak and hostile unnamed outpost.

The imagery evokes all manner of recent terror and devastation, from Rwanda to the Sudan, of a parched, ruined landscapes, a sky awash in smoke and a corpse-lined interior. Isabelle Huppert plays Maria, a coffee plantation owner caught between warring factions of government soldiers and rebel armies in a civil war.

She turns down the French authorities demanding she evacuate the country, preferring to shore up what remains of family’s dissolving empire.The political crisis mirrors her family’s deeper unraveling. Denis’ filmmaking is as sensational and tactile as ever. She ruptures the narrative track, elliptically playing with time and space in attaining a ravishing hallucinatory physical grounding of terror and disruption. The recurring use of water imagery, of an innocence trampled, repose denied, is particularly effective and striking.

White Material is sustained by an eerie and annihilating sense of disassociation. Nothing quite coheres logically or internally. The movie unfolds as a fever dream, concentrating Denis’ strengths as an imagist and a poet of the dispossessed. Her best films are liberated from stories or plot.

Huppert’s own ferociously ravaged state leaves the strongest impression. Her splintered emotional consciousness becomes a haunting gateway to consider the material. The personal ruin becomes a startling commentary on the moral ramifications of French colonialism. It ends like a moment out of Conrad, a haunting and devastating “heart of darkness,” made real and plangent.

(The luminous Gerwig outshines putative star Stiller. Image courtesy of Focus Features.)

5. Greenberg (Noah Baumbach, US). Press screening. The sixth feature of the very gifted American independent Noah Baumbach is pretty enthralling stuff. I wrote it at length here. Greta Gerwig gives one of the year’s best performances.

6. Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette, France). Toronto festival, 2009, special buyer’s screening. This year is remember for two significant losses, the deaths of two founding members of the nouvelle vague, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard, who just turned 80, are the only surviving members. I’ve read, but not had it verified, in some accounts that Rivette himself was very ill and not even able to finish this film. Even some of his enthusiasts think this a minor work; I’ve watched in four or five times. Each subsequent viewing provides me something to savor. I wrote more about it here.

7. Everyone Else (Maren Ade, Germany). Berlin, 2009. Ade’s superb second feature, about the fissures and cracks of a complicated, evolving relationship of a moody young architect and his girlfriend, a music publicist, during a Mediterranean  retreat. The references (Voyage to Italy, Cassavetes) are subtly entwined, the acting is sensational, and the prowling, moving camera, especially the way it moves and dances around the faces and bodies of the two leads, is absolutely spellbinding. 

8. The Social Network (David Fincher, US): Public screening. I was apprehensive a year ago when I heard this was Fincher’s next project. I couldn’t quite imagine how he’d dramatize the material. I found out. It’s another of his obsessive studies of the outsider, a beautiful synthesis of style and technique. Thanks to Aaron Sorkind’s terrific script, it’s the most novelistic of Fincher’s films, burrowing, questioning, tough and tragic, outlining and imagining a peculiar ecosystem without losing the verve and kick of the brash, impudent and outsized personalities.

9. Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, US). Press screening. I was skeptical when I heard it won the top prize at Venice, from a jury presided by Quentin Tarantino. (For what it’s worth, my favorite American film of the year was Kelly Reichardt’s extraordinary Meek’s Cutoff, which was acquired but will not open until early next year.) In her Oscar-acceptance speech years ago, Sofia Coppola talked about Wong Kar-wai and Antonioni. The autobiographical flourishes don’t terribly interest me. I’m more interested in form and content; she pulls it off. She’s after difficult emotions and feelings to evoke, but it’s the spaces in between that are involving, delicate and often beautiful to behold. Like Baumbach’s Greenberg, it was shot by the great Harris Savides. Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning are both superb.

10. Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, US). Sundance. I don’t grade on a curve, but I can’t help but notice four of my top ten films are directed by women. This is an extract from my out of Sundance review:“Six years ago at Sundance Debra Granik debuted Down to the Bone, a downbeat, persuasively directed piece featuring a star-making performance by Vera Farmiga playing a working-class woman ravaged by her private addictions. The performance catapulted the career of Farmiga, and it marked Granik as a bright talent to watch.

Now Granik's second feature, Winter’s Bone extends and deepens the considerable promise of that film. Likewise, it features an absolutely stunning performance by a young actress who is something to see. Jennifer Lawrence has an open face, darting eyes and an inquisitive, tactile physical expression that gives considerable weight to the emotional complications of her character's plight.Granik and the writer Anne Rosellini have adapted the novel of the same title by Daniel Woodrell.  

A hillbilly noir, set in the Ozarks, in rural Missouri, the film is suffused with genre elements colored by ethnographic details about the local culture that governs the daily lives and specific characteristics of the local inhabitants.Granik and her cinematographer Michael McDonough, shooting with the digital RED camera, establish the physical environment of rippled landscapes, harsh terrain and unforgiving forests.

In the daily movements and actions, Granik sharply illustrates the social significance of music, folklore and the very distinctive vocal patterns and dialect.  But there's also a deep suggestion of menace and uncertainty, brought about by the constant threat of violence and the pervasive use of guns and drugs.

The story, both involving and rich in nuance and texture, details the extraordinary measures undertaken by 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Lawrence) to uncover the fate of her missing father. The larger social and cultural framework provides a lot of small, compensatory qualities that cohere and flow into a sustained whole.” 

(The magnificent and beautiful Lawrence in a star-making role in Debra Granik's Winter's Bone. Image courtesy of Sundance Film festival.)

Other films of note:

The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France): Cannes. Un Certain Regard. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know until recent this film qualified as a 2010 release. I wrote about it here. What more is there to say about a 102-year-old director still turning out masterpieces?

A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, France). Coverage from Cannes, 2009.

Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, France). Cannes, 2009.

The Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Love, France). Cannes, 2009.

The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, US). Sundance. My review here.

Please Give (Nicole Holofcener, US). Sundance. Review.

Another Year (Mike Leigh, UK). Cannes. Review.

Stutter Island (Martin Scorsese, US).

Vincere (Marco Bellochio, Italy). Cannes, 2009.

The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski, UK/Germany).

The Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, South Korea). Cannes, 2007. Review.

 

Through a Glass Darkly

(Portman's ballerina with her charismatic director, Vincent Cassel, in Darren Aronofsky's great Black Swan. Images courtesy of Fox Searchlight.)

I’ve liked, in part or whole, the four previous features of Darren Aronofsky. One of the earliest pieces ever published at this site was my interview with him. I listed his previous work, The Wrestler, in my top ten list a couple of years ago.

Within that context, since I first saw Aronofsky’s new film at the Toronto Film festival in September, my profound enthusiasm and excitement for Black Swan has taken time to fully process.The movie constitutes, I think, a major leap forward and stands with Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, as the best American film this year. (Reichardt’s film is not being released until early next year.) 

Working from a carpentered script by three different hands, Aronofsky seamlessly fuses the pieces. His movie is about a beautiful, emotionally scared New York dancer, Nina (Natalie Portman), whose desire to be “perfect,” threatens to rip her apart as she prepares for the lead dancer’s role in a new “visceral and raw,” production of Swan Lake. “I know,” the imperial director, Thomas Leroy (the sinewy Vincent Cassel) acknowledges, “it’s been done to death.”

Aronofsky’s poetic, feverish and often startlingly brilliant movie has some fascinating and thrilling echoes with The Wrestler. Both films underscore for his all of his technical finesse how terrific he is with actors. He seems to know intuitively what the actor both holds and is scared of, and attacks it, making their vulnerability palpable, lively and excitingly human. 

The boardwalk confrontation between Mickey Rourke’s failed father trying desperately to connect with the daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) he had continuously disappointed was powerful not only in rawness and pungent emotional exchange, but the truths the director summoned from his star, the sense of a great talent and ability that had been squandered because of his own ruin and self-addiction.

If that film concerned a man’s search for his humanity and the art that made his talent, personality and sensibility expressive and particular, Black Swan tracks, psychologically and artistically, a very similar path. Rourke’s wrestler, theatrical, self-created, was a gladiator. Nina’s furiously controlled ballerina is a technically adroit though sexually aloof young woman permanently trapped between modes of being, aware of her serpentine sexuality and the power she holds over men, though strangely afraid to draw on it, and seemingly safe and secure only in the almost fetishistic and fabricated lair of the apartment she shares with her mother, (Barbara Hersey).

In The Wrestler, Aronofsky reiterated Rourke’s potential greatness. In Black Swan, he makes the case for Portman’s. She started when she was just a kid, but she’s never really been thought of as a great actress; a great face, of course. The whole of the movie is about the emotional and moral consequences of Nina letting go. Portman goes off, in ways beautiful, crazy and daringly haywire and unexpected. She’s small and lithe, but there’s a peculiar tension in her movements. 

With the possible exception of Mike Nichols, in Closer, Aronofsky is the first director to truly demand and push Portman to get beyond her beauty and plastic technique; to her credit, she submits finally to a tough director’s will. Both Aronofsky and Portman are willing to suspend realism to intensity effect and consciousness (like with The Wrestler, Aronofsky likes the camera to dance on the edge of his protagonist‘s back).

In The Wrestler, the backstage world of professional wrestling was captured with a particularly Hawksian ethos that animated the special group dynamic, men who recognized what they were, were content to live out their lives according to their terms, and as such, had a healthy regard for their competitors. In Black Swan, the backstage world is marked by viscous double dealing, sexual treachery and constant rumor-mongering.

With its mirrored images, like the rehearsal space, or water imagery, Nina in the bathtub, imaging again her own destruction, the movie is about creativity and re-birth. As such, visually, the movie is awash in doubles and doppelgangers (the production design, by Thérèse DePrez, is evocative and note perfect). Nina vanquishes her past, the gloriously though now declining top ballerina (Winona Ryder), tragically called “the dying queen,” through a particular cruel form of appropriation. Nina’s “double,” explicitly acknowledged in the structural similarities of the names, is Lily (Mila Kunis).

Black Swan begins in dream, and part of the great pleasure of the movie is how Aronofsky constantly destabilizes the work, visually and sexually. Portman’s Nina is, virtually from the start, unmoored; her body taking on physical characteristics of self-abuse, even if she has no recollection of marking herself, her every movement is shadowed by thoughts of disruption and a hallucinatory dread. One of the film’s most effective recurrent acts is Nina stalked her own image superimposed on others, like a woman she passes in shadow on a nighthawk street.

Aronofsky and his great cinematographer Matthew Libatique worked in 16mm and digital; seeing the film projected a second time, I noticed more clearly the interesting stylistic uses of grain and texture. A lot of the film is shot hand-held, and it makes for a thrilling and vertiginous viewing experience. Portman, who did much of her own dancing, is an entrancing figure (and so is, it must be said, Kunis though she lacks some of Portman‘s discipline and structure).

Catching Portman, in a kind of repose, her body angled before a mirror, in warm ups and stretching, or captured in the exalted flight and elegant movement of the dancer, the movie is electric and full-bodied.

The two great visual artists, director and cinematographer, are also very alert to bodies and faces, the tension and daring plays off the contrasts of their two gorgeous subjects: Nina is tight but sculpted, Lily free and energized. The elaborately drawn tattoo on Lily’s back and shoulder blades intensify the sense of flight and abandon. (Without giving too much away, the two have a sexual pas de deux that is about as charged and provocative a moment as contemporary American art cinema gets.)

Aronofsky summons other works, obviously the Powell and Pressburger masterpiece The Red Shoes and also Polanski’s Repulsion, and the body horror works of David Cronenberg. I have a fairly low threshold for visually mannered filmmaking; this time, I let it all ride and any objections I might hold melted through the precision of the filmmaking, the velocity of the acting and movement.

The movie’s rhythm and cutting is absolutely dynamic. Andrew Weisblum’s editing is sure and free, but it gets at the movie’s swiftness and knife-like exactness, like a single cut that transports Nina from the hallway of her apartment to the exterior of Lincoln Center. The movie builds and flows to a stunning twenty-minute crescendo that is thrilling, sustained and dazzlingly shot and executed.

It ends, in the most explicit reference to The Wrestler, with a nearly identical shot of its protagonist ambiguously floating through space to either her oblivion or resurrection.

Whatever the outcome, the tumult and exhilaration is purely ours.

(Doubles and doppelgangers: Portman in the performance of a lifetime.)